A New Owner for the Ravishment Academy
In my last announcement, I offered to transfer ownership over the Academy to a potential successor. So far, only @LtBroccoli has shown any interest in that. However, he also said that he doesn't want to be the one to officially put his name on the forum. If I understand him correctly, he is willing to support whoever takes over financially and as moderator/co-admin but he does not want to be the one who enters the official contract with the webhost. So unless somebody steps up to take that role, there is currently no one willing to carry the legal responsibility for hosting the forum.
My personal background
Ok, this section is actually difficult for me because I value my privacy a lot and I have this latent fear that someone might figure out my real identity and that running this place might hurt my personal life or my career if that happens. When I first registered on RavishU in October last year, I didn't participate in the German forum there for almost two months because I didn't want people to realize that I understand German. That is how cautious I was. But I think sharing some of my personal background might help some understand better how I'm approaching running this place.
I'm an economist and I'm currently writing my Ph.D. thesis. And I guess that most of you now think of inflation, unemployment, markets, interest rates, GDP or other economic buzzwords. And that is partially true, these are things that economists, in particular those specializing in macroeconomics, deal with. But what a modern economist primarily does is analysing and (mathematically) modelling incentive structures. What does that mean? An economist asks the question: What are the incentives for the people acting in a given environment and how do these incentives shape the outcome of the interaction between those people? And the most common environment that economists look at are markets. But that's not all.
There are several sub fields in economics like mechanism design, auction theory or public choice for example. If you live in the US and think about whether the rules for voting in your political system encouraged the polarization of the country into Democrats and Republicans and wonder whether something like ranked choice voting would give third parties an actual chance of winning and gaining influence, then you are contemplating what incentives the voting system provides and are asking a typical question that an economist might look at who specializes in public choice theory. If you wonder how you have to design an auction such that the people bidding actually bid what they are willing to pay for the item in question, then you are engaging in auction theory. And if you ever thought that you might save a lot of lifes if people were not just willing to donate their kidneys for their loved ones but willing to donate their kidney to somebody else if their relatives donated their kidney in turn to their partner in need, then you just began designing a mechanism that might have gotten you the nobel price in economics in 2012 if you had that idea a little earlier.
What does that mean for the forum? I view the problems of our community through the lens of misaligned incentives and view the issues we have as structural problems that we need to overcome. So when somebody makes a suggestion to change something here, I don't ask the question "Would people like that?" but "How does that affect the incentives in an attention economy where authors compete for the attention of readers?" And the design choices I made for this forum, try to address structural problems I have identified.
To give you an example: Inherent to forums like ours is a focus on the topics at the top of a board. Once a story drops to page 2 it is usually dead unless the author can push it back to the top with a new chapter. And even on page 1, only maybe the first 5 to 10 stories get a large number of views. Even some of the best stories are basically forgotten after a while because they keep sinking deeper and deeper into the depths of the forum. And of course, occasionally some old story will be pushed back to the top of the forum by a user comment. During the early phase of a forum like ours someone like @Lucius or @RapeU might push a lot of old stories back to the top. But the larger the catalogue of stories grows, the harder it becomes to keep a significant share of older stories relevant.
Now that you know that, you might see how the Popular Stories and Community Favorite boards try to tackle this problem. By highlighting stories of extraordinary quality/popularity and removing them from the competition in the Public Stories board, you do not completely solve but mitigate this issue. Suddenly, stories that have proven their popularity are spared the fate of fading into obscurity and gain a space where they get attention far beyond their natural life span in the Public Stories board - if the community members were to participate in rating the stories they read.
I could now go through several other problems like this and explain to you my reasoning behind the choices I made. But know this: I'm an economist with a Ph.D. level education and that makes me an expert in analysing incentive structures. That is what I'm good at, that is what I have been trained to do for almost a decade now. And what I would like people to understand: When I tell you about the incentive structure of the forum, then this is not a value judgment about the behavior of the people who act in line with those incentives. As a general rule: Individual intent always loses against opposing incentives in the long run. So please don't feel attacked when I say "people have an incentive to do this and this is bad for the forum" even if you find yourself having done something that aligns with the harmful incentives (like not commenting and rating for example). This is a structural analysis and not an assessment of your character.
