The End of the Ravishment Academy

[Blue]

@Claire
Something I just noticed: if you go to the thread intended for posting "normal" stories outside of the contests, you'll find links to tips on what to keep in mind when posting stories. However, you won't find any information about whether and how to rate stories, or that comments are welcome, until you delve much deeper into the forum.
Perhaps it would be helpful to include a note at the beginning of that page about what you expect from readers.

[Claire]

@JTCK I love the enthusiasm, it is great to see you so hyped up for the forum. And I'm really sorry if I ruined your joy over becoming a Pillar with the announcement. That was not my intention. I could have posted the announcement earlier but I was afraid that people would blame the announcement and thus me for some authors not handing in stories for the Quarter Final of the tournament. So I wanted to wait until after the deadline to avoid that accusation. That is why I posted it exactly then. I'm really sorry if I ruined an otherwise nice day for you with that. :/

I already addressed the idea that the decline in activity is caused by a summer slump. In case you didn't see that post, you can find it here.

I really would have liked to invite you at the start. And I think because you were not here at launch you have a wrong idea of what it was like. There was no hype for the launch. It was really rough and it is almost a miracle that the forum survived the first month.

I knew that most forums - not just forums for erotic fiction, but forums in general - basically never get really started and just fizzle out before they ever get going. To avoid that fate for the forum I had two strategies. First, invite as many interested people as you can think of directly to the forum. Second, slowly repost my own stories over the course of two to four weeks so that there is always some new content for people to read at the start. The idea was to make sure that the forum wouldn't run out of new content before enough people even knew of its existence.

The second part of the strategy worked somewhat but it also meant that I essentially sacrificed some of my stories, especially the German ones. There is a good chance that stories posted early on never receive the attention they would have gotten if they were posted in a more active environment. Some of my English stories escaped that fate, especially Record Chaser and surprisingly also You. But seeing Späte Genugtuung rot away on the last page, that still hurts a bit.

Anyway, what didn't work at all was inviting people to get the forum started. We invited people I knew from RavishU and some people Shocker knew from TBV. In addition to those I had invited to the beta test of the forum already, we invited something like another 20 people I think directly via Mail and something like 11 or 12 actually showed up. Of all the people we invited, @Blue was the only who actually had a noticeable presence. The remaining people who joined thanked me and my team for launching this, expressed their sadness over whatever predecessor forum they mourned and then... did nothing. And that was bizarre. I even had one of those people offer me money to cover the costs of the forum but despite being in chat for months before they ultimately left, their post counter to this day is 0. They wanted to give me money but couldn't invest the 15 minutes to read a short story I wrote. You literally had people enthusiastically express how happy they were that a site like this exists and then they sat back and proceeded to watch it rot without ever engaging with any content. You asked me whether I had high expectations and I would say no. But I thought that a bunch of veterans of the community who saw their favorite sites die one after the other would now be here with a "Let's get this started! Let's not lose this one, too!"-attitude and... they did nothing. I expected people to fall back into old patterns after a few weeks or maybe a month, but absolutely nothing from the start of something like 80% of a group of people who described themselves as happy that they finally found a new home for their kink.... yeah, that surprised me.

So what was the launch like? Well, it was essentially @LaLia, @Shocker and myself posting like crazy with some support from @Vela Nanashi and @Blue. When you look at this graph again:



That first decline until the end of May? I think that is @LaLia and myself slowly burning out as we desperately try to keep this graph and the forum from flatlining. So there was no launch hype. I think the word circle jerk was invented for what that first month of the Academy was like. It was truly just the 5 people I mentioned. It was really bleak.

So why did the forum not die immediately? First, I told myself that I would give this three months but I'm not gonna lie, seeing the utter disinterest by the people who registered here at launch whether this forum would ever get going at all was really tough. To have one person after another come to me, thank me, sounding joyful and enthusiastic and then just doing nothing, I had a hard time believing it. Second, the RavishU Memorial Contest happened. And third, the one month announcement served as a wake up call.

