The End of the Ravishment Academy

[Vela Nanashi]

For every single registered user or guest with 0 posts, no comments, no ratings, I don't think all of them have read 0 stories from beginning to end, and not enjoyed any of them, so their lack of commenting and rating is the issue, not the people who actually do comment on stories, and rate them.

I don't think there is a problem when you read a bit into story and then decide "oh this story is not for me" and then stop, even if I happen to comment on every story I have read so far, I might start skipping stories that I do not want to continue reading.

Though I do think there is an issue if you read part of the story and it satisfies your need (for example you fap to part of the story and then stop reading), then you probably should comment and rate it, even if you did not read the whole thing, as it clearly was satisfying enough.

Just to clarify my view on things I don't know if others share that view or not.

[Claire]

I don't think I will be able to answer every point made here in a single post, so if it takes me a while to address what you wrote, please don't take it personal. I'll start with a few quick remarks.

@Shocker In case you missed my last post. Can you clarify for me what you were actually asking? I'm not playing dumb, I seriously didn't understand whether you want to know what would change my mind or whether you want to know how transferring ownership over the forum would work.

@RapeU It's a very kind offer that you're willing to donate. But this is not about money. I paid the hosting fee for three years in advance and there's roughly 2.5 years of that left. The only recurring cost I have to shoulder are 20€ for the domain in February 2026. If the site were to grow to the point where we would hit the bandwidth limit of 3 GB per day, then I would have to pay more and I would do that. And if we were to ever reach that point, I would start a Patreon account or something like that. But as long as the current plan is sufficient to host the site, there is no need for financial support. Nevertheless, thank you, truly, for the offer. It means a lot.

Now regarding the contest schedule: Yeah we could adjust that, I have no objection there. For the most part, I have been experimenting to see what works and I already see that tournaments sadly don't work. I thought they could be a fun new thing, imitating typical sports events that highlight the 1 vs 1 knockout format to get people invested but people don't seem to care. We tried it, doesn't work, fair enough. But that is not the issue here. People also don't engage with stories that aren't even part of any contests. And whatever TBV did, it didn't work. I mentioned those numbers before, but TBV had 537 registered users after 3 years. We basically have those already after a little more than 4 months. The average response to stories is also higher and we generate at least 5 times the search traffic. Currently, we generate even more search traffic than rapecage did, only RavishU had more search traffic than us. Generally speaking, all of our predecessors like TBV, Rapecage and RavishU are examples for me on how not to do things. I no longer want to run this forum because it has turned into those sites despite my best efforts to prevent that. So these three communities for me are not aspirational goals that I want to recreate but failed efforts at community building that I wanted to overcome.

I failed, I didn't manage to do it. But just so that people understand: I no longer want to run the forum because this forum is turning more and more into those sites: Story archives with little to no engagement around the core content of the community. There is no need for a forum like this. AO3 and Literotica already deliver that on a scale we could never reach. Anybody who is fine with just posting their story or reading stories without any discussion surrounding them can do that on these plattforms. We are either the plattform where people truly engage with the stories or we are redundant. And I'm not saying that to dismiss Literotica and AO3. I posted some of my stories there to advertise Ravishment Academy. And it was nice to see Venus' Touch for example finally get some of the love it deserves in form of a lot of high ratings on Literotica. But in terms of comments on stories, these plattforms are abysmal. But for those who like to say that they truly don't care about getting feedback: Go to AO3 and/or Literotica, it's the perfect place for you.

I'll stop here for now, I'll keep addressing the individual posts later, but I need to some other things first.

[LtBroccoli]

@Claire sounds like you're burned out and need help. That's perfectly reasonable, building a site is a shitload of work. If you want to step away, let's get a plan in place to keep the site going.

Like you said, money's not the issue, it's effort. I propose a couple of us (2-4) band together and make a new hosting account to take over the duties, and that we split up duties between mods and any other admins. This way we take the burden off your shoulders and keep things going.

Here's one thing we have to remember: we're in a dying medium. Sex story sites are falling by the wayside and we're even more niche than Literotica. People don't like commenting on porn stories too often. If we're defining success by a 10:1 read to comment ratio, we're boned. But if we're defining it by keeping the site up and growing, I think you did a damn good job so far.

Who else is in? I'm willing to step up, except for puttying my real name on things. Let's get a plan in place by September 4, the sooner the better.

[Claire]

But Claire, it's just summer....

So we saw this sentiment echoed in a few posts now. And I get it, it's a valid hypothesis. It is sadly just not true. Let me pick this apart for you and after that we can hopefully have a fact based discussion about this. Because currently this "but people are just less active in summer.." is a coping strategy.

First, I want to acknowledge that seasonal effects do of course exist. And I think they play a role. The slower summer months likely have the following effect: They stop our growth but they didn't reverse it. I can show you the graphs if you want to, but here is the general picture.

Since July, clicks from Google stagnate but Bing and DuckDuckGo searches are still increasing and we are getting found by more relevant search terms by those. So people do not look less for rape fantasy stories via Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo and they still find us just as often as in June or even a little more overall.

At the end of June, we reached ~1000 daily visits. At the beginning of August, we still had those same 1000 daily visits. The number of registered people who were online over a 24 hour period hovers around 50. Over the course of a week that number is somewhere between 130 and 150. We had a brief period where we had even 60+ registered members every day, but there is no complete collapse in users being online.

When you look at the number of views that topics get then those don't shrink either.

So here is what we know: The number of people looking for us/rape fantasy stories has not drastically decreased. The number of people being here has not decreased drastically. The number of people reading stories has not decreased drastically. The growth of those numbers has come to a halt. That's it, that's the summer effect. So if you want to claim that summer is responsible for the downturn in activity then you have to argue this: People don't search less for us, people don't come here less often, people don't read less. They are not outside and therefore have no time to be here. The data just refutes that idea. Instead, you would have to argue that it is only their reaction after they finished reading a story that has changed. But why summer would cause people to just change their behavior after they finished reading a story I find very hard to explain. So bottom line: If we saw a collapse in daily visits, search traffic and registered users online, I would agree that it might be a summer effect. But overall, nothing points in that direction.

But that is not all you would have to show. Let's look at our previous all time low in the number of daily posts 28 day average. That was May 26 at 28.46 posts per day. This is the daily average from April 29 to May 26. During that time period, we had 118 registered users on the forum on average, 68 at the beginning of the period, 168 at the end. We had on average 520 daily visits during that time. At the time, we got 69.6 clicks per day on average from Google, now we have 166.75. If we compare current activity levels with the previous all time low, then we have twice as many daily visits, more than twice as many clicks and have 139 people who were online over the course of the last 7 days which is more than what our entire user base was during the previous all time low.

So you would have to argue that the summer effect not only uniquely affects user behavior after they finished reading a story, no, you would have to argue that this effect is so strong that it dominates the fact that we have at least twice as many people here. And what you are comparing this too was already the previous all time low, not some high phase of activity.

So I hope I'm not destroying anyone's illusions here but: Summer is not the reason for the lack of activity on the board. It's effect likely stopped the growth in all the numbers I just howed you and that makes sense. The problem is not that less people are here. The problem is that the number of people that are here and the engagement with the content is simply not related at all. That is the issue.

[Claire]

I honestly wonder if the traditional web forum is a dying artifact of the web, much like Geocities/Angelfire websites and chatrooms. Much of online discourse has migrated to other venues like Reddit and Substack and creative works often get a lot more audience response on DeviantArt. Granted, the subject matter of this forum wouldn't last on any of those platforms. But I'm thinking out loud as to whether there has been a macro cultural shift on the internet that no longer values forums with threads, avatars, signature lines, and a general sense of community.

This will be a long answer and I'll take your post as the inspiration for that. So this answer is only partially about you, so sorry about that.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but I think that what you are saying is irrelevant. And in some sense it's also dangerous. Since December last year when I first suggested some changes for RavishU I've heard all these big meta analyses: Forums are just outdated. Young people don't read anymore and need YouTube style recommendations on what to look at next. Socal media has destroyed people's attention spans. People just want to masturbate, because this is just porn. People are too ashamed, to wary to interact on a rape fantasy site.

While these meta trends in society might all be there, they all don't apply to us. If we were trying to compete against some mainstream social media plattform, sure, then these things would matter for us. But we are trying to carve out a small niche for a few dozen, maybe a couple of hundred active people. Im not here lamenting the fact that Twitter has more posts than us, that would be absurd. But we are a niche community that appeals to people who are into a taboo sexual topic and who enjoy or at least don't mind reading. We are not going with mainstream societal narratives by definition. We just need to carve out a small subgroup of people from the 1.5 billion people who speak English and get them to interact here. And the idea that this is somehow impossible because social media or whatever has just ruined people for that in general doesn't convince me.

Furthermore, here is what is dangerous about this: Once you start to explain a problem by some big meta trend it is very easy to come to the conclusion that you can't do anything anyway. If it is TikToks fault that nobody has the attention span anymore to read anything longer than flash fiction, then there is nothing you can do. It's a nice narrative to tell yourself if you want to convince yourself that, sadly, the issue is just out of your hand. If you look at what gets the most views on the forum, it's almost all long and medium length stories. And sure, there is some effect here that the author creates additional views for their story every time they post a new update and that is an inherent advantage for long stories. But the most viewed stories on the forum, Closing Time and Record Chaser, didn't have an update since June 17 and May 1 and are still generating plenty of views. So there is definitely a willingness to engage even with the most social media unfriendly content imaginable: long form story telling that does not offer instant sexual gratification, basically the antithesis to a 3 minute porn clip.

So let's bring it back to what we actually have control over, our own behavior. You signed up for a contest and submitted a story for both rounds of the tournament so far. But, unless I missed something, you didn't comment anything on any of the contestants stories nor did you reply to any of the feedback you got. I also learned that you apparently read and liked my story Men at War by a offhand reference in the topic about humor in rape fantasy. Even if you just posted what you said there:

For an example on this site, I find Claire's story about the Peterson cult absolutely hysterical, because it's a satirical take on the manosphere and incel culture.

Then that would have contributed to the site and motivated me as an author and as the person running this place. And I'm not saying this to call you out, this is a general trend that extends beyond you. Let me tell you what I know just about my own stories. And I'm telling you this because I firmly believe that the stories of others aren't treated differently from mine. I just can't demonstrate it for them because I don't know their history.

Record Chaser sits now at a rating of 29 since July 10. It has made hundreds if not over 1000 views since then. Apparently no one feels compelled to push it over that 30 barrier to move it to the Popular Stories where it would serve the forum by motivating new users to register. But it's not just that, I know that the story is massively underrated. @Shocker praised it to hgh heaven back on RavishU but hasn't commented or rated it here. I know that @skuttrusk wanted to rate it with 3 points but accidentally rated chapter 7 instead of the whole story. I know that @Verbal13 underrated it with only 1 point because at the time he didn't understand that he could give ratings with more than 1 point.

It's similar for my stories Venus' Touch, The Infinite Rape and You, with You also being just one 3 point rating away from becoming a Popular Story.

But the most egregious example is Men at War. I know that @Shocker read and loved it on RavishU. I know that @HistBuff read and voted on it twice back on RavishU with two different accounts. I know by your offhand comment that you read and enjoyed it. And I know that the user @Nightlight10 specifically registered to comment and tell me how much he liked it. That's 4 people who haven't rated it and 3 who didn't comment on it. These four ratings alone would bring it close to 30 points as well.

And I could give you more examples of people voting in a poll of one of my stories that they came reading this but didn't comment or rate it. And my point is: I find it hard to believe that the exact same thing is not also happening with other authors' stories. Just because I can not track this for Shocker's or Blue's or your stories because I'm not that aware of their previous reception before they were posted here doesn't mean that the same thing is no happening there too. I mean, what reason could there possibly be that this happens only to my stories, right? I also know that Shocker's Fugitives story had only 14 ratings despite 16 people voting for it when it won the contest. And I know that of those 14 not everyone voted for it. So the story is missing at least 3 ratings from people who are here, who did read it and who voted for it in the contest poll. This hurts the forum. I can only imagine how many stories we would have in the Popular Stories board if this kind of thing didn't happen. We might even be close to having our first Community Favorite.

To bring it back to you personally one last time. If you had commented something about the Peterson cult in Men at War, then that would have made me happy. I would have responded to you and maybe we would have gotten into a bit of a back and forth discussion. You and I, we both enjoy a good discussion with thoughtful arguments. And I guarantee you, the next thing that would have happened would have been @Lucius joining us in our discussion. I could also see @JTCK throw in a comment or two. That is how communities are built. Engagement with the core content of the community and then a discussion based on shared experience. And some who read the story in the future might see that and think: "Oh ok, this is not just people mindlessly fapping here but actually talking with each other... cool." That is the image you would want to project to new users stumbling over the site. You want them to perceive people actually talking about the stories they read as normal.

[RapeU]

Now regarding the contest schedule: Yeah we could adjust that, I have no objection there. For the most part, I have been experimenting to see what works and I already see that tournaments sadly don't work.

Let's stop right here and assess because I've said this before and you either didn't see it or didn't fully understand.

The tournament for a flash story clearly worked. The tournament for a short/medium story did not, but that's because of timing. TBV gave people a month to write stories and a month to vote. This is what needs to happen if you want stories to be both voted on and given a high rating. We saw it happen with the German contest where the most voted story was also the highest rated and passed the first rating threshold. That story took a month to get it's high rating.

And whatever TBV did, it didn't work.

Hard disagree. TBV worked. Enchantress and the other moderator for whatever reason just couldn't keep running the forum. If the moderation team acted like you did and were open about their inability to keep it going, I'm sure a group of us would have stepped up to help. Instead, the mod team informed everyone of the forum closure then immediately disabled all features so it was impossible to contact anyone on the site at all in any way.

Generally speaking, all of our predecessors like TBV, Rapecage and RavishU are examples for me on how not to do things. I no longer want to run this forum because it has turned into those sites despite my best efforts to prevent that.

That is inaccurate. You're always going to have lurkers no matter what site you make. Even the most famous TikTok videos have a disproportionate amount of views if you compare them to likes and comments. You've built a growing community. I'm not sure if you noticed, but when I talked about my female rapist story then finally posted the first chapter, a lurker made their first post in that thread "can't wait to see how this goes!" That would have never happened on RU, and I'm not sure about TBV because I was mostly active during story contest times.

AO3 and Literotica already deliver that on a scale we could never reach. Anybody who is fine with just posting their story or reading stories without any discussion surrounding them can do that on these plattforms.

But that's not what many of us authors who are here want. If I wanted eyeballs with no discussion I'd go on those sites right now and post them all there. Plus, Literotica has weird cringy rules regarding CNC.

And I could give you more examples of people voting in a poll of one of my stories that they came reading this but didn't comment or rate it. And my point is: I find it hard to believe that the exact same thing is not also happening with other authors' stories. Just because I can not track this for Shocker's or Blue's or your stories because I'm not that aware of their previous reception before they were posted here doesn't mean that the same thing is no happening there too. I mean, what reason could there possibly be that this happens only to my stories, right? I also know that Shocker's Fugitives story had only 14 ratings despite 16 people voting for it when it won the contest. And I know that of those 14 not everyone voted for it. So the story is missing at least 3 ratings from people who are here, who did read it and who voted for it in the contest poll. This hurts the forum. I can only imagine how many stories we would have in the Popular Stories board if this kind of thing didn't happen. We might even be close to having our first Community Favorite.

