Transfer of the ownership over the forum to @RapeU is finished. At this point, I neither own the ravishmentacademy.com domain anymore nor is the forum data hosted on my account. This transfer took longer than expected because we tried for a long time to get Abelohost to help us in a way that would have eliminated any downtime for the forum. But ultimately, we ended up doing it ourselves which resulted in roughly 6 hours of downtime for the forum yesterday. That was less than what I expected given that neither of us had ever done anything like this before, but overall it seems to have worked well. The forum should now be running fine. But please let @RapeU know in case you notice that something doesn't work.
The bottom line is: @RapeU is now the sole owner of the forum. And I wish him the best of luck with his attempts to build an active community here.
Autopsy of a Dead Forum
What I got wrong
The beginning:
I also want to use this final announcement of mine to give you a last status report on the forum and to say my goodbye. Now that the forum failed like all its predecessors, I want to use this final opportunity to reflect on where things went wrong, what would need to change, and what mistakes I made. I'm mostly writing this for myself because I invested a lot into this forum, but an autopsy of the corpse of this forum might also be helpful for anyone who wants to give it another try in the future.
Exactly 6 months ago on April 4 2025 I launched the Ravishment Academy with the hope to build a place for the rape fantasy community that would not end up like all the others before it. I made that decision in the wake of RavishU's demise on February 11 2025. @Vela Nanashi and I were trying to breathe some new life into RavishU, I as a moderator, she as an admin. And from the feedback I got and from the data I looked at at the time, we seemed to have some success. We were in the middle of fixing some structural mistakes RavishU made and were in the process of implementing the Popular Stories and Community Favorites boards as you see them here. With the large catalogue of stories RavishU had, the forum would have had plenty of Popular Stories and Community Favorites immediately. And that would have immediately provided strong incentives for more participation. In contrast, here is the fundamental question a new forum with no large backlog of stories would have to answer: Would its initial momentum generate enough Popular Stories and Community Favorites for these incentives to carry the forum to new heights?
My biggest mistake:
Or so I thought. Underlying that question is a premise that turned out to be false. What is that premise? That there would be an initial momentum to begin with. This assumption was my first and biggest mistake. I assumed that with no other forum like this existing anymore, the people expressing their happiness over having a place like this again would be motivated to build something new here. I truly thought that initially people would treat this forum like a delicate seedling that needs to be nurtured because after all the other places they lost they would want to make sure that this one doesn't just die and disappear, too.
So my entire plan revolved around the assumption that there would be an initial hype, not a huge one, but maybe a dozen motivated individuals. And then it would be a war of attrition against fatigue setting in. What would happen first? Would we get this place on the radar, have new people find us and get those to participate, first, because the Community Favorites gave them an incentive to be active, and second, because the active veterans modeled publicly visible what good participation in the community looks like? Or would the initial enthusiasm die before we ever reached the critical mass of Popular Stories and Community Favorites to make the activity on the forum self-sustaining? I did not plan for there never being any enthusiasm for the forum from the get go and I didn't adjust to that reality quick enough.
My plan was to generate that initial hype by inviting veterans of the community who were looking for a new home. I knew that we could not expect people to just find us via Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo. So inviting people for the launch seemed like the logical thing to do. But the truth is, with the exception of @Blue none of these invitations mattered. Nothing would have changed if we hadn't invited the rest. So the forum faced a completely different challenge than what I planned for. I didn't have to make an initial hype last until a critical mass was reached. I needed to generate activity from nothing before the core team carrying the forum burned out. I wasn't prepared for that reality. I believed too much into the apparent enthusiasm of what people said instead of judging their interest by the apathetic behavior they displayed. In that sense, I was naive.
My second biggest mistake:
My second biggest mistake was this: I did not realize how much this community in particular seems to have a problem with using a like button. Over the course of the last few months, I published some of my stories also on Literotica and AO3. And while those places are of course much bigger, the supply of stories is also much larger such that the average views on the average story aren't even that much higher than here. I published Venus' Touch and Sweet, Sweet Mess on Literotica. The feedback culture there is even worse than it is here, but the stories received 44 and 91 ratings respectively up to this point. My story The Infinite Rape got 28 Kudos on AO3 with 4604 views there. 28 ratings here would likely give us our first Community Favorite. But even our highest rated story, Fugitives with a rating of 40 currently - the winner of the most popular story contest ever on the forum - only has 19 people liking it. This story got pushed as a contest participant, as a contest winner, and as the first Popular Story ever. It has increased its view count from ~1600 to now ~6000 since it became a Popular Story. Roughly 360 new users registered since Fugitives became the first Popular Story, but it barely got any attention since then. A little yes, but nothing that would be even remotely proportional to the views it generated since then.
