Status of the German section!?

[LaLia]

I think there are now many things we can be truly proud of here, and which, in my opinion, are working better than on RavishU. Above all, this includes the quality of the stories.

However, what I still miss, and what isn't really taking off (and, in my opinion, isn't being pushed hard enough), is the German section. There are hardly any German stories anymore, and of course, fewer people commenting on them in general. This is a shame and sometimes frustrating, and it will eventually be a point where I might leave the board. RavishU was definitely better in this regard.

The question is, how do we attract more German-speaking users? Or am I alone in my opinion, and do others simply not care whether we have more German stories or not?

[Vela Nanashi]

I hope those who can write and read german will be drawn here and post more, sadly I don't have that skill myself, but I hope the german part will take off too and do well. I am just not sure how to help that, I probably can't. Unless there is something technical I can eventually get to for that.

[Claire]

I agree with you. The forum's problem is of course the same as ever. If readers don't reply to and rate the stories they read, then the forum is unattractive for authors. And while that is a general problem, the problem is even more pronounced for the German stories and offers the English speaking community a glimpse of what's to come if that doesn't change.

On a personal level, I have given up to a degree. That higher degree of activity on RavishU's German section you experienced back then was in large part driven by Irenova and me in November and December of 2024, and then you joined us in January of 2025.

If I look at my own stories, then you can see that Die Unendliche Vergewaltigung hasn't seen any engagement from our German readers since launch day, its only reply being from you. Despite being the most popular story RavishU's German board had to offer in its final three months and being stuck in last place here, it now has close to 2200 views and at least 7 people voting in the poll that they came reading that story. 2 of the 4 ratings on that story came from readers of the English translation.

It's similar for my Story Späte Genugtuung. It sits at a rating of 23 and has over 4300 views at this point which makes it the most viewed German story on the board. It got one new comment from @AdmiralPiet in November, then one in October from @JTCK who already knew the story from RavishU, and that's it. Basically, the story had 1 new commentator since May despite accumulating thousands of views since then.

Meanwhile, the English translations of the exact same stories have made it both to Popular status. The Infinite Rape has at least 8 different people leaving a comment and ratings from 15 different people. That might not sound like a lot, but that is very rare here. On October 30, I shared the following in an internal post with the moderators and admins:

let's look at what an author wanting to publish a story can expect here.



This image shows you the distribution of commentators on stories. It counts how many people leave a comment on a story (excluding the author themselves). I collected this data yesterday. We had 328 stories in the Public Stories and Popular Stories board (I excluded the stories in Rule Violations). On average, these stories received feedback from 3.8 different people. Don't confuse this with 3.8 comments. If the same person comments on the same story, this is counted as one commentator. So on average, 3.8 different people comment on a story. But let's look at this in more detail.

The image shows you that about 11% of stories receive 0 feedback. The most likely case is that a story receives feedback from exactly 1 person with a probability of 16.5%. The second and third most likely numbers of commentators are 3 and 2 with probabilities of 13.1% and 12.8%. Overall, there is a 53.35% chance that you will get feedback from 3 people or less. About 90% (89.63% to be exact) get engagement from 7 people or less. And if you are hoping to hear what 10 or more people think about your story, you have a chance of 2.7% of that happening. Hearing from 20 people or more happened exactly once.

Think about what that means. It is 4 times as likely that you get no feedback at all than that you get 10 or more people writing a comment. And those numbers are slightly inflated because some of those commentators are actually mods or admins just creating a post to remind the author of some rule they broke.

I'm sure that those stats look worse for non-contest stories than for contest stories, and worse for German than for English stories. And that is why you see so few German authors publishing anything anymore, including me. That is the German readers on the forum sabotaging themselves. That is also partially driven by the German authors who, similar to their English counterparts, post their own stories but don't comment on the stories of others.

I myself have adopted the following stance: If an author is new and posts here for the first time, they will usually get the benefit of the doubt from me and receive feedback from me. But when it becomes clear that they are not leaving feedback for others as well, I ignore their stories.

So in a way, the decrease in activity revolving around German stories that you see comes from two factors: You are being absent for months and I refuse to give authors the attention they are not willing to give others. And with that, probably 50% to 75% of engagement with German stories is just gone. That is the sad reality behind this.

[AdmiralPiet]

@Claire
I could think of a number of short or flash fiction pieces to write in german.
But at the moment I don't see myself doing something longer.

Maybe it would be an interesting experiment to translate my english stories back to german?

How many german writing authors are we even, in relation to the others?

[Claire]

@AdmiralPiet Translating a story can be a fun experience. I only tried it from German to English yet but go for it! It gave me more of an appreciation for the nunances of both languages.

Regarding how many German authors we have... that depends on how you count that. Would you count someone who hasn't been here for 6 months but has posted a story at some point? If you mean German authors who recently posted a German story and leave for feedback for others... then I would say @LaLia and @Blue are the only ones.

[AdmiralPiet]

@AdmiralPiet Translating a story can be a fun experience. I only tried it from German to English yet but go for it! It gave me more of an appreciation for the nunances of both languages.

Ok. Not me who just translated 2/3 of Cherry Picking into german (roughly though)

Await my coming by the first light of the third day!
(Or rather monday, if all works out)

[Blue]

I'm one of the few authors who publish German stories here on the board, and I've already suggested trying a German-language section.

Regarding the response to German-language stories: I did post a few stories in both, German and English, as an experiment. The number of readers was roughly the same—as was the number of comments. Namely, hardly any, apart from the commenters already known here. So that can't be the only reason.

Nevertheless, I would welcome it if we tried a German section. Perhaps then one or two more German authors would join.

And even if it only served to give two or three German authors the opportunity to make their stories more visible. As it is now, they always get pushed to the bottom very quickly. And hardly any readers use the search function.

In this respect, I completely agree with @LaLia

[Lucius]

Forty-six German stories is not too bad, that's slightly above 10% of the total number. I'd like to see more of them because there's value in diversity here -- more writers and readers from the population of ravishment fans fluent in German only.

That's in theory. In practice the best chance German stories have here lies in the success of the Project Relaunch, which is far from assured. The rising tide should lift the German boat as well.

[AdmiralPiet]

Ok. Not me who just translated 2/3 of Cherry Picking into german (roughly though)

Await my coming by the first light of the third day!
(Or rather monday, if all works out)

@Claire
In the end it was the first hour of the fourth day.
I translated "Hostile work environment"

[Blue]

I have a question: I'd like to post my stories, which I submitted in English to previous competitions, in German as well.

For the Flash Fiction competition, the stories couldn't be longer than 1,000 words. For the regular forum, however, you have to write at least 1,000 words.

Does that mean I have to add a few more words to the Flash Fiction story before posting it?