Forum Closure

[RapeU]

This is something I didn't want to ever have to do, but the time has come to admit my limitations and my mistakes. The forum is going to close in November. Here's the main reasons why:

1) While writing is a tool I use to help with my mental health, it is not the only tool I use. At this point keeping the forum alive for the sake of my mental health will end up causing more problems than relieving them. I'm also going to teach at a much larger school than last year, and I need to spend more of my time focusing on my students. I also need to spend more of my time focusing on my family.

2) @Claire has expressed her desire to leave the forum on multiple occasions. Each time I convinced her to stay. Last time she agreed if she could be a regular member, but she still ended up doing A LOT of stuff behind the scenes. When she expressed her desire to leave again, I decided it wasn't worth the effort to try and keep things going at the cost of both of our mental well being. I relied too heavily on @Claire's behind the scenes work, and that was a mistake. It shouldn't be just a small number of people doing that kind of work. The whole team needs to be involved, and I'm not someone who can see what needs to be done. I work better when I'm more of a second in command type person.

So, we're back to where things were roughly one year ago. The forum is going to shut down unless someone who actively wants to work on the vision of the board @Claire and I share step up. It has to be someone that wants the positive feedback culture, otherwise @Claire will remove all her contributions, not just her stories, and the forum won't be the same. I'd rather have the site close with dignity than to be kept alive on life support in a worse state than it was a year ago.

Now, if someone does take over that shares the vision of feedback culture, @Claire will probably still leave. @Vela Nanashi will likely leave as well due to significant medical issues. Whoever takes over would essentially need to assemble their own team from the ground up. Otherwise, in early November, it will be the Academy's final days. The exact date will be announced once I make the next payment in August.

[aprilt909]

:(:(

[Blue]

Too bad. But I understand the reasons.

[Claire]

@RapeU I know how thankless the job is you have been doing. So let me say thank you for everything you've done! It was a valiant effort. But no single person can compensate for the lack of engagement of an entire community. So be proud of what you did!

I hope you don't stop writing and use other platforms to keep posting your stories. As I said before: You don't need this place to keep writing. There are other places where you will at least get more views and likes.

I know how hard it is to let go when you are the person in charge. You keep thinking that maybe things will get better with the next 100 users or after the next contest or whatever. But you did the right thing. You made the right choice.

[Shocker]

Well, that’s not what anybody wanted to hear, but thanks for being upfront about it. Also thank you for all the tine and effort you have been putting into this @Claire , @RapeU and @Vela Nanashi. As well as the rest of the support and admin staff.

If anybody wants to copy my stories, they better do it now, as it’s unlikely that I will follow the exodus to AO3, I hardly ever can find anything I want to read there.

[Claire]

@Labaal So, my stories already are on AO3. Beyond that, we created a collection on AO3 for RA stories that we used to draw new users here:

https://archiveofourown.org/collections ... ries/works

These advertisement efforts have become the most important source of external traffic for the forum since the beginning of the year.

So far, the collection has a total of 50 stories in it. Maybe some more will be added to it, but some stories by authors who haven't been here in months will most definitely disappear when the forum goes offline. That is sadly inevitable. :/

[Naor2a]

[Grimnir]

This is not welcome news but time - and lack of time will be the mistress/master of us all. Hopefully a solution will appear. Whatever happens the administrative team deserves credit for their work and efforts. Thank you all.

[Claire]

@Labaal I will keep posting new parts as I keep editing them. I still have to edit chapters 7 to 11.

AO3 works similar to our forum here in the sense that whenever you post an update to a story, the story gets a boost in hits. The biggest mistake you can make for a long running story on AO3 is to post multiple chapters at once. When I first started posting on AO3 in May or June last year, I posted my stories far too quickly. Recently, I've settled on a one update per week rhythm, but even that cuts the high attention phase for a recently posted story somewhat short. If you're curious here is some data for the last update of Record Chaser on AO3:

I finished chapter 6 on AO3 on June 13 2026, so a little over a month ago. The story had 14295 and 94 kudos at the time. Here is how the hits develop over the course of the first week:

13.06.26 14295
14.06.26 14699 (+404)
15.06.26 14869 (+170)
16.06.26 15000 (+131)
17.06.26 15090 (+90)
18.06.26 15170 (+80)
19.06.26 15243 (+73)
20.06.26 15310 (+67)
21.06.26 15378 (+68)
...
27.06.26 15671

You can see here how the story made a lot of hits on its first day (404), a total of 1015 hits in its first week, and another 361 hits in its second week. The story reached 2000 hits since the last update yesterday, so after 31 days. By now, the story should have lost all momentum a story gets from a recent update. It seems that the story has settled at ~30 hits per day after one month. So hits are incredibly frontloaded immediately after an update.

The reason why I'm not just posting all chapters there at once is simply that I would cut the number of hits (and kudos) the story receives drastically because I would cut the initial hype phase afer a recent update artificially short. Now, if there was an active community there that left kudos and comments on the story regularly, I would probably post faster. But the sad reality is that every new RC chapter on AO3 gets probably a couple dozen people to follow the link here to read more of it, but only maybe 1 in 5 or 1 in 6 of the people who like the story enough to come here leave kudos for the story on AO3.

Long story short: For original works, the feedback culture on AO3 is even worse than here. If as an author you want to maximize the outreach of your story on AO3 in terms of hits and kudos, you need to spread out the time window between two updates. Based on my experience, I think one update per month for a story is probably close to the ideal rhythm.

So yes, I will keep posting RC on AO3, but it will take a few more months until the story is complete over there. If fans eagerly awaiting the next chapter would leave comments and kudos on the story, I would probably do it faster.

[Vela Nanashi]

I would also like to tell people there is a way to save a whole story topic, you need to click the menu on top or bottom of the topic view that has a wrench, then select print all, that gets you a cleaned up version of a story thread that you can save and edit in a text editor later or read in one. Now if you want the decorated version you will have to go to each page and save that as html with assets so that is a bit less convenient.