I know from my own stories, but also for some others, that users regularly participate in polls in which they express that they like a story but didn't give it a rating. The comparison to AO3 and Literotica made already clear how uniquely hostile this community is to liking the stories they, well, liked. But you can see that here too without having to look elsewhere. I know that a bunch of people voted for Fugitives in the Gang Rape Galore poll and didn't rate it. And I could observe the same pattern for Dear Diary in the Rashomon contest. I know that more people voted in the The Infinite Rape poll that they came reading the story (11) than people rated the story (9). And I know that at least 2 of the 9 people who rated the story voted with no in the poll. That's at least 4 missing ratings to a currently 23 rated story. So that's most likely another Popular Story that would help the forum. And if people actually rated what they liked, then @HistBuff and @Vile8r would have had Popular Stories a long time ago, too. How do I know that? Because people find this forum via Google basically every day explicitly searching for the names of these two. For reasons I don't understand, it is our community in particular that refuses to rate stories. Even Literotica and AO3 aren't as averse to liking stories as we are here and the feedback culture there is so much worse than even the very low baseline set by this forum.
When I came up with the idea for the Popular Stories and Community Favorites boards, I was aiming for a distribution of stories that looked something like this:
- Public Stories: 90%
- Popular Stories: 8%
- Community Favorites: 2%
So yes, I underestimated how much people would refuse to help the forum by rating what they like. But compared to the first mistake I made, I don't think I could have anticipated this one. The damage this has done to the forum is tremendous though.
If you combine these two mistakes together, they paint a grim picture. If the people here at launch would have enthusiastically engaged with the launch content (15 to 21 stories at the launch weekend) and rated stories like people do on Literotica and AO3, we likely would have had our first Popular Story within the first week. Instead we struggled to get a story above a rating of 10 for the first month or so. If I had anticipated that, I would have done a few things differently. For example, I likely would have made contest winners Community Favorites regardless of their rating. And I would have made clear that this community requires engagement with its core content from day one and would have not waited a month to do that. I wasted crucial time there that the community didn't have.
But more about that in the next section.
Where we are now
So where does the forum stand? I showed this data in previous now deleted announcements before, but here is the up to date data.
Daily posts:
That is the evolution of average daily posts over time. I sketched out the history behind this graph before. The forum starts with 30 to 35 posts per day, carried by @Shocker, @LaLia and me. Because the people invited at launch don't support us, we start to slowly burn out - Lalia and myself at least - and activity begins to decline despite the userbase actually growing quickly. Then I create the one month announcement that makes the stakes clear. And it gives the forum a second wind. After the devastating quarter final of Ravished in a Flash, the semi-final and final are doing much better. The forum peaks in June with the Gang Rape Galore contest. @Lucius and @RapeU become two more activity power houses and at least around the Gang Rape Galore contest some other users also contributed significantly to that post count. After that, it is all going downhill. We see a consistent decline. We went from 35 posts per day at the start to more than 50 at the peak of activity and now after an extended decline seem to have settled at 15.
We managed to create those 35 posts per day at launch with a userbase of less than 20 people and with 15 to 21 stories. Now we have a userbase of nearly 700 people, ~150 of those being online over the course of a week, over 300 stories to read and comment on, but the number of posts per day has crumbled to 15. When I showed this data during the now deleted announcement where I announced that I would no longer run the forum, people tried to tell me that this was just a summer slump. That notion was obviously wrong even back then, but when I showed people that not a single data point hinted at less people being here, many seemed to still cling to that notion. Now it's October. Back when I showed this graph in August we had just dropped below the 30 posts per day level and there is no hint of a post summer recovery in sight. We seem to have settled at 15 posts per day and even if the post count recovers now a bit, it has a steep way ahead of itself to go back to 40 to 50 posts per day or even beyond that (and no, starting a bunch of game threads that quickly increase the post count does not refute the point, it just invalidates the usefulness of the statistic).
Why is this happening? Because the activity level on the forum at its core depends mainly on what behavior the community at large models for new users finding the forum. If new users find a community that has a lot of activity where they see commenting on stories and lively discussions in the Book Club and the Dining Hall as normal, then they are more likely to register and comment themselves. But if they see mostly dead sub boards, most topics having barely any comments, then this is presented to them as normal. Why register on a forum where nothing happens? Why try my hand at writing a story myself and publishing it here if I can see from the get go that I will only be screaming into a void? An active community recruits new active users, an inactive one reproduces inactivity. And that is why that post count of 15 per day is so devastating. It makes participating in the forum for any new user finding the place completely unattractive.
Daily stories/topics:
And that level of inactivity is also reflected in the number of stories being posted here. The forum launched on April 4 and the 100th story was posted on May 27. That's 100 stories in 53 days, or 1.86 stories per day. And that number is of course being inflated by a lot of stories having been posted at launch (15 on day 1 alone). The 200th story was posted on July 1, immediately after the strongest phase of the forum. That took us only 35 days despite the large influx of stories by authors reposting their "old" stories at launch was gone. The story per day count during the peak of the forum was 2.85. And that makes sense. Activity wasn't what I would call strong, but if you look at the number of substantial feedback posts the Gang Rape Galore stories got on average, you can easily see why posting a story here might have seemed attractive at the time. Now we just reached 300 stories on October 1, so after another 92 days, longer than it took for the first 200 combined. That gets us down to only 1.09 stories per day. And that of course is correlated with the dwindling post count. No feedback for authors, hence less reason to post stories.
All of this is of course also reflected in overall topic creation. That number includes obviously more than just stories, but the majority of topics are stories. So here is what topic creation looks like over time.
Topic creation is more volatile than posts because the numbers are just smaller. But the picture is clear. After a lot of topics being created at launch, topic creation seemed to have found a baseline of 3 per day. It then peaked at 5 around the Gang Rape Galore hype, dropped back to 3 after that and then began to decline as the dwindling feedback made posting stories more and more unattractive. We now seem to have reached a new normal at 1.5 topics per day. So you can see here exactly what I warned the community about. Without feedback, authors lose the motivation to post stories here and the community dies.
Daily registrations
But what about daily registrations? Daily registrations is the most fascinating data point we have.
First we see a constant rise in daily registrations as you would suspect as the forum becomes findable on the internet. Then we settled in the 4 to 4.5 registrations per day range. And then you start to see a decline but not nearly as pronounced as for posts and topics and the decline sets in later. Where posts essentially entered a steady decline at the end of June, topics and registrations followed suit around July 20. But registrations never collapsed as much as the other two, never dropping below 3 per day. And I think the reason for that is simple: The Popular Stories. Now this is anecdotal evidence, but I observed that for quite a few newly registered users reading a Popular Story is the first thing they do.
Do you see that small recovery at the end of August? It begins exactly on August 26. What happened that day? Record Chaser became a Popular Story and two more Popular Stories followed since then. I'm not saying that Record Chaser alone had that effect. I'm sure that Fugitives and Lia's German Contest story prevented the collapse in registrations being as huge as it was for the other statistics. The effective thing about Record Chaser being in there is not that it's my story, but that it's a very different beast compared to Fugitives. We need not only more stories in the Popular Stories board, but greater variety.
For a while we had only one English short story in there. Now we got a German story, a very long English story, a medium length first person story and a short second person story. But we would also need a comedy in there, a flash fiction piece, an incest themed story, etc. If we had those 24 Popular Stories I mentioned earlier - a varied catalogue of different themes, languages, lengths and narrator perspectives - I'm sure we would see daily registrations move beyond 5 per day easily. But even in its current state, the Popular Stories board is already doing its job. It prevents the total collapse we have seen in the posts and topics statistics to occur for registrations as well.
So bottom line: Daily registrations are holding up better because the Popular Stories board works as intended. It only suffers from the community's refusal to actually rate the stories they like.
The Day the Forum Died
I had a bad feeling at the time, but I downplayed it coming just from the hype of the successful Gang Rape Galore contest. But in hindsight, I think I can clearly identify the day that the forum died. It was June 26 2025. On June 26 we got our first Popular Story with Fugitives. And I advertised that moment hard. I announced @Shocker as our first Accomplished Writer here. I created a pinned topic in the Authors' Story Collections board that would list all Accomplished Writers and their story collections. I created an announcement thread with an announcement message at the top of the board. I removed the Popular Stories board as a sub board to the Public Stories board and put it front and center on the index page of the forum. An author achieving the Accomplished Writer milestone was always supposed to be a moment of celebration for the community. Whenever an author and their story reached that milestone, the community needed to treat them like they are a king or queen for a day. And then... nothing happened. In a healthy community, those who had not read the story yet, would now go read and rate it, or at least congratulate the author on their achievement even if they personally didn't enjoy that particular story.
But instead of celebrating one of their own, only @Lucius, @Vela Nanashi and myself congratulated Shocker on his achievement. The announcement thread that announced the most important milestone for the forum to date, the launch of the Popular Stories board, sits at 0 replies to this day. We all just came off the high of the Gang Rape Galore contest. The possibility that things could be different here compared to all our predecessor forums was in the air. And the community just shrugged and ignored the moment. The community didn't bother to make this moment special, neither for Shocker personally nor the community at large. At that point, a different community reaction could have set the tone, made it so that every author would want to strive for that Accomplished Writer milestone. If the community had done what I asked them do to at the end of my announcement post:
then the forum would now look very different. This was the pivotal moment. Here we could have built something bigger on top of that hype of the contest, filled the Popular Stories quickly with more stories, maybe pushed Fugitives close to the Community Favorites level. But the indifference to one of the oldest members of the community reaching a major milestone for himself and the community as a whole is a larger problem that this community has that you can see everywhere.Of course, if you don't want to rate a story, then don't. Nobody wants you to lie about liking something you didn't. But if you just forgot when you finished reading or gave a great story only a 1-point rating because you didn't know yet that you can rate a story with up to 3 points, maybe take the time to revisit one of those stories you liked and rate it positively or upgrade your rating. Not only will you make the author of the story smile and encourage them to write more, you will also help us build up our library of Popular Stories that will encourage more people to register and ultimately also more authors to write the stories you would like to read. You are helping the individual author AND the forum as a whole with the simple click of a like button.
Here is a very simple thing you can do: The next time you visit the Public Stories board, don't just look at the most recent stories. Click on the downward facing arrow left of "Rating" and look at the stories sorted by rating. You will then see the highest rated stories at the top of the board, some of which are no longer on the first page using the normal sorting. Give those high rated gems you missed a chance, and who knows, maybe Fugitives won't be the only Popular Story for long!
You can see it in the Student Orientation board. When you scroll through that board, you can see how common introduction threads were for a while. Now they are a rare occurence. Why? Because the community at large doesn't welcome new users. The community desperately needs new people. And any person who registers AND creates a post should be treated like a gift. But the community doesn't care. Imagine every new user who introduces themselves was welcomed by 20 people, asked curious questions, be invited to participate. But the community shrugs the presence of new people off as if we had an excess of active people. The only time when people welcome a new user in significant numbers is when they recognized a familiar face. And these are exactly the people that don't need that extra attention. You could connect with them via PM. Welcoming the fresh faces should be the top priority.
You can see the same thing when a user became a moderator or won a contest. The community at large doesn't come together and celebrates these moments. And that is a major problem. Welcoming new people, encouraging new authors to keep writing and to comment on other authors' stories, celebrating a contest winner, that is what would make feel people welcome, make authors feel like their achievements are special. It's normal community behavior that is completely absent in our bubble. And that is something that no admin and no moderator can create on their own. I can make sure that contests are seen, that winners are pronounced properly, that the poll for the contest is visible, that Popular Stories aren't pushed out of sight as other stories would take their place if they had stayed in the Public Stories board instead. I can provide the infrastructure and demonstrate the behavior we would need to turn this into an active community. But I can not make these things feel special on my own.
The community decided not to rate stories they liked, not to thank new moderators, not to welcome new members introducing themselves, not to encourage new authors to keep writing by commenting on their stories, not to congratulate contest winners, not to celebrate authors becoming Accomplished Writers. All of these things are simple. And if maybe a dozen, maybe 20 people did this regularly, then this community would grow quickly. But it's too late now.
So this is it. On June 26 the community collectively decided to treat @Shocker's monumental achievement as nothing special. That was the moment that doomed this community to end up like all its predecessors.
Why I have no hope for the future of the forum
So why can't we do all of this now? Well, first of all I tried. I encouraged and asked the community for help over and over again. At some point I have to accept that people rather prefer an inactive zombie forum over an actual community that engages with the content. But the problem goes deeper than that.
Once a community is in the zombie state that it is in now, it is very difficult to get out of that again. As I said before, the community as it is now models the behavior for those that join the community now. And the message this community sends to any new user is this:
"Don't post stories, don't comment, don't like, don't discuss. If you do, you will only scream into a void, so don't bother. Nobody cares that you registered here, nobody cares that you posted a story, nobody cares that you liked and commented on something, nobody cares that you won a contest, nobody cares that you became an Accomplished Writer."
To get out of that, you would need an enthusiastic group of people who deliberately counteract that narrative by being extremely active. For the first few months of the forum we had that. My team and me desperately tried to model the opposite behavior. But without support from the rest of the community we couldn't uphold the necessary level of activity on our own. Now the inactivity on the forum has become a curse that reinforces itself. And the new team doesn't seem to have the will to counteract the negative tendencies that lock the forum into this zombie state. So if the community wasn't active before, I doubt that will suddenly change when not even the admin and moderator team is willing to model anything else with their own behavior.
If you take a sober look at the community, you barely see a new face here after 6 months. @Lucius, @LaLia and maybe @chloevee are the only community members who were very active for a while that I can think of spontaneously that were not veterans of any of our predecessor communities. When you look at the names of the authors on the first page of the Public Stories board, then you see that the stories posted are dominated by people who have been staples of the community for years at this point, people who are so used to inhabiting forums in a zombie state that they might not even realize anymore that this level of inactivity is not normal for a healthy community. Our community is sadly not attractive for new people to join (and new doesn't necessarily mean young, just to be clear). Changing that is a herculean task that would require even more effort than what my team and I were willing or able to put into this place over the course of the first three months of the forum. And since there seems to be nobody willing to do that, I doubt very much that the average number of comments on a story will look fundamentally different two years from now than what it is today. And if that stays the same, then the number of new stories posted each day will also not fundamentally change.
So to summarize: I overestimated the interest that people invited at launch would show. I wasn't prepared for the reality of a community that was completely apathetic from day one. I also didn't anticipate the refusal of the community to use a like button. Both hurt the forum tremendously. Ultimately, the forum ended up in the same zombie state as all our predecessor forums and I wasn't able to prevent that from happening. The pivotal moment that decided the outcome was June 26 when the community refused to treat the launch of the Popular Stories board as a special moment. There, we could have gone in a different direction, instead it went downhill from there. Now that activity basically non-existant, this inactivity reproduces itself because it communicates to new users that this is normal, acceptable behavior which in turn makes posting stories here completely unattractive for any new author. Now that this behavior has been normalized, breaking out of this cycle would require even more effort than trying to prevent falling into it in the first place. With the effort being required even larger and the new team running the forum being less inclined to put in that effort, the forum will most likely stay in the state it is in now until it is closed for good.
It pains me to see that this is the sad reality of the Ravishment Academy.
Goodbye
With that I take my leave. I sincerely wish @RapeU and his team the best of luck. I hope that I'm wrong with my assessment of the future of the forum. If you reading this truly care about the continued existence of the forum, please show @RapeU more support and gratitude for what he's doing than the community has shown my team.
Personally, I will stay around as a lurker until I finished Record Chaser. Maybe I will even attempt to translate Späte Genugtuung. I don't like to leave things unfinished. And whenever someone comments (respectfully) on one of my stories, I will always reply. If you want to talk to me personally, send me a PM. But I will no longer involve myself in the community beyond that, at least not until this community has fundamentally changed. Also, I will from now on no longer look up stories for authors in the RavishU backup. (@Vile8r I saw your PM from a couple of days ago and will still look up your story, don't worry.)
I want to thank @Vela Nanashi for helping me build this forum. Without her, the entire infrastructure of the forum couldn't exist in the way I wanted it to be. I also want to thank my former moderators @LaLia, @Lucius and @chloevee.
That's it from me. All the best to those who remain here.