Why was the RavishU Memorial contest so important? It wasn't because it generated activity on the forum, that was as bad as anything else on the forum. But it made us the authoritative source on the internet for anybody looking for RavishU. This is what got us on the map. I would say that likely 95% of people who found us since the launch found us because of that contest. If you look at the view count of the contest thread, it sits currently at 7940 views. Here is a quote of what I wrote in the contest thread after it was over:

When I saw how RavishU had handled its contests in the past, I always wanted to do this better: Put the contest front and center on the page, advertise it via board announcements, have the participating stories clearly marked as entries for the contest, create backlinks to the contest thread within each story thread. And it worked like a charm. The contest thread is by far the most viewed thread on the entire forum with 690 views right now as I am writing this post. And to make clear to you how large that is: The Valentine's Day 2025 Quickie Contest thread on RavishU had only 624 views from January 21 to February 11 on a forum that had at least 10 times the daily traffic compared to Ravishment Academy right now. What you can see there is a leaner forum structure and I think somewhat decent advertising for the contest at work.

So we had 690 views for the contest thread when it was over, already outperforming the analogous thread on RavishU. But the difference between the 690 views from the quote and 7940 views today? That is almost exclusively people finding us via search engines for RavishU related searches. You occasionally see people here posting that they found us accidentally. It wasn't an accident. I read up on search engine optimization and tried to deliberately establish that link between RavishU and us by choosing that name for the contest and by telling Google via creating internal backlinks that the contest is important. I'm confident that you or @RapeU or @Lucius or @skuttrusk and many others would not be here right now if it weren't for that contest thread. Nowadays it is "only" the third most often reached page if somebody finds us in a Google search because Google has now shifted to showing people the index page for the most part when they search for something RavishU related. But the link between us and RavishU was established through that contest thread initially. Who knows whether this would have ever happened without it.

So we got now the findability via Google covered:

► Show Spoiler

But the activity on the forum was declining as @LaLia and I could not uphold the sheer number of daily posts that we had provided up to this point. My share in the total number of posts on the forum was over 1/3 at the time. If you added Shocker's and LaLia's posts to that you got to over 2/3. Now, my share in the total number of posts has dropped below 20% and the posts of us three together make up "only" ~40% anymore. And that lack of activity then reached an absolute low for the Quarter Final of the Ravished in a Flash tournament. In the one month announcement I wrote this:

The winners of these three Quarter-Final matches were essentially decided by the votes of the contestants. Besides our admin @Vela Nanashi who voted (and commented) on all the stories provided by our contestants, there was only a single vote on one of the stories from a non-contestant. So one vote from one user who didn't compete themselves and was not a member of the team.

Reading all the stories in this Quarter-Final would have taken the average reader less than 30 minutes, closer to 20 actually. Even if that was too much, anybody could have used the roughly 6 to 8 minutes to read the two stories of 1 match and could have just voted on that. Of course, there are always reasons why someone individually might not have had time to be online here over the course of 3 days. But over the course of these 3 days, on each individual day more than 25+ different registered users were online and spent time on the forum.
(...)
The number of people rating these stories (7) was equal to the number of authors participating in the competition (7) with two of the people voting leaving only a single vote on one match-up. The bottom line is: A community can't work like that. A writing community that shows no appreciation for the content provided by its authors can not function.

So back then, the number of users who are online every day was ~25. Back then we also had trouble to get stories above a rating of 10. Yes, the disinterest of the people invited for the launch was so enormous, we could not get a story above a rating of 10. And it was the one month announcement that ultimately got us out of that ditch. That announcement like the RavishU Memorial contest was a calculated move on my part and it worked as intended. It motivated @peterfrisk, @chloevee, @Lucius and @RapeU to be (more) active and got a handful of people to be at least a little bit more active for the remainder of the Ravished in a Flash tournament. In the semi-final we got our first story with a rating of 18, getting close to 20 and we got more comments on the semi-final and final stories. And that motivation for people then spilled over to the Gang Rape Galore contest, the peak in activity on the forum. That was the first time since the launch that I could actually not comment on a story for a week myself without all activity on the forum immediately collapsing.

Why did I recount the story of the forum for you in this detail? Because the truth is, there was no honey moon phase, no shiny new toy hype period like you suggested. It was a bleak, desperate struggle to keep any semblance of activity alive for the first 1.5 to 2 months of the forum. The forum was a near dead patient on life support. It was thankless and unrewarding. And in the background, @Vela Nanashi and I kept making updates to the forum software to make ratings more prominent, to make rating stories easier, to optimize the site for search engines, to add the sorting arrows, to add H1 tags so Bing would shut up about them missing, to get people that dice roller in chat that they requested that now nobody is using. I started posting my stories on AO3, Literotica and Reddit so that I could add links to them that would lead people here and that Google would see as backlinks to the forum increasing our domain authority.

