Project Relaunch: 2 Week Update

[RapeU]

Our community challenge for you for the next two weeks:

Check out the stories in the Popular Stories board and help us get a story above a rating of 60, making it the first story finding a new home the Community Favorites board!


New Accomplished Writers and Popular Stories:

• @Darinost with his story It Takes a Village
• @Lucius with his story One Morning in Potaissa
• @Claire with her story Late Satisfaction

New authors

• @jasmine18 (Matt finally loses his virginity)
• @VeraSmithy (Home and The Library)

A reading recommendation

• Milk Run by @Shocker

Project Relaunch: How things are going after two weeks


Two weeks ago, we created a big announcement for Project Relaunch, our attempt to breathe new life into our community. Today, we want to talk about what happened since then and what's still left to do. But before we do, please remember: the most important thing behind all of this is that you start to comment on and rate the stories you read. Your engagement with the stories you read and the support you show our authors decides whether a forum like this has a future or not, more than any measure we take or any offer we make. It is up to you! Your actions on this board matter!


What happened so far


Contests

Over the last two weeks, a lot of things happened. First, we set up a new contest schedule six months in advance. The first contest of the current season started a week ago with the flash fiction tournament Ravished in a Flash. In a few hours from now, voting for the first round will end and we will know who advances to the quarterfinal. 13 competitors signed up to deliver 12 wonderful stories for the theme of the first round: Cherry Picking. On January 17, the contest gave us the first day one the forum with 100 or more posts. Thank you very much again to our competitors who signed up on short notice and made that possible!

I would also like to thank those who left feedback comments on the contest stories and rated them, namely: @AdmiralPiet, @Verbal13, @DayDreamNights, @Writers_Bloque, @VeraSmithy, @joey, @Shocker, @Vile8r, @Blue, @Lucius, @SoftGameHunter.

We also created individual contest threads for each of the five upcoming contests from February to June. If you want to write a story today already that you wish to enter for May's Party Hard! contest, please do so. As a matter fact, it's a great way to make sure your story gets a second wave of attention. If your story sinks to the depths of page 4 of the Public Stories board until then, it will nevertheless be pinned to the top of the board for the competition. So use those contests to give your story a second wind and a second chance at becoming a Popular Story! Just be aware, each story can compete in only one contest.

Beside the season contests, February will also see our first contest based on prompts suggested by our Pillars of the Community. We created the new Dean's List board that is only accessible by Pillars, Accomplished Writers and of course mods and admins. In there, we will ask for prompt suggestions once a month. We will also use that board whenever we need feedback from our active users on features of the forum!


Popular Stories and Accomplished Writers

Since the initial announcement for Project Relaunch, we got two new Accomplished Writers and three new Popular Stories. Our new Accomplished Writers are:

• @Darinost with his story It Takes a Village
• @Lucius with his story One Morning in Potaissa

and we got the new Popular Story

• Late Satisfaction by @Claire

Congratulations again to our new Accomplished Writers! Please check out their new Popular Stories if you haven't done so yet. They are all worth it!

Sadly, we still have no story that made it to Community Favorite status yet. But, with Record Chaser we have a first story making it to a rating of 50+. And there are 3 more stories at this point with a rating of 40 or higher. In two weeks from now, I hope that I will be able to tell all of you about our first Community Favorite story.

This is our challenge to you guys:

Check out the stories in the Popular Stories board and help us get a story above a rating of 60, making it the first story finding a new home in the Community Favorites board!

Many of the Popular Stories are quick reads that despite thousands of views over the last few months have barely gotten any new comments and ratings. Take 15 minutes, read a short story in the Popular Stories board, and if you liked it at least a little, give it a positive rating and an encouraging comment!


A reading recommendation

We would also like to use these announcement threads to highlight active authors and their stories every now and then. With the current Ravished in a Flash contest going, we would like to recommend to you:

Milk Run by @Shocker

Milk Run was written for the semi-final of the first Ravished in a Flash for the theme "That day dad went to get milk". @Shocker won his match with the story back then, and over time, the story has accumulated a rating of 26. It's the highest rated piece of flash fiction on the board from one of our most prolific authors. So take the 4 minutes to read the story. I find it highly unlikely that you will consider it a waste of time!


New authors

Since the last announcement, two new authors published their first stories here. We would like to give them a shoutout here. If you haven't done so yet, check out the works of our freshly hatched authors:

• @jasmine18 (Matt finally loses his virginity)
• @VeraSmithy (Home and The Library)

New topics

As promised, we have also created a bunch of new discussion and game topics for all of you to participate in. Join us in writing a story together, tell us what you think about AI's potential as a smut author or share your favorite genre of literature with us. Team Down could really use some support in Tug of War. We have created a new topic every day and we would love to see you chime in for whatever interests you. Whether that's movies, gaming, music or sport, feel free to create a topic yourself.


A new board: The Dean's List

Let's talk a bit more about the aforementioned Dean's List board that's only accessible to Pillars. Not only will this be the place where the active members of the Community get to decide the prompts for the new community contests. There, we will also ask you for your feedback on certain features of the forum. If you want to have a say in what tags, emojis, or post reactions the forum uses in the future, then become a Pillar by gaining 50 reputation points. We might ask you for your opinion on the contest schedule or about what to do to breathe some life into the roleplay section of the forum. And naturally, we are much more interested in the thoughts of those who have demonstrated their interest in the community by gaining 50 reputation points themselves. So become a Pillar yourself and help shape the forum.