The reason Shocker and LaLia's stories are in the Popular Stories forum is because they were both spotlighted in a contest. Here's the key part I'm going to say again, because I think it's that important. It took over a month for both stories to become a Popular Story even though actual voting for the contest was only a week. I suspect that if Shocker and LaLia's stories were not in a contest, they would have fallen into the archives of the forum and would not be community favorites right now.

A week is not enough time to vote for a group of stories. A month is more reasonable. And while people are voting for their favorite stories, they're also going to rate them too. I think if you spotlight a group of stories for a month you would see one or more become a community favorite.

Who else is in? I'm willing to step up, except for puttying my real name on things. Let's get a plan in place by September 4, the sooner the better.

I'll help out however I can. I'm limited on time because of school starting however.

[HumiliationInc]

I'm not saying you are wrong, but I think that what you are saying is irrelevant. And in some sense it's also dangerous. Since December last year when I first suggested some changes for RavishU I've heard all these big meta analyses: Forums are just outdated. Young people don't read anymore and need YouTube style recommendations on what to look at next. Socal media has destroyed people's attention spans. People just want to masturbate, because this is just porn. People are too ashamed, to wary to interact on a rape fantasy site.

While these meta trends in society might all be there, they all don't apply to us. If we were trying to compete against some mainstream social media plattform, sure, then these things would matter for us. But we are trying to carve out a small niche for a few dozen, maybe a couple of hundred active people. Im not here lamenting the fact that Twitter has more posts than us, that would be absurd. But we are a niche community that appeals to people who are into a taboo sexual topic and who enjoy or at least don't mind reading. We are not going with mainstream societal narratives by definition. We just need to carve out a small subgroup of people from the 1.5 billion people who seak English and get them to interact here. And the idea that this is somehow impossible because social media or whatever has just ruined people for that in general doesn't convince me.

I'm unfamiliar with the meta analyses you mention, including the studies they aggregate. I suppose generalizing to a niche kink forum could be an external validity issue, but it is all assumes that the sample of this forum is fundamentally different than the population at large when it comes to online viewing habits. It perhaps could be but I don't see any compelling reason to assume it is. Macro-level hegemonic influence is incredibly strong and we're all shaped by discourse, whether we want to admit it or not.

Furthermore, here is what is dangerous about this: Once you start to explain a problem by some big meta trend it is very easy to come to the conclusion that you can't do anything anyway. If it is TikToks fault that nobody has the attention span anymore to read anything longer than flash fiction, then there is nothing you can do. It's a nice narrative to tell yourself if you want to convince yourself that, sadly, the issue is just out of your hand. If you look at what gets the most views on the forum, it's almost all long and medium length stories. And sure, there is some effect here that the author creates additional views for their story every time they post a new update and that is an inherent advantage for long stories. But the most viewed stories on the forum, Closing Time and Record Chaser, didn't have an update since June 17 and May 1 and are still generating plenty of views. So there is definitely a willingness to engage even with the most social media unfriendly content imaginable: long form story telling that does not offer instant sexual gratification, basically the antithesis to a 3 minute porn clip.

I think that's an unfair extrapolation of what I initially said and confounds what was essentially a descriptive statement of what I intended with being a prescriptive statement of what I supposedly inferred. Never did I say it was all hopeless and the big machine of Web2.1 with its algorithms and quick dopamine hits mean to just roll over. However, going back to my above comment, I think that anyone traversing social spaces on the internet has to recognize that the landscape has fundamentally changed and garnering engagement—particularly long-form engagement—on legacy-style platforms is more difficult in 2025. That doesn't mean it can't be done; it just means it's a tougher market to crack, so to speak.

This is pure anecdata, but we're dealing in descriptive stats rather than inferential stats anyways: When I learned this place was open, I excitedly told some people about it—some expatriates of the original Ravish University, some totally new. While they were happy about the forum and some registered, many have made it clear they they're planning on focusing on their current platform of choice (largely DeviantArt). For one reason or another, they prefer another type of platform. And trust me when I say that bums me out, because I'd love to see them contribute here!

So let's bring it back to what we actually have control over, our own behavior. You signed up for a contest and submitted a story for both rounds of the tournament so far. But, unless I missed something, you didn't comment anything on any of the contestants stories nor did you reply to any of the feedback you got.

I honestly didn't want to reply to any feedback on my contest stories because I didn't want to bump my own stories and provide an unfair advantage. I also didn't know the protocol of posting to other's stories with my normal user name, and I just wasn't super interested in the smack talkin' aspect of the contest under our given pseudonyms. I know you dismissed the vacation explanation early, but I can tell you with my n = 1, that was a factor in how little I've engaged with the contest. I've taken one longer vacation and one smaller vacation during the contest. I literally finished the first story early because I was on vacation for a week (and no way was I posting such a story over a hotel WiFi *lol*).

I also learned that you apparently read and liked my story Men at War by a offhand reference in the topic about humor in rape fantasy. Even if you just posted what you said there:

For an example on this site, I find Claire's story about the Peterson cult absolutely hysterical, because it's a satirical take on the manosphere and incel culture.

Then that would have contributed to the site and motivated me as an author and as the person running this place. And I'm not saying this to call you out, this is a general trend that extends beyond you. Let me tell you what I know just about my own stories. And I'm telling you this because I firmly believe that the stories of others aren't treated differently from mine. I just can't demonstrate it for them because I don't know their history.

Record Chaser sits now at a rating of 29 since July 10. It has made hundreds if not over 1000 views since then. Apparently no one feels compelled to push it over that 30 barrier to move it to the Popular Stories where it would serve the forum by motivating new users to register. But it's not just that, I know that the story is massively underrated. @Shocker praised it to hgh heaven back on RavishU but hasn't commented or rated it here. I know that @skuttrusk wanted to rate it with 3 points but accidentally rated chapter 7 instead of the whole story. I know that @Verbal13 underrated it with only 1 point because at the time he didn't understand that he could give ratings with more than 1 point.

It's similar for my stories Venus' Touch, The Infinite Rape and You, with You also being just one 3 point rating away from becoming a Popular Story.

But the most egregious example is Men at War. I know that @Shocker read and loved it on RavishU. I know that @HistBuff read and voted on it twice back on RavishU with two different accounts. I know by your offhand comment that you read and enjoyed it. And I know that the user @Nightlight10 specifically registered to comment and tell me how much he liked it. That's 4 people who haven't rated it and 3 who didn't comment on it. These four ratings alone would bring it close to 30 points as well.

And I could give you more examples of people voting in a poll of one of my stories that they came reading this but didn't comment or rate it. And my point is: I find it hard to believe that the exact same thing is not also happening with other authors' stories. Just because I can not track this for Shocker's or Blue's or your stories because I'm not that aware of their previous reception before they were posted here doesn't mean that the same thing is no happening there too. I mean, what reason could there possibly be that this happens only to my stories, right? I also know that Shocker's Fugitives story had only 14 ratings despite 16 people voting for it when it won the contest. And I know that of those 14 not everyone voted for it. So the story is missing at least 3 ratings from people who are here, who did read it and who voted for it in the contest poll. This hurts the forum. I can only imagine how many stories we would have in the Popular Stories board if this kind of thing didn't happen. We might even be close to having our first Community Favorite.

I honestly don't have an explanation, because there are numerous hypotheses: People don't know there's a rating mechanic, people don't care about the rating, previous RavU posters feel redundant rating something twice, others feel like it makes things a contest. Speaking personally, the rating mechanic really doesn't interest me. But I can't speak for others.

To bring it back to you personally one last time. If you had commented something about the Peterson cult in Men at War, then that would have made me happy. I would have responded to you and maybe we would have gotten into a bit of a back and forth discussion. You and I, we both enjoy a good discussion with thoughtful arguments. And I guarantee you, the next thing that would have happened would have been @Lucius joining us in our discussion. I could also see @JTCK throw in a comment or two. That is how communities are built. Engagement with the core content of the community and then a discussion based on shared experience. And some who read the story in the future might see that and think: "Oh ok, this is not just people mindlessly fapping here but actually talking with each other... cool." That is the image you would want to project to new users stumbling over the site. You want them to perceive people actually talking about the stories they read as normal.

I'll be frank. I only have so much time to engage on a forum, especially one that is literature-based. And my engagement ebbs and flows. It did the same at the old RavishU in which I would disappear for six weeks and then constantly engage for two and a half weeks. I have other interests in life far removed from kink. Sometimes work takes up more of my time. And sometimes when it comes to commenting, I don't always feel compelled to post because there's not much I would say that would actually propel the discourse.

[Claire]

@RapeU I have to correct a few things you said there.

Let's stop right here and assess because I've said this before and you either didn't see it or didn't fully understand.

No, I understand, you are just dramatically overestimating the importance of that issue. First, Gang Rape Galore had a little more than two weeks of writing. When the number of admitted stories reached 10+ I extended the voting window from from 7 to 10 days. And even that was not completely uncontroversial at the time. And I guarantee you that three more days for Femdom Fury would not have changed much. A lot of stories hadn't seen comments for multiple days in a row. And you should also take into account that Femdom Fury had only half as many entries as Gang Rape Galore, so the time per story was even longer.

Did these extra three days for Gang Rape Galore matter? To determine the winner, no. The vote was close for the first few days but I think the last few days Fugitives had a comfortable lead that was never in doubt. So it didn't change much in that regard. But we might have only 50+ votes n the contest instead of 61 if we had stayed with the 7 day voting window.

I'm not saying it has no effect. I'm not saying we can not go for longer voting windows. The next contest will have one month of writing and two weeks of voting, maybe more if we get a lot of stories again. But the point is, this is just not a crucial issue for the participation problem. It sure can be optimized, but it's no our core problem. The problem is not that too few people are here or don't have enough time to post. The problem is that the people who are here don't engage.

Hard disagree. TBV worked.

Let's be a bit more precise here. This is a matter of perspective. What do I mean by it didn't work? As a forum with the same goal as this one, i.e. community building, it didn't work. If the goal of the TBV team was to build a small confined space for themselves and their buddies to hang out, mostly unseen by the outside world and not attracting too much attention, then yes, the place worked. And if that was the goal of the admins then that is totally legitimate. But if your goal is to build a community where people interact and comment and you attract new users to your content by projecting that community interaction into the outside world, then TBV failed.

I said this earlier, but TBV had 537 registered users after 3 years. That is 0.5 new users per day. And those users weren't particularly active. TBV is no longer online but when it still was I looked at the statistics. If you looked at the publicly available content on TBV then it looked like this:

On TBV, the most-commented story had 50 replies (1,100 views), and the most-viewed had 2,000 views (with 33 replies).
(...)
The thread announcing its closure has more views (2,600) than any content on the site.

I can also show you this here:



This is an estimate of search traffic for TBV by semrush. They estimate that TBV's highest ever search traffic was 468 clicks per month. But most of the time it was much lower, hovering around 250 and 200.



Here now you have Rapecage as a comparison. Rapecage had quite a high search traffic in 2016 and 2017 but closer to the time that's comparable to ours and to TBV's it was at roughly 2200 estimated clicks per month.



And finally, you have RavishU. Close to the end of its lifetime, it had 10,000+ clicks per month. The numbers were even higher back in 2014 but that is not relevant for us today.

So where do we stand in all this?



We have an estimated search traffic according to Semrush of 2000 to 2500 monthly clicks. This clearly underestimates our search traffic but since this is the same estimation method it uses for our predecessors, let's go with it. So after 4 months, we have the same search traffic rapecage had after 6 to 8 years and we clearly outperform anything TBV ever managed.

So whatever statistic you look at: Views, replies, number of registered users, search traffic. TBV did not do well. That being said, let me stress that again. If that was never the goal of the admin team, if they never wanted the site to be seen and found, maybe they wanted to fly under the radar hoping that nobody would try to take them down if they are mostly invisible. If that was the goal, then mission accomplished. But for what I'm trying to do here, building a community where you find a large catalogue of stories with people actually talking about those stories, TBV is not a good example.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but when I talked about my female rapist story then finally posted the first chapter, a lurker made their first post in that thread "can't wait to see how this goes!" That would have never happened on RU, and I'm not sure about TBV because I was mostly active during story contest times.

Why would that never have happened on RU? I'm not saying this happened often, but LaLia and I are probably two good examples of new users joining the site who injected some activity into the place. Don't get me wrong, I think RU wasted a lot of potential because it wasn't managed well because, well, it was barely managed at all.

So, just to be clear before we get lost in the weeds here. I don't mind longer voting periods. One month seems very long to me but if that is what people prefer, I have no strong attachment to this. I just want to warn you about thinking that this is somehow the decisive measure to take because you're setting yourself up for disappointment then. I would ask you to trust me a bit on this. I have looked a lot of activit data across different sites by now. The success of Gang Rape Galore or even the success of @Werewolf's story in the round of 16 in the tournament show us that time is not the decisive issue here.

[Blue]

@Claire
Hello Claire, you vehemently argue that sommer time isn't contributing to the fact that there's hardly any activity on the forum at the moment.
I would like to vehemently disagree with that, using my own example:

Under normal circumstances, I visit the forum several times a day and then I have plenty of time to read posts and comments, write and post stories, etc.

Summer vacation has been going on here for a few weeks. My wife is on vacation for six weeks, and we're out and about a lot during that time, so I usually only have a quick look at the forum in the morning and evening. I only read the most important posts and hardly write anything.

My grandchildren have three weeks of kindergarten vacation and are with us for a few days during that time. During that time, I have even less opportunity to spend longer here.

Yes, the number of clicks per day may stay the same in the summer, but the amount of time people can be here decreases significantly. You can't always tell, because my laptop, for example, is usually on all day, and this page is always open in a browser, so I appear all the time as online. In reality, however, I'm often only active for a few minutes to an hour.
And I'm struggling to continue writing my long story. Hopefully, all of this will improve in 2-3 weeks.

And many people will feel the same way I do.
So please wait until September, or even better, October, before making a final decision about closing it.

Regarding support: I'd love to get involved in moderating and developing the forum, but as an IT "dinosaur," I unfortunately have no idea how today's forum software works. Ten years ago, things would have been different.
But if I can help in any way, please let me know.

[Claire]

I missed a month here to things happening. I wanted to participate, but couldn't. I feel bad to hear it is shutting down. I love reading the stories and posting my own. I think I made some friends here. Hopefully things pick up. I want to help keep this board going and lift it up.

Maybe a word of advice. I see regularly in chat that you would like people to discuss your stories with you. I get that because I would enjoy that too a lot if hat at least occasionally happened in chat. But you rarely ask about other people's stories and in the rare case that you do read them, you seem to rate but not comment on them. Forget about the fate of the forum. Just for you personally, I think you would have more success getting people to talk with you about your stories if you showed a little interest in theirs, too.


@DayDreamNights Don't let this discourage and share your story. I know this might sound a bit cynical, but whether you post it today, in a week from now or in 4 weeks makes little difference. In most cases after 5 days or so the regular people will have commented on your story and after that nothing happens anyway. Just don't wait until two days before the forum closes. But trust me, whatever happens in October, it won't affect how your story is received. So especially if this is the first time publishing a story somewhere, take the plunge and go for it!

@lint Thanks, I appreciate the kind words.

@peterfrisk I'm glad you got something out of commenting on stories. Would have liked to read more feedback from you.