So the reason why I'm no longer willing to run the forum is simple. We dropped below the activity of those bleak two months I described to you. You read that we had 25 registered users online during the first tournament. Now we have ~50, for a while we even had >60, but you were the only non-contestant who posted anything for the Round of 16. Just as it was with the first round of Ravished in a Flash. Personally, the last notification that I received for any kind of interaction of the community with any of the 13 stories I posted is now from July 28, a rating of Sweet, Sweet Mess. So more than two weeks ago. The last comment I received is your comment on Sweet, Sweet Mess from July 26. And if that was just me, fair enough, then I would have to live with the fact that people are just disintereted in my stories. But it is not just me.

[DayDreamNights]

I'll do my best to have my story ready asap

[Claire]

@DayDreamNights Looking forward to it!

@Blue Regarding the summer activity issue: You can of course prioritize your own personal account over what every metric tells about activity as a whole. If you want to do that I won't stop you. But I will not make decisions based on anecdotal evidence over what the metrics tell us. As I said, I'm not saying summer has no effect. I'm saying it's just not nearly as huge as your own personal experience might make it feel for you.

Also, with regards to your talk with @Vela Nanashi over feedback: I notice that like in the past you feel for some reason the need to defend your own posting behavior although I mention you as a positive example basically every time the topic comes up. So I want to make very clear that I have never said that people should spend every waking minute here. Nobody says that people should miss their son's football game on the weekend to be here instead. But you see this interesting tendency that people frame the issue as if showing some activity means they need to commit their entire life to the forum. That is of course ridiculous. What the forum needs is something like 20 people who post on average maybe 3 comments per week on other authors' stories, a time commitment of maybe an hour a week for a hobby that you really like. And I hope that people understand what an average is: Commenting on 3 stories per week on average means that you will have people like Shocker, Lucius, RapeU, you, myself who do more than that and others post only on 2 stories. An average means that you post maybe on 4 or 5 stories during a contest period and then only on 1 or 2 stories when it is a bit calmer. We're not talking about life altering commitments here.


@LtBroccoli If you want to organize a group of people hosting the forum, go ahead. If you personally don't want to put your real name on it, I get that. I didn't want to do that either. Abelohost knows who I am but they keep my real identity hidden to the outside world. If you do a whois query on the domain for example it won't tell you who I am. That is one of the reasons why I chose them as the host.

[JTCK]

So the reason why I'm no longer willing to run the forum is simple. We dropped below the activity of those bleak two months I described to you.

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain your decision to me again.
You’re right — I unfortunately missed the early days of the forum and hadn’t realised how much work had already gone into those first months.
What can I say? Sadly, your reasoning makes perfect sense, and with your explanations, I can now understand your perspective much better.

[LtBroccoli]

@Claire Yeah, I'm up for that. I need at least 3 people to help me out with running/maintaining things. Thinking from an Admin/Mod perspective. @RapeU you mentioned that you'd like to chip in a little. If we can get 2 or more people, let's get this game going. @Vela Nanashi I'd really appreciate it if you can keep helping out on things. You're a wizard with the code, and I'm rustier than the Tin Man.

Anyone else, hit us up. The sooner we get this resolved, the faster we get back to our normal depravity.

[Badman]

To be honest I was never a big fan of RavishU. However, after a FFF, Cage and BlackVan all folded it seemd to be the only game in town. Then it too folded and we ended up here.
I write stories for my own amusement and enjoyed writing snippets or captions if you will based on photos others posted or maybe in response to soimehting humurous.
The lack of any real engagement, chat or banter just makes this feel like the dead internet again.
Anyway thank you for your effort but as the boys from Monty Python would say;
It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker!", "It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace!"
Even little things like not seeing how many other members are online just makes it feel like I'm talking into a void.

I'll see you in another life, when we are both cats

Badman

[Claire]

Even little things like not seeing how many other members are online just makes it feel like I'm talking into a void.

I'll see you in another life, when we are both cats

Badman

You can see who is online at the bottom of the index page if you yourself are logged in. Guests can't see who is online but registered users can.

Also, I haven't watched Vanilla Sky in a while. Good film.

[RSlice]

If there happened to be a surge of interest between now and October would it be considered to keep open?

[Lucius]

If there happened to be a surge of interest between now and October would it be considered to keep open?

I'm an 'aestivalist' who thinks that the present condition of the forum is for the most part due to it being summer, but there's no chance it going back to June levels of activity, having circa 1400 monthly posts. Forums about to be closed do not experience surges of interest.