New Emojis

As you might have noticed, we swapped the standard phpBB forum emojis that looked very 2005 for the well known twemojis and added a bunch of new ones to the list. There will most certainly be more updates to the emoji list in the future. And suggestions from our Pillars are still very welcome. So if you're missing one you like, let us know here:

Emoji Update



What happens next


Contests

First of all, Ravished in a Flash will continue. There are 3 rounds left to go! The quarterfinal will feature stories with the theme All By Myself. Then there is the Kristen's Board Memorial Contest looming on the horizon. You have until February 15 to hand in your consensual short story! February will also see the start of the first community contest based on user prompts. We will create a thread for that very soon in the new Dean's List board, most likely tomorrow.


New topics

We will keep creating new topics each day until the end of February. There will also be several topics asking for your input on features like tags and post reactions in the new Dean's List board.


See you in two weeks!

That's it from us for today. As I said in the beginning: the forum lives and dies with the support you show our authors. So please, contribute to our challenge. In two weeks from now, let's have our first Community Favorite story to celebrate!

[HistBuff]

There are plenty of amazing stories that have 3,000+ views, such as "Brotherly Bond" by @Vile8r, and still have a modest rating and not that much feedback. I've seen gems with 4,000+ views with a rating still in the single-digit. Individual rating of chapters is interesting and a great help for a long story since it lets the writer know which elements are best liked. But to get a story to that elusive Community Favorites, you need ratings from at least 20 different readers, and this looks like a very hard thing to achieve.

After nine months here, my overall feeling is that this site has different vibes from RavishU. If I was asked which past site it reminds me of, I'd say it reminds me of RapeCage, since there are striking similarities---pool size of writers and readers, frequency of contests, rules (same rules = no underage, no bestiality, no snuff if I remember correctly). The biggest difference is on RapeCage, members were generally more active, but this was before 2023 when members were more active across all sites where I was present. This shift isn't easy for me, but yeah I view this forum more like a spiritual successor of RapeCage, which was a really awesome rape fantasy forum, so I'm not making a disparaging comment here, far from it. I love the similarities and there are several past RapeCagers who are with us here, some of whom are accomplished writers.

I greatly enjoy writing here and having discussions on the art of writing a good sex fantasy story. Thank you everyone who makes this site possible and keep it running.

[Claire]

@HistBuff I want to support a lot of what you said in your post and disagree with one thing.

My own experience with AO3 and Literotica is similar to yours. Any kind of reader feedback is extremely rare but people over there are much more likely to rate a story. My story Venus' Touch got 45 ratings with a rating average of 4.42 on Literotica out of 4429 views. And Sweet, Sweet Mess has even 90 ratings out of 7146 views. But it also has only a rating average of 3.72 because me putting that story into the Romance category was apparently a huge mistake that some people didn't like very much.

On AO3, my stories Record Chaser, The Infinite Rape, and An Unfortunate Misstep have 51, 51, and 45 kudos each with the latter two being short stories that can't be pushed to the top of the list on AO3 by adding more stories. In contrast, The Infinite Rape has gained almost 2,000 views here since it became popular, it has even 3 new people voting in the attached poll that they came reading the story, but they didn't rate the story. That is a clear sign that something is off with the user interface for ratings and that's something we want to fix.

So overall, I can mirror your experience with Literotica and AO3. Much more likely to rate, but even less likely to comment on anything they read.

There is one thing I disagree with though:

The biggest difference is on RapeCage, members were generally more active, but this was before 2023 when members were more active across all sites where I was present.

When you look at RapeCage using the the wayback machine you will see that that is not true, at least not when it comes to engagement with stories.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200209094 ... board=13.0

This shows the first page of the biggest story board there in February 2020. There are 17 stories on the first page. 4 have 0 replies. Only one story has 10 replies. 13 out of 17 stories have 5 replies or less. The story at the top of the board had its last reply on February 7 2020 while the 17th story at the bottom of the page had its last reply January 15 2020. That's a three week last reply gap for the 1st and 17th story on the list. For our public stories board, that gap is currenly 2 days.

For another interesting comparison, look at this board:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200209231 ... board=53.0

This is the Rape Cage Contest Winners board described as "The best of the best. These are all the stories RC members have voted as Story Contest Winning Entries" on the forum. So it's comparable to our Popular Stories board.

There is no storywith more than 35 replies on the first page. The January/February 2019 contest winner Nectar of the Gods has 0 replies and 976 views 13 months after it was posted. Our @Shocker apparently won both the May/June 2019 contest and the then most recent November/December 2019 contest with his stories Vows and Measuring Up. He got 1 reply and 409 views for Vows and 8 replies and 968 on Measuring Up, the latter being the attention he got after 7 months. Compare that to his story Fugitives here: 8959 views, it was at ~1600 when the story won Gang Rape Galore and became Popular back in June. The story has 52 replies from 25 different people. Of course, that makes it an extreme outlier here, but we also looked at the "best of the best" RapeCage had to offer, so it's a fair comparison.

We tend to look at these older communities with rose-colored glasses maybe because it was the first community we joined or maybe because we had two or three people there that we were really close with and the intensity and quality of the contact with this hand full of people makes us mistake the connection we had to them with a generally more active community. I thought his myself recently while thinking of the October to January period I spent on RavishU. Irenova and I breathing new life into RavshU's German board or me writing like crazy and posting something like 7 new stories over the course of a month? I have fond memories of that. And then I stumbled over a piece of data I collected for RavishU: I listed all the new stories published on RavishU from October 15 2024 to January 15 2025 in the three most active story boards: Gang Rape, One on One, German. The result? 15 new stories in One on One, 16 in Gