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Disciple
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Know ye all who give half a damn about the Stories board - all four of you - that we've two brand-new subforums available.

Behold the Bar With No Name, where aspiring writers - and readers - may research, request, and recruit to their hearts' content! And behold Crime Alley, where lie the noble (and not-so-noble) memories of stories past, some awaiting that final scythe of deletion, some that might yet possess the faintest glimmer of hope, of revival...

Know ye also that, having offloaded a shitload of threads into these two subforums, I have cut Stories from a terrifyingly gargantuan sixteen pages to an infinitely more agreeable fourteen. The overall task is not quite finished, but its easiest steps are. For the next one(s), I call upon the suggestions and advice of my fellow Forum-goers...

Should the Bar With No Name encompass all about-stories threads?

In all seriousness - I don't know how many of you ever go beyond the first few pages of the Stories board, but I do on a semi-regular basis, and there's a lot of not-really-stories material back there. Trailers for upcoming stories, advertisement for other sites and blogs, direct links and downloads to stories on said other sites... it's the last one I'm really hung up on. I could relegate any thread without a story in the actual text to the Bar, but doing so feels somewhat... petty, especially with a labor of love like, say, The Adventures of the Blue Lynx.

Right now I'm contemplating the following policy: post whatever you like on the main Stories board and I won't touch it, until it falls off the first page, at which point (if applicable) I'll whisk it off to the Bar. At the current rate Stories is going, that means your thread will have at least 4-5 months' worth of exposure to anyone who clicks into Stories. In the meantime, the Bar itself could do with some housekeeping, some merging of all the request-themed threads...

(I've currently cloned SGWriter's Story Ideas sticky into the Bar; would anyone object to me 100% moving it in there?)

Finally, know ye that our benevolent liege @MightyHypnotic is even now hard at work building a new tag system for both this Forum and its accompanying blog, that we might be one step closer to the day when the Dungeon is no longer necessary. There haven't really been any formal discussions on what this tag system will contain, so I figure this is as good a place as any to float suggestions and proposals.

Having shopped around Superstories, Adultfanfiction, Archive Of Our Own, and a few other sites with tag systems, my tentative sketch looks something like this...

Character tags are the most obvious, though rendered slightly redundant by the fact that most authors in our line like putting the heroine(s) right in the title - Supergirl: A Dark and Stormy Night and whatnot. Still, filtering by character's probably gonna be one of the biggest draws of this thing, so in it goes.

Setting tags are the first big "maybe" on my list. Should readers be able to filter by DC-based stories, Marvel-based stories, Original Creation-based stories, et cetera? As a regular geek, I'm isolationist to the max; I make faces whenever Batman so much as mentions knowing Superman (so why didn't ya ask him to help out during the quake, ya boob?!), much less a competitor character like Captain America. But as a fetish reader, I love seeing Wonder Woman and Silver Sable rubbing shoulders - and other body parts - like it ain't no thang. Aside from the more-the-merrier principle, it's a handy reminder that everything on this board is an intentional parody, not the "real" DC/Marvel universe or whatever.

Right now, my best idea for implementing Setting tags is to combine them with the character tags. Have tags like DC - Supergirl, Marvel - Invisible Woman, Original - Fuchsia Fox, maybe a handful of crossover tags whenever these categories intersect...

Length tags are... things few people consider, but I think they could be useful. Help new readers look for stories over 1000 words, over 5000 words, over 10000 words, whatever.

Completion tags are something I know at least one of you want (I've already got a crude version bolted onto my slightly-outdated Stories Index). Only thing worth discussing there is whether there should be separate In-Progress (for when it looks reasonably certain the author will finish it) and Unfinished (for when it doesn't) tags.

And last, but not certainly least... the Element tags. Is there sex (M/F, F/F, gangbangs, interracial, all of the above)? Violence (harmless, semi-realistic, lethal)? Knockouts (physical, drugs, magic, regular ol' exhaustion)? Mind control (I believe some prefer it called corruption)? Lovely, shiny tights and pantyhose (and the removal thereof)? Bondage alone could probably have a half-dozen tags to itself (rope, cuffs, chains, magic, gags, harnesses...).

There's probably more things I should be mentioning here, but it's getting pretty long as is... thoughts, everybody?
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DrDominator9
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OMG! If you attatch story length tags I'm a dead man! No one will ever start reading my work. :confused:

More feedback to follow
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Void
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I'm not sure of this is a particularly helpful answer, but I like all those ideas. Clearing space for story topics and separating them from actual stories is a very helpful distinction for everyone so big thanks for that.

I think those tags all make sense. Would the character tags extend to villains and recurring characters in a series? There's a risk of the list of characters being very bloated for some stories if so, but for the majority of stories it would probably fly. I think you've got a good list of elements tags there, and there will be lots of readers that benefit from the ability to zero in on their preferred kinds of action or peril or general fetish. I guess it comes with the inherent risk of spoilers, but I can live with it.

Another element to bring up here is 'dark' elements, I guess. I'm thinking particularly about heroine torture and death, as those are the elements that I think were the purpose of the dungeon, and may need to be used to ward people off reading a more traumatic tale than they were expecting. But, again, that one comes with even larger spoiler issues - so I'm not sure what we all think is best there. Then again, there will be folks who actively like the element of 'heroine death' and would benefit from being able to filter down to those options, so unless the author actively asks to avoid spoilers, say, in a more drama-focused yarn, then maybe those darker elements ought to be tags too? I'm not sure if dubcon and noncon sexual content also wants to be flagged here or not, or just generally if people would want a scale of rating for explicit sexual content to mild or no sexual content.

It's a huge undertaking either way. The more ambitious the tag system, the more daunting the implementation will be. It would be fantastic if it comes off, though.
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Abductorenmadrid
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Void wrote:
6 years ago
I'm not sure of this is a particularly helpful answer, but I like all those ideas. Clearing space for story topics and separating them from actual stories is a very helpful distinction for everyone so big thanks for that.

I think those tags all make sense. Would the character tags extend to villains and recurring characters in a series? There's a risk of the list of characters being very bloated for some stories if so, but for the majority of stories it would probably fly. I think you've got a good list of elements tags there, and there will be lots of readers that benefit from the ability to zero in on their preferred kinds of action or peril or general fetish. I guess it comes with the inherent risk of spoilers, but I can live with it.

Another element to bring up here is 'dark' elements, I guess. I'm thinking particularly about heroine torture and death, as those are the elements that I think were the purpose of the dungeon, and may need to be used to ward people off reading a more traumatic tale than they were expecting. But, again, that one comes with even larger spoiler issues - so I'm not sure what we all think is best there. Then again, there will be folks who actively like the element of 'heroine death' and would benefit from being able to filter down to those options, so unless the author actively asks to avoid spoilers, say, in a more drama-focused yarn, then maybe those darker elements ought to be tags too? I'm not sure if dubcon and noncon sexual content also wants to be flagged here or not, or just generally if people would want a scale of rating for explicit sexual content to mild or no sexual content.

It's a huge undertaking either way. The more ambitious the tag system, the more daunting the implementation will be. It would be fantastic if it comes off, though.
I am with @Void for the most part. Sieving out actual stories from "stuff" will be a great start. With tags, if they were predefined (by the mods), not user created, it would also help keep things tighter. For example, you don't want endless tags created for "Supergirl", "Super Girl", "Super-Girl" etc etc etc. This means patience as "the first of their kind" characters crop up and an official tag is required to be assigned to them. If you let users create tags you may just see a swamp full of similar-but-not-the-same tags referring to the same sort of character. Like Void and several others I have a series of stories running with main characters. My "Lucy Wuan" character is my own invention and a nobody outside of my Supergirl series, but, you never know, someone might like to find my stories which specifically have her in them ... should she get a tag?

Also, like Void I would be keen to protect readers from what some of us monsters ... err ... writers have created. What we should be clear about is that it's not always straightforward how dark a particular peril may be. "Non-consensual" in a melodramatic type of scene can be erotic / hot / "Oh no ... you found the source of my power is down there!" ... whereas the description itself SHOULD be considered a bad thing! (you guys get that, right!?), and indeed there probably are stories that have non-consensual scenes intentionally to make a dark plot development. You can be ticking the same "Noncon" box, but they are entirely different things.

AEM
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Disciple
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I'm glad you two mentioned 'darkness', because I developed a plan to tag for that... didn't put it in the initial post mainly because I was short on time...

Basically, I envision a Cruelty tag going from 1 to 5, based on how... in-depth the writer gets on the heroine's suffering (this will be in addition to the Element tags on whether the heroine dies, etc.). It's still massively simplifying an inherently subjective topic, but five degrees instead of the current Dungeon/non-Dungeon binary should be at least a slight improvement. And of course, if an author disagrees with the Cruelty rating on one of his works he can always petition me or MH to change it.

(I'm actually not too hung-up on consensual/non-consensual sex tags so far, because as far as I can tell the main dichotomy on this board is between Hot, Minimally Painful Mind-Control Sex and Brutal No-Frills Forced Sex, which ought to be covered by the Cruelty tag. Actual consensual stuff is rare as a silver dollar.)

Relatedly, I'm also considering Good Wins and Evil Wins tags. These would, obviously, be the ultimate spoilers (though that could be circumvented by implementing some kind of "Show me no tags" box... assuming that's even possible), but I'm not sure most of the readers here are looking for properly suspenseful plots, as opposed to immediate gratification. Then again, most writers here exclusively favor one or the other anyways - read any two or three Centurion yarns, and you pretty much know how the rest're gonna go.

There's probably more stuff I should be remembering to mention, but I've been up almost eighteen hours so I'm gonna sign off for now...

(And I don't think any of us need to worry about user-created tags just yet... MH is having a hell of a time trying to give me access to the tag system on the blog, and I'm supposed to a mod...)
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Abductorenmadrid
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Disciple wrote:
6 years ago
I'm glad you two mentioned 'darkness', because I developed a plan to tag for that... didn't put it in the initial post mainly because I was short on time...

Basically, I envision a Cruelty tag going from 1 to 5, based on how... in-depth the writer gets on the heroine's suffering (this will be in addition to the Element tags on whether the heroine dies, etc.). It's still massively simplifying an inherently subjective topic, but five degrees instead of the current Dungeon/non-Dungeon binary should be at least a slight improvement. And of course, if an author disagrees with the Cruelty rating on one of his works he can always petition me or MH to change it.
Cruelty - ok - I can work with that but you may want to outline a grading and let writers self certify their work instead of you or MH doing that. Are you seriously going to rate all incoming stories yourself? Don't get me wrong, I'd love an impartial reviewer look over my stuff - heck if you are going to go that far give it a score, but it could become a lot of work, that's all.

Disciple wrote:
6 years ago
(I'm actually not too hung-up on consensual/non-consensual sex tags so far, because as far as I can tell the main dichotomy on this board is between Hot, Minimally Painful Mind-Control Sex and Brutal No-Frills Forced Sex, which ought to be covered by the Cruelty tag. Actual consensual stuff is rare as a silver dollar.)


Oh I dunno - I have a few dollars in mine :p


Disciple wrote:
6 years ago
Relatedly, I'm also considering Good Wins and Evil Wins tags. These would, obviously, be the ultimate spoilers (though that could be circumvented by implementing some kind of "Show me no tags" box... assuming that's even possible), but I'm not sure most of the readers here are looking for properly suspenseful plots, as opposed to immediate gratification. Then again, most writers here exclusively favor one or the other anyways - read any two or three Centurion yarns, and you pretty much know how the rest're gonna go.


Hmmm, not so sure on the good / evil win tag. I think I would opt out of assigning those to my stories. Heck, I've got a main story line on the go where it's intentionally unclear if it was a good or evil win ... I wouldn't want to give that away for the world. At any rate, I agree with your assessment that readers go in more for immediate gratification than suspenseful plots. Just by comparison of reactions to stories alone it is obvious what "sells more" and you will no doubt need to bias tagging needs in that general direction.

AEM
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Void
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Hah, it's a fair point about the sexual content in stories. I agree completely, but thought I would at least play devil's (angel's?) advocate. Generally, if it's a SHIP story with sexual content, it would go without saying it's going to be a little noncon. I guess the differences there would be between fantasy/fetish scenes, and harsher, more violent scenes - but all of that plays pretty well into the cruelty grading thing.

Speaking of which, that could be a pretty decent way of roughly signalling the tone/darker content that people could be opening up. I agree with AEM that it would be difficult to implement, with varying stories being difficult to slot into one place or another, and you say yourself it's inherently subjective. Maybe, rather than 5, you want like 3 grades, just to give a more general vibe of where a story is at and to make it easier to apply? I dunno... it's so ethereal and nebulous... maybe just the raw elements would be enough to give people a feel for what they'd be opening up, without trying to classify how 'dark' or 'cruel' the story actually is? If heroine loss were a tag in itself, that would also offset the need to clarify how traumatic the story will be - but as AEM suggests, that also comes with problems in the spoiler department. Not only that but a lot of my favourite stories contain a very definite evil wins, but the story continues until you get a kind of good win. That aside, where the heroine ends the story as being dead or a sex slave or pregnant and retiring from duty or crying for mercy - yeah, a quick 'evil wins' tag covers that and helps people find stories with those outcomes. Beyond that, I would avoid going any further and let the elements speak for the rest - I don't think a 'good wins' tag would be all that helpful, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

Assuming there is a reasonable system of tagging elements, I'm not sure there is a need for flagging 'darkness'. If tags like 'evils wins' and 'heroine death' were around, I'm not certain anything more would be necessary - and it would save you a mountain of work. Could someone make the argument in favour of doing more, or that readers need more protection? In the context that the clip releases hang out together, displaying fantasy rape, prolonged heroine beat down, heroine death and so on, I'm going to suggest that they don't.

I don't suppose any readers want to chime in on this about what they'd like?
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DrDominator9
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Boy, I can't help thinking that you've opened a pretty big can of worms here, Disciple. As well as potentially laying out a lot of work for yourself. I'm not completely sure of my own position on a lot of these questions but here's my gut reaction to some of the problems presented. I'm going to use my own works as examples for my questions....

1) Regarding the hero/heroine win-loss tag: I'm definitely not a fan. I feel it's a huge spoiler for both the writer and the reader if the reader knows what's going to happen in the end. Half the fun of writing to me is providing the reader the thrill of the unsureness of whether the heroine will live through the perils facing her.

1a)In some of my stories (Wonder Woman and the Superheroine Serial Killer especially) some of the heroines die and some don't. How on earth would that be cleanly tagged?

2) Regarding the violence tag: Since I'm one of the darkest writers on this site in terms of heroine peril, I can certainly understand the need for this tag and can agree it's necessary. I also tend to think it's a bit of a spoiler as well to know in advance what will befall the heroine and as a reader I prefer to come upon such incidents of peril as I read it but if you have a tag system, there's no getting around the spoiler aspect. I can live with it.

2a) To me, numerically rating the violence might not be best done by the writer him/herself. What I may feel as a writer is no big deal, Supergirl leaks a bit of urine through fear, is a complete turnoff to some readers. It's one quick paragraph in a great story and people will see the tag "Pee" and skip the whole story. Sort of forces the writer to self edit a bit. The same could be said for blood scenes. Could be a little, could be completely gory. Hard to tell from a one word tag. I don't have an answer to this, just posing the question.

2b) Originally, the idea of the dungeon was based on the fact that there was a level of brutality that wasn't suitable for the average reader. Also, in the dungeon as opposed to the regular story section, the heroine generally was forced into unwanted sex and lost. These days, even if there's somewhat forced sex and the heroine wins, it's now slotted into the regular section. (Centurian's stories in the last couple of years have trended in that direction. Don't get me wrong, I love them more than ever. I'm just saying that the line has become blurred, hence your attempt at a new system.


3) Ratings vs Warnings Idea: I'm not sure this is a solution but I'm considering whether or not a writer should issue warnings within a story. For example, in my Supergirl and the Military Exercise story, the first five chapters are fairly easygoing and "fun" ones with little sexual peril but a lot of implied threat to follow. As I start Ch. 7, the peril is about to get very nasty. Because it's a pretty clean break/cliffhanger, I was considering putting an interim warning at the start of the chapter that readers who don't enjoy dramatically-rendered somewhat brutal forced sex should stop reading here (with the possiblility of picking the story up at a set chapter later on.) That works for me but may not for other people, either readers or writers. Thoughts, people?

Gotta run, but will probably pose more conundrums later.
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Void
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Hmm, Dr D makes some good points. I'm a little torn on the spoiler issue... I'd love to hear thoughts from readers on that one. My own leaning is that I prefer to avoid spoilers where possible, but I understand the appeal of giving readers better ways of finding the kind of content they'd like.

Maybe we're being too precise with the tags, and more broad tags would work better. That this is a SHIP forum already means that for most readers a lot of elements are already implied. Beyond that, tagging graphic violence, sexual content and characters might just be all you need to appropriately signpost stories. If people really want it, and make a decent case for it, you could still tag 'dark' or whatever for stories where you want to convey that the heroine will have a rough time, with death, torture and emotional trauma falling into that rough zone. The funny thing is I wouldn't even list heroine defeat as necessarily qualifying as 'dark', given how many light-hearted yarns there are where wonder woman becomes a working girl for pimp daddy, or whatever. I do kind of think the whole 'dark' issue is a red herring - more down to tone than content. Certainly, the less tags you use, that can be used more widely, make the task that much more doable.

The more exact tagging could still be wheeled out for shorter tales where literally the whole story is that one scene where poison ivy hypnotises wonder woman into group sex, before feeding her into a hungry plant - and then brainwashing, group sex, evil wins, heroine death as tags help the people looking for a quick read containing their interest. But for the larger stories, with many different kinds of scenes, they are better served by more raw, vague tags. Bleh, maybe this would just muddy the water further - but these are the cases where I think the more precise tags would benefit the reader and writer.
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Disciple
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Well, I've gotten my sleep (and then some)... good commentary, all...

I guess I'll step back on the "Good/Evil Wins" tags... I suppose they're not really that necessary in the grand scheme of things, and let's face it, all the Evil Wins stories (except the ones starring original heroines, I guess) run on negative continuity anyways. Batgirl might be getting sliced and diced in this one but as soon as someone else wants to use her she's back in tip-top shape.

On the general subject of spoilers... Archive Of Our Own, which mostly does user-created tags, does have an "Author Chose Not To Warn" option for authors who genuinely want to preserve the suspense, or are just too damn lazy to tag. We could do something similar for this site - something like "Author Requested No Tags" as a combination spoiler-guard and here-there-be-dragons warning sign (though even then, it'll largely apply to tone/content tags; I don't think anyone ought to have a problem with character or length tags).

(Side-note: I have zero problem with in-story warnings/disclaimers and encourage authors to use them whenever they feel like it. Probably save me some effort down the line.)

And yes, reading through and tagging all the stories on this forum so far is a gargantuan task, but we're not getting any big influx of new ones and I'm mostly doing it in segments anyways. Right now I'm mostly focused on stuff from early writers like SGWriter and sign4deaf, who turn out fairly short, fluffy reads. For longer/darker/more recent stuff I'll probably be enlisting help from my fellow Forumgoers, if not the original authors.

When I wrote last night's post, I almost included an example for each number on the Cruelty scale, but backed out at the last minute because... well, I don't quite remember why. So let's try it again...

1. Heroine Transformations. Barely even token fights before the corruption/hot lesbian sex starts, and all the corrupted heroines seem perfectly happy with their new lives (there are stories even lighter and fluffier than this, like Tales of Supergirl: Faking It, but I figure HT is a decent benchmark).
2. The Misadventures of O-Girl: Guess Who Is Coming for Dinner?. Much longer scenes devoted to tormenting and torturing the heroine (and all leading up to cannibalism, to boot!), but written so campily, with such ridiculous gimmicks, that it's nigh-impossible to be distressed by.
3. Wonder Woman: Wonder Maid. Decidedly grittier, with genuinely bone-crunching fights and a definite, non-campy pleasure in the heroine's pain, but ultimately ends on a genuinely pleasurable note for the heroine.
4. Batgirl - Dare Damsel Demo. To be honest, I could probably stick all of BG1969's works here - they're incredibly rough in terms of both physical and mental torment, but there's just a hint of playfulness beneath it all that restrains me from granting (most of) them a...
5. Fox Hunt. Y'all can read this one for yourself if you're curious, but suffice it to say any story with "the heroine is a complete, aware, horrified prisoner in her own body" as a selling point is probably getting an automatic 5.

(As a final note: I should probably make it clear that for the time being, all this talk of tags is mostly for the Blog, which I'm slowly porting stories over to at the rate of a few a day. I'm open to leaving the stories here on the forum completely alone, as a courtesy for those who want to go into their stories 100% cold.)
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batgirl1969
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Ouch....am I that hardcore?? Lol
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Void
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I'm on board with the opt in or out thing to resolve issues for those wanting to avoid spoilers. I also agree that general tags about characters or length wouldn't be a problem and could be applied to all. I might also add 'author' into that, and I would also be okay with any general tag that implied action or scenes of a sexual nature.

Authors could even offer tags at the start of their story which they're comfortable with being used, and that could be taken. Getting people to play along with the right use of tags would still be really hard/tedious, but it would be a happy middle ground of sorts.

The cruelty grading thing is still tough. I think I can see the logic of the system in those examples, placing the onus more on the discomfort or distress of the heroine... But I still think it will be a slippery thing to apply widely, especially in stories which treat a heroine awfully for one chapter but amazingly for the other six, or whatever. Also, even the example of a 1 on the cruelty scale still cuts to 'corrupted into lesbian sex slaves' where perhaps you can still go tamer on towards chaste tales devoid of sex or overt peril, where the good girl only has to contend with quicksand or trying to escape a locked sauna or some other fairly mild danger.

I'm torn, but part of me wonders if it's even worth rating levels of distress within a story. I can see the appeal, more for those that want help to find especially dark stories, but for the most part it seems like a quality people can find for themselves and either like or dislike as they read. A bit like if we were trying to rate the comedy in a story or 'realism' or combat. Sure, there are degrees to these things that people will like more or less, but I don't know if that many people would benefit from an upfront score before they read and find out for themselves. I am on the fence, though, and could pretty easily be convinced otherwise.

Come on, readers. Weigh in!
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