Project Relaunch - Still Chugging Along

[RapeU]

(New) Accomplished Writers and Popular Stories:

• Amy's Treatment by @skuttrusk
• Venus' Touch by @Claire
• Späte Genugtuung by @Claire

Reading Recommendation:

• Mutiny In Léopoldville by @HistBuff

New Authors:

• @ExploreHer
  • Sigma Iota Mu Fraternity
  • What I think about in Las Vegas
  • Anonymous Messenger
• @Colin Piper
  • On Persuasion Street

Project Relaunch - Still Chugging Along


Project Relaunch has been going on for almost seven weeks now. It took a lot of time and effort from our team to inject life into the forum. In some areas this has worked tremendously well. But in others we have sadly been left alone by most of the community. We want to once more extend our hand to all of you and ask you for your help. The small success you do currently see on the forum is largely dependent on a few team members carrying a lot on their shoulders. If you don't want the forum to drift back into the state it has been in for the last 4 to 6 months of 2025, then this is the moment to start helping us!

Our last challenge to get another Popular Story above a rating of 50 was sadly ignored by the majority of the Community with @AdmiralPiet and @naturefreak being notable exceptions. While plenty of people read and enjoyed stories in the Popular Stories board only a few of them rated what they read or commented.

On the positive side, we saw first instances of users commenting and rating stories to get access to our so far only Community Favorite. With that we have proof of concept that the forum structure works as intended. We've known for months now that the Popular Stories board works indeed well as an incentive for people to register. Now we only need to get more stories into both of these boards and we have a good chance to get a thriving community.

We also see the changes we made to the contests working. We had 13 people sign up for the RiaF-Tournament and now we have 11 people competing in the Kristen's Board Memorial Contest - a contest for consensual stories no less! Compared to the last 3 contests in 2025 with 5, 6 and 5 competitors, we are doing much better now.

So while there are signs of success, please make no mistake: This is not self-sustaining, this is the result of essentially a few people working hard behind the scenes. There is a limit for how long we can keep this up and you rating and commenting on stories you like is the best way you can show your support for our authors and us. The more you help the forum with your engagement, the more time we can spend on further improving the forum. Thank you!


Where we are now


Contests

The Ravished in a Flash tournament came to a conclusion with @RapeU winning the final match against @Lucius which was an absolute nailbiter. If you want to know more about how things went down, you can find more details here:

Contest Season Update

Right now the Kristen's Board Memorial contest is in the middle of its voting phase with roughly 6 days left to go. I don't think we ever had a contest this close before. Currently, three stories share second place with 4 votes each and the first place story has 5 votes. Use the remaining time to help decide the winner of the contest!

Writing for our first community contests has begun. Community contests are build around three prompts decided by the Pillars of the Community. For our first contest, the prompts are: Park, Cleanse and Milkshake.

After the Kristensboard contest, the next regular season contest is the Spin-Off contest. Choose a character from a story of another author with a rating of 15 or higher and write a short story featuring a character from the original story as the protagonist! You have until March 15 to write your story.


Popular Stories and Accomplished Writers

We got a new Accomplished Writer this time and three new Popular Stories! @skuttrusk joins the illustrious club of our Accomplished Writers. Congratulations again!

• Amy's Treatment by @skuttrusk
• Venus' Touch by @Claire
• Späte Genugtuung by @Claire

Amy's treatment is the story of a female psychologist with an out of control rape kink going rogue on one of her patients.

Späte Genugtuung is our second German story in the Popular Stories board. As an English reader you might enjoy the translation of Late Satisfaction which can also be found in the Popular Stories board.

And Venus' Touch is an experiment exploring ambiguous consent that according to the attached poll has the community firmly divided on whether the depicted sex was consensual or not. What do you think?


New Authors:

We got two new authors on the board since our last update! Please check out their stories and show them some love.

To @ExploreHer and @Colin Piper: Welcome to the forum!

• @ExploreHer
  • Sigma Iota Mu Fraternity
  • What I think about in Las Vegas
  • Anonymous Messenger
• @Colin Piper
  • On Persuasion Street

A reading recommendation

Our reading recommendation for this announcement is:

• Mutiny In Léopoldville by @HistBuff

King Leopold II's ghost has a lot to marvel at in this story -- after all, His Majesty was notoriously lecherous! Sexy females in peril, well-hung African soldiers running riot and even one of Leopold's successors are swept into the welter of violence, sex ... and violent sex!

The story currently has a rating of 26 and is @HistBuff's highest rated story on the forum for a reason!


Future Updates

We will soon start a topic for updating the tags on the forum. Also, we want to add topic descriptions to the board. These would then give authors a way to advertise their stories a little more and look something like this:



However, the descriptions will likely be limited to 160 characters and not be as long as in the screenshot.


See you in March

Our next update will come in early March. Then we will take a look back at what Project Relaunch did and didn't do. Hopefully, we have good news for all of you then! As always, help us make this forum succeed by engaging with our authors' stories. Thank you!

[Lucius]

There's a certain vox clamantis in deserto vibe with those announcements that I like to break.

Yep, the forum needs active users, and every comment and/or rating matters.

[AdmiralPiet]

I don't know how much truth is in this, but I feel we are getting more authors, and more comments by names that are not the "usual suspects"

As @Shocker said in a previous update more or less: I have seen the problems, and I try to be active here, but at my own pace and time.

[Lucius]

I don't know how much truth is in this, but I feel we are getting more authors, and more comments by names that are not the "usual suspects"

True, there's no cause for alarmism. There's one for guarded optimism.

As @Shocker said in a previous update more or less: I have seen the problems, and I try to be active here, but at my own pace and time.

Amen.

[Claire]

@AdmiralPiet We definitely see much more activity around the contests and yes, I'm cautiously optimistic that the changes we made have also made the forum a bit more attractive again for authors. I think also that the forum overall feels less dead.

What I just want to caution against is to misinterpret that increase in activity as the result of a "natural development" when it is in fact carefully engineered. Paradoxically, we tend to get criticized the most for what we do on the forum when the forum is doing the best. And ironically, it is doing relatively well precisely because of the things we get criticized for. And that is sadly a dangerous dynamic that does quite a bit of harm because it tends to counteract the positive momentum instead of prolonging and nurturing it. And I think that is what @Lucius is getting at. When you don't hear any positive voices that acknowledge the positive changes our efforts have made to the forum since January 4 and instead only get dismissed as "dramatic", or a simple announcement summarizing what happened over the last two weeks and saying "We are trying hard to turn this around, but we can't do it alone. Please help us!" gets distorted into "You are threatening the community", then this is... not helpful. It does not make you want to do this.

---

On an unrelated note: We just deactivated rating comments. It looks like they were increasingly used as substitutes for normal replies in topics and we think not all users were aware that authors can't reply to those rating comments. But we can always reactivate them in case deactivating them doesn't help. We will also include that in the next proper announcement.

[ExploreHer]

@Claire I think disabling comment rates is a good idea. As a newcomer I found that part rather confusing.

[Claire]

@ExploreHer We think so too. Thanks for the feedback that you found it confusing. That is actually very helpful. A lot of the extensions the forum uses were written by devs who wanted to add a cool feature to phpBB and they are great. But basically nothing here was coded by anyone you would consider an expert on designing user interfaces. So we're always trying to improve on that but we aren't experts either. So feedback like that is really helpful and very welcome!

We've also updated the little pop-up window for the ratings so that it now includes some information on how ratings work.