To give you a final example from outside of our community: AO3 incentivizes inflationary tag use to increase the chance of your story getting found. This undermines the usefulness of tags in general. But that doesn't make the authors plastering their stories with tags no matter how little they actually apply bad people. It's just what you have to do there to guarantee that you get readers to find your story. And the thing to do would be to change the tag system there. But you will never solve the issue by appealing to people to only use the tags that actually do apply to their story when the system itself encourages them to do the opposite.
The core problem of the rape fantasy writing community
With this lens in mind, what is the core problem that we as the rape fantasy writing community face? We are stuck in a negative feedback loop that drives away the vast majority of potentially interested authors. And that loop looks something like this:
Authors post their stories. They hope to hear what others think. The community reads what they wrote, but only few people reply. The once motivated author loses their motivation and ultimately leaves the community. Now the community has less authors and therefore less new stories and therefore even less readers registering and commenting. Even less reader engagement means even less replies for authors means even more authors leaving, and repeat. This loop goes on until only those authors remain who are willing to publish their stories receiving little to no feedback, either because they truly don't care about feedback which is extremely rare or because they learned to cope with the lack of engagement.
And so our community, no matter the site, is over and over again reduced to a small core group of people that can endure this low level engagement for a prolonged period of time. And if you are one of those people, then you are weird. And I'm saying that with affection and I include myself in that group of weird people. If you truly can put your creative writing out into the world without getting anything out of it other than the feeling of having created something, then you belong to a very small minority of people who can actually do that.
I think that the user @EvilKnight is a good example of this happening here. He was active for a few weeks, posted a couple of stories, was interested in participating in the first tournament but missed the deadline, and now he's gone. But you can also read the negative effect that this loop has on users from our very own @LaLia in the two month announcement thread:
That is what I meant earlier that individual intentions always lose against structural problems in the long run. @LaLia came in guns blazing trying to help the forum and did a lot. And instead of appreciating this, the community showed her apathy and wore her down.LaLia wrote: Sun Jun 01, 2025 9:07 am Now to the topic that's been causing us problems since the beginning: I can completely understand you now. Shocker, Blue, and a handful of other people have commented on my stories. Many (especially other authors) sometimes haven't provided a single piece of feedback. You just have to say that if it's so noticeable when two people give less feedback with 200 users, that's a real problem.
I'll have more time after Pentecost and will give more feedback again, but I must also honestly admit that I won't pay much attention to authors who only post their stories and don't give feedback here and there until things improve a bit here.
What does the end point of that development look like? Well, I think these snapshots of RapeCage in the way back machine illustrate that perfectly. Look at this one here first:
RapeCage - Rape Fantasy Stories Board - February 9 2020
This is a snapshot of RapeCage's most active story board from Febuary 9 2020. There are 17 stories on that first page. On average, these stories have ~3 replies. The story with the most replies is "Constantly Raped" by CerealRapist with 11 replies. How many of those are from the author I can't tell you. But an even older snapshot reveals that the thread was started in 2017 and has at least one additional chapter posted by the author with a total of 6 replies at the time. So that low level activity was not a recent thing in 2020 but was already the case in 2017.
Furthermore you can see that the most recent story was posted February 7 2020 and 2 days later had 1 reply. The second story in the list by CerealRapist again was 3 days old at the time and had 0 replies.
You might argue that there were other story boards on RapeCage and that this is not representative despite being the largest of all the story boards. So look at this snapshot here:
RapeCage - Contest Winners board - February 9 2020
This is RapeCage's contest winners board, highlighted as housing "The best of the best. These are all the stories RC members have voted as Story Contest Winning Entries." So we are looking here at stories officially branded as high quality and that were in the community spotlight for, first, contest participation and then, second, winning the contest.
You look at that list and you see quite a few contest winners with less than 10 replies, one even with 0 replies. Older contest winners seem to have a few more replies on average with the highest reply count on page 1 being 35 replies for the September/October 2016 contest winner "The Courier". Its most recent reply being from September 30 2017. That means that this story was on page 1 (one page having 20 topics) for ~2.5 years of a board highlighting only the best of the best the site has to offer without receiving a single comment.
Now you might argue that maybe RapeCage didn't have a large userbase. But from what I know, RapeCage was the second largest RapeFantasy writing board we ever had after RavishU. But we don't need to guess. Look at this snapshot here:
RapeCage - Index Page - February 22 2020
If you scroll to the bottom of that page you can see a statistic that tells you that on February 22 2020 85 people were online over the last 24 hours. That's more than what we typically have at the moment. And for those clinging to the idea that the current lack of activity here is a summer effect despite nothing pointing in that direction: On RapeCage you see even more users being online than here, it's not summer, it's February, and activity looks even more desolate than here.
This is what the end of that negative feedback cycle looks like: The total normalization of non-participation. 85 people being online over 24 hours, probably close to 200 if not more over the course of a week, and the two most recent stories have 1 and 0 replies after being online for 2 and 3 days respectively. We're not there yet, but that is where we are headed.
This is not sustainable. A community can't persist that acts like that. Every community, no matter what it is about, needs to create engagement of its members with its core content. And the core content are the stories. That is what people come here for, what they register for, what they find us over. It's not a discussion about football or politics, it's not some game users play with each other. No, what people find forums like these over are the stories. Saying that our community can do without users commenting on stories is like trying to start a community of model car collectors where nobody talks about or compares their model car collection. And it is only in our particular community that I find people actually believing that engagement with the core content is optional and not a necessity for the community to function. And that is a cultivated mindset.
Why is this so crucial? Why does this ultimately destroy one community after the other? You have to look at this from the perspective of the people running these communities. You can see how hesitant people are to take over from me even after I laid out that the current financial cost of running the forum is not that high (~7€ per month).
What does running a community like ours mean? First, you need to find a host who is not only willing to host adult content but rape fantasy. Not many hosts want to be associated with that. Then you have of course to cover the financial cost. Currently that's manageable but it's not 0. Then you become the public face of a community with content that many deem questionable and would like to shut down entirely. You also don't want your real identity to be known. In my case for example, I don't want a potential future employer ask me during a job interview why I'm running a forum for rape fantasy stories. You also are legally responsible for what's being hosted here. So any pornographic image that somebody posts that might potentially depict a topless 16 year old could become a problem for you. RavishU for example got in trouble because somebody posted an image of a gang rape scene there that people thought was a role play but it turned out to be a photo of a real gang rape. If you don't moderate this place carefully, then edgy people attracted by the darker subject matter of our kink like @RaymondPISTACHIO start to dominate the tone of the forum and drive away the reasonable adults you want on a place like this.
This is the responsibility and the difficulty that comes with running places like this. Now imagine your forum looks like those snapshots from RapeCage that I showed you (and nothing against RapeCage, RavishU was doing a little better than that but not much and from what I saw, TBV was in a similiar if not worse state). And then something happens. Let's say you start a new relationship that seems to be going somewhere but you dread that conversation where you tell your partner that you are actually the admin and owner of a rape fantasy forum. Could be an issue, right? Read some of the accounts in the How open are you about your rape fantasy kink? thread if you want to get an idea how difficult that talk might be. I can also tell you that I know a former member of our community who I would like very much to be here and who also would like very much to be here, but isn't active because they are about to be married and their partner doesn't know that they write and read rape fantasy. So do you risk that uncomfortable talk with your partner when you take a look at your forum and see that the two latest stories have like 1 post after 3 days and your most popular contest winner ever sits at 35 replies after 4 years? You're not making money with this, you're taking an enormous responsibility on your shoulders, it costs time and effort to organize this and your very own community signals you every step of the way "We don't care anyway", maybe not with their words but with their actions. What decision do you make?
Different scenario. Not a new relationship this time, but your forum again looks like this desolate wasteland of activity that these RapeCage snapshots show you. This time, you get a copyright complaint from Disney because of some Star Wars fanfiction rape story. You know that since you don't make money with any of this, legally it should be fine hosting that story. But you don't have the ressources for a legal battle with Disney even if you are in the right. Would you keep bothering with this?
And examples like this are literally what happened. To quote myself:
Or look at RavishU. The host took it down, yes, but the data still exists. Lois, the owner of RavishU, could at any point go to Abelohost as I have, pick a slightly more costly hosting plan because the database of RavishU is huge, and restart the forum there immediately. More than that, she or one of her admins could have over the course of a weekend converted the outdated SMF forum into an up to date myBB forum that would have offered users much more functionality similar to what you have here. How do I know? I did that with my backup of the RavishU database despite being a horrible noob when it comes to stuff like this. But given the state that the forum was in, why would she? RavishU still exists, I have that backup. And bringing it back online is a matter of will, not possibility. But why bother for this community?Claire wrote:And it should be even less surprising that The Black Van shut down even without any outside interference. The thread announcing its closure has more views (2,600) than any content on the site. The reason given was:
Does anyone really believe they would have shut down a well-running forum where 50 replies was average, not a record, and popular stories had deep discussion threads and thousands of views?ZipTiesThatBind wrote:It has been our pleasure to provide you all with a space to indulge in our particular kink for these past few years. Unfortunately, both of us admins have gone through quite a few major life changes during this time, and we’ve come to the sad realization that neither of us can give the forum the time and proper attention it takes to run the place anymore. (Source: The Black Van - Forum Closure)
And that is the point. If you have a community that is disinterested in engaging with its core content because it mistakes a forum for amateur authors writing erotic fiction for a porn streaming site, then the people running it will come to the conclusion to give up over and over again once some outside force makes them question whether it's actually worth it. Whether that's the host taking it down, some powerful entity threatening legal consequences, or personal life circumstances changing like it was the case for the TBV admins.
What a healthy community would look like
So you might wonder, what does a healthy community then look like? And it's a little sad that this question even needs to be asked but the answer is quite obvious. First, you need engagement with the core content of the community. That is, exchanges between authors and readers and readers among themselves in the story threads. To give you a recent example, something as simple as this. And the interesting part is not the linked comment itself but the fact that another user responded to it. This is what you want to see. Users talking about the story, the ideas in it. And ideally, you would see the author and even more users join that exchange. If you saw this regularly underneath stories, the majority of the problems of our community would be solved.
You would in general see something like 10 to 20 people respond to a story over the course of a week or two. But this is not where the engagement with the core content ends. Communities are build on people having a shared experience, in our case that is reading the same thing, and then talking about that shared experience. But this should not be limited to the story threads itself. In the next step, the community takes that to a higher level and starts discussing the core content on a meta level. And that does not need to be an academic discussion. That could be a topic like "Which victim did you feel the most sorry for?" or related to the " humor in rape stories" thread "Which story made you laugh the most?" Some also said that they enjoy playing games and you could of course play great games that involve the stories. How about "Guess the story" where a user posts a line from a story and the community guesses which story that's from? How about playing "Who am I?" with characters from the stories posted here? And these are examples that you personally might like or dislike. But our community doesn't even have something as basic as a "Your 3 favorite stories" thread. The point is, this would not be content about a particular story but about the stories as a whole where people, who have made the shared experience of having read stories here, interact. And those meta discussions would of course feed back into the direct engagement with the stories. Because if somebody tells you in a convincing way why they felt really sorry for a victim in a story you haven read yet, then that might get you to check that story out. That is what normal thriving communities look like.
And then surrounding the direct and the meta engagement with the core content you can have adjacent or even completely unrelated topics and games. Those are very welcome here, the Dining Hall exists for a reason. But make no mistake. That is not why any new user finds this place, registers and starts to participate. Only people who are already integrated in the community might do that to have fun with the people they know. This is fine, but irrelevant from a community building perspective. If playing unrelated games or posting porn images helped create a thriving community, then RavishU and RapeCage and I suspect also TBV would have had tremendous engagement with the stories posted there. But it very obviously did not help these communities.
Is a healthy community possible?
That depends a bit on what you mean by possible. On a purely technical level, yes of course. We have more than enough people who claim that a forum like this is important to them to get this going. The real issue is whether you can overcome the mindset that makes people treat this like a porn streaming site. And that is where I have my doubts. I fear this view is so ingrained in people, especially in those who have been members of various communities over the years, that there is little you can do at this point. I think many people by now have just been conditioned by RapeCage, TBV and RavishU to think that engagement with the core content is some nice extra that's not necessary for these communities. But let's see how dfficult this would actually be to implement.
When the forum launched, I tried to get it off the ground by inviting a bunch of people directly. @Shocker helped me invite some people he knew better than me. This here is essentially what our starting lineup looked like.
@Claire, @Vela Nanashi, @Mister X, @LaLia, @Shocker, @Jennifer Strawberry, @JustJess, @rexmundi, @Brootal, @Kendall, @darklord, @LtBroccoli, @DarkArchon, @KittyUmbrass, @HistBuff, @pinkwarkitten14, @leftwanting, @valblair321, @Blue, @Rainbow
There are a few others that registered during the first week of the forum, but I listed only those who I know are veterans from other older communities. And I could of course list a few more people who registered shortly after, but let's stay with the one week cut off for now. There are obviously still a few people who are or were very active on that list but the vast majority on that list barely engaged with anything. If even today just 2/3 of this group of launch people did as little as commenting on 3 stories per week on average, I never would have created a one month announcement, warning people about the lack of activity. I certainly wouldn't have decided to stop running the forum. Realistically, we are talking about a time investment of an hour per week maybe. Please note the word average. That means some people will do a little more, some people a little less. That means each individual user might be very active one week with 6 or 7 comments on stories and then don't comment at all another week. But with enough users doing that, you get a nice constant stream of activity on the board.
But maybe you think I'm expecting too much. You can add a lot of people to this list.
@modela2, @praetor3d, @Nickamano, @Vile8r, @chloevee, @ren6, @rhurac, @John_F_Drake, @EvilKnight, @Peer, @Brek, @Quinotaurus, @peterfrisk, @bob202, @RSlice, @Interception, @HoodedRat757, @Brazen, @Lucius, @Siva, @Writers_Bloque, @AdmiralPiet, @RapeU, @skuttrusk, @DeckerDary13, @Reformed Society, @Lux, @Corvid, @Hazard, @HumiliationInc, @Verbal13, @JTCK, @ShibbolethParty, @KleineHexe, @Irenova, @VictimEyes, @Songbird, @Kaizererotica
All these people posted stories here, participated in/signed up for contests or said that they would be more active this time in their introduction threads. We now listed a total of 58 people and that list is far from complete. If you were to add people who are regularly online to that list, you'd get more people. As I said before, we have something like ~50 people online each day and ~140 over the course of a week.
Commenting on as little as 3 stories per week, imagine half of the listed people doing that. What would the forum look like? You would have story threads with 6, 7, 8 replies from different people and then others stories with 8 replies from completely different users. We would need to adjust the threshold for Popular Stories upward because too many stories hit the 30 reputation threshold. We would already have a few Community Favorites. Imagine these people congratulating the winner of a contest or a new Accomplished Writer on their achievement. They'd go to bed and wake up the next day to 20+ people congratulating them, making winning a contest or becoming an Acoomplished Writer feel truly special. How many stories would we get if authors saw that this is the average response they can expect? How many more new people would become active commentators because as they browse the forum they realize that commenting here is the most normal thing in the world? How many would start commenting to get access to those Community Favorites and then stick with it because it is fun and they got used to it? What discussions could we have in the book club?
But, the truth is, after 4 months we have less activity then we would have if just half of the launch people engaged, forget about the ~500 people who registered since then. We are visible enough on search engines, we have a ton of different content to offer, we have the userbase, we have an up to date forum that offers much more functionality then what you had on RavishU for example. We have a thought through infrastructure. And if I may so, you have an admin who is available and who sets a positive example, who puts her money where her mouth is. I sincerely hoped that these things would be enough to get us to that point where the activity on the forum becomes self-sustaining. Clearly, I was wrong about that.
Why I wrote all of this
Quite a few of you expressed their sadness to me that this forum goes away. And let me tell you all, I'm probably the one who is most sad of all. I poured a lot of myself into this and seeing it fail like this is hard. It is incredibly sad and hurtful. When I started this, I expected the survival of the forum to become a tug of war between the initial hype and the negative feedback loop that has destroyed all our communities we had up to this point. I thought we would come out swinging with the people invited for the launch and that it would be a matter of whether we get the infrastructure I set up rolling with the Popular Stories and Community Favorites boards. Instead, it was an uphill battle from the get go. Instead of a strong start, we got a forum on life support from day one. When I created that one month announcement warning people about the possible end, I knew that this was a move I could only pull once. It worked, it carried the forum to new heights, saved the Ravished in a Flash tournament from being a total desaster and carried us to the peak of the Gang Rape Galore contest. And I truly believed that getting our first Popular Story might ignite a new spark, that this could be a psychological moment that gives us a second wind. But what I thought might be the beginning of something bigger, was actually the peak in activity. But in the end, as it had for all our predecessors, the negative feedback cycle did win. I am at my wits end.
So why did I write this long post? So that the people who truly cared maybe understand my decision a little better and realize that I'm not doing this out of indifference. I wanted nothing more than this place to succeed. I share your sadness and disappointment. I very much appreciate the kind words that people have offered me. I also appreciate the select few who gave some of my own stories a read and a comment. It weren't many who did that, but every bit of genuine, well-meaning feedback did mean the world to me. And I'm sorry to some who didn't get as much feedback from me as I would have liked to give. I will try to remedy some of that over the course of the remaining time.
