The End of the Ravishment Academy

[Claire]

Sadly, after the three months announcement when I was genuinely optimistic, activity on the forum has almost completely collapsed to an all time low. And so I decided that I will no longer run the Ravishment Academy. To give everybody the chance to save their stories and to exchange contact information with other users in case they want to stay in contact, I will keep running the forum normally until October 4. During that time, you can keep posting stories and other topics if you want to. I will also organize one final contest.

Whether this is the end of the Academy depends on whether anybody else wants to take over from me. If somebody thinks that the Academy is worth preserving in its current state, I'd be willing to hand it over to them and let them run it in the future. But I see no point in investing my time and effort into running an archive any longer.

Please see the second post for more detailed information.

[Claire]

What happened

For the three month announcement, I was genuinely optimistic. Activity had declined a bit since the peak of the Gang Rape Galore contest but that was expected following a very popular contest. When 16 people signed up for the Used and Abused tournament, I was convinced that the tournament and the next contests would bring us back to the level of activity we had seen for the Gang Rape Galore contest. We also got our first Popular Story with Fugitives and the Popular Stories board took center stage on the index page of the forum. I had hoped that this would finally get people to rate the stories they read.

What happened instead was this:



What I interpreted at the time as a slight dip in activity after a popular contest turned out to be the beginning of a persistent downward trend in daily posts that has now continued for almost two months with no end in sight. Activity peaked around the Gang Rape Galore contest with the 28 day average for daily posts going up to 52 mid June. Over the last 28 days, the forum had 25 posts on average per day, the lowest it has ever been. The first 9 days of August sit at an average of 14 posts per day, reaching an all time low of only 7 posts on August 6 followed by yet another low on August 7 with only 2 posts. The forum is about to reach 500 registered accounts, roughly 140 of which were online over the last 7 days, and has over 250 stories to offer any new or returning reader. Nevertheless, the activity on the board is lower than when 20 registered users had 20 stories to talk about at launch - and activity was extremely low back then already. The low level activity is now also starting to negatively affect the number of new stories on the forum and the daily registrations.

I had hope that the launch of the Popular Stories board would further invigorate the forum. But the community at large did not congratulate @Shocker on his accomplishment of becoming the first Accomplished Writer of the forum. The community in general does not welcome new users in the Student Orientation board, does not congratulate contest winners on their victory, does not congratulate authors on achieving the Popular Story status and Accomplished Writer milestone, and does not welcome new moderators when they are announced.

I moved @Shocker's Fugitives to the Popular Stories board on June 26. At the time, the story had ~1500 views. Since then, the view count increased to 3739 making it the third most viewed story on the entire forum. For comparison, the second most viewed Gang Rape Galore story is Spoils of War by @AdmiralPiet at 1453 views. So being in the Popular Stories board gave the story a boost in exposure as intended. And yet, it received only few comments since then and barely any new rating. Since June 26, 177 new users registered on the board. @VictimEyes is the only one who commented on Fugitives.

The initially high interest in the Used and Abused tournament had 16 people sign up for the competition. Of those 16 people, on average only 4.08 commented on the other contestants' entries. And only a single non-participant commented on 3 of the 12 entries.

The Femdom Fury contest received very little attention overall. While my own story was not written for the contest in particular and had thus received some comments before the contest even started from people who otherwise would have posted during the contest, its contest participation lead to it receiving one new comment, one new rating and one upgraded rating. That was it.

I could go on at this point but I think these examples tell the story behind that shrinking post average well enough. The point is: Despite there being much more to read and despite there being much more users online every day, the activity on the forum is lower than at launch, lower even than at our previous all time low. It seems like me saying in the three month announcement that the forum was doing better was collectively interpreted as a sign that futher activity is no longer needed.


What will happen next

I will keep running the forum normally until October 4, the 6 month anniversary of the forum. I will organize one more contest as a goodbye for the forum and I will keep commenting on stories that might get posted here. This should give everybody enough time to save their stories and to exchange contact information with people they want to stay in touch with.

What happens after October 4 depends on you. If somebody sees value in preserving the forum in its current inactive state, I'd be willing to give them the database and the domain of the forum. For anybody who is interested in running the forum instead of me, here are some things you should know:

The forum runs using the phpBB forum software on the most recent version 3.3.15 which is available for free. It uses 35 extensions for customization. Most of those are publicly available for free too. @Vela Nanashi has modified some of those extensions and is willing to hand them over to someone who might take over from me.

The forum is hosted by Abelohost, an offshore webhost located in the Netherlands which tolerates a lot of content other webhosts would reject and which focuses on privacy. I'm currently using the SecureWeb plan of their Offshore Web Hosing plans. It costs 10€ per month but its monthly cost can be lowered to 5€ per month if you're willing to pay for it 3 years in advance. I also bought the domain ravishmentacademy.com for a year for 20€. I would give you the domain until its expiration date in February, then you would have to pay for it yourself. If you choose the same plan as me, the monthly cost of the forum is a little less than 7€ per month. I also spent a few Euros on some of the extensions the forum uses.

The bottleneck of the SecureWeb plan is the 120 GB per month traffic limit, so roughly 3 GB per day. Currently, the forum generates something like 600 to 700 MB traffic per day, so there is still room to grow. Nevertheless, if traffic increases again in the future, you might hit that limit. My plan was to upgrade to a VPS, Virtual Private Server, in the future. And you can of course try your luck with a different host. As far as content restrictions are concerned, Abelohost forbids underage and bestiality content.

If you are seriously interested in taking over the forum, feel free to contact me.


Thank You

I would also like to thank a few people who supported me and/or really tried to make this place work with their activity on the forum. First, there is my co-admin and friend @Vela Nanashi. She wasn't always as present as she wanted to be due to her health issues but you have no idea how much she helped with the extensions of the forum that made it possible to run the forum as I envisioned it in the first place. Thank you so much, Vela!

Then there are of course my moderators @LaLia, @Lucius and at @chloevee. Thank you for stepping up, it's much appreciated!

And I would also like to thank @Shocker, @Blue, @RapeU and most recently @JTCK for how they regularly commented on other authors' stories. Without users like you, the forum wouldn't have made it 4 months.

Personally, I'm very sad to see the Academy end this way. If you are angry because of my decision, please direct that anger at me and not my team. Both @Vela Nanashi and @Lucius wanted me to keep the forum going for longer, hoping that something might change after all over the course of the next few months. So this was purely my decision and not their fault. I made this decision because I no longer want to invest the time and effort required to properly run this forum for a community that with few exceptions shows little to no appreciation for any of that.

[RSlice]

The only reason I dont really interact is lack of interest of the types of stories. No offense to any of the authors they all write good stories I just prefer non-consensual home invasion style stories and there just hasnt been a whole lot.

And I kind of just hit roadblocks on whenever I attempt writing out a personal story of my own.

[Shocker]

@Claire I'm very sorry to hear about your decision, but respect it., thank you for creating this platform. The summer months are typically time people spend outside, being on vacation but rarely at the keyboard. So @Vela Nanashi and @Lucius are possibly having a point in wanting to see the next few months.

Would you perhaps be so kind in providing an idea what would need to be turned over to keep the forum operating, past October?

[Vela Nanashi]

You would need to get a hosting account to copy files and database over to, and then take over the domain, and pay for those things. From what I understand.

[Claire]

Would you perhaps be so kind in providing an idea what would need to be turned over to keep the forum operating, past October?

I'm not sure I fully understand the question. Do you mean what's technically necessary to transfer ownership of the forum from me to you? Or do you mean what it would take to change my mind?

[HumiliationInc]

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.

[Vela Nanashi]

I think one main issue we have with this site is we are too friendly to guests and registered users with 0 participation, maybe if we changed that so guests and zero participation registered users only could see a tiny teaser taste of what the real forum has, a few chosen stories that are free for guests and lurkers, then you have to pay with comments/participation that is good enough to get more access to more stories, maybe you have to pay participation points to unlock full stories after you have gotten the tiny taste, maybe that would force more users to participate. Making it worth it to actually host the site. Maybe users would comment more on the owner's stories you know, and other authors stories, making it feel worth it to host things. As others have said before there are places to post stories that only get viewed, the goal with RA was to be different, to have people actually participate and comment. Most people are too lazy or too scared to participate I guess and that is really sad.

[RapeU]

I think it's premature to say that the forum should shut down because activity is going lower. The problem you perceive is that you want results. In today's world a 15 second TikTok video could go viral with millions of comments and views in a matter of days. By comparison, we might have a time period where there is only one new post in a single day. Results on this forum to what high standards you've placed are going to take time, much more time and patience than the norm of today's society. It might even be years before what you consider to be a full launch of the board happens.

Now with that said we need to start having contests on a consistent and predictable basis like I said in a previous post. Right now it's wildly unpredictable with only a week worth of vote time to read stories. In today's world, that's not realistic. TBV did it best with a month to write a story and a month to vote. Yes activity will suffer, but activity across all message boards everywhere has suffered for a long time. Message boards are no longer a trend like they used to be. Social media is where people spend most of their time doing the things we used to do on message boards in the early 2000's.

What we need to do after getting contests on a consistent basis is be patient and maintain. If you're not willing to wait it out, that's fine. I'll gladly donate to keep this place running if that's what it takes. I need this space. Writing helps me get the sexual things out I can't do in the real world and also doubles as one of the ways I deal with mental health issues like depression.

[skuttrusk]

I'd be very sad to see this place go. I think even if the posts and stories don't always generate a tone of visible engagement, people are clearly reading them and getting pleasure out of them. I certainly would rather get lots of people commenting, but I don't know how to make that happen. Maybe I'll have a few ideas though if I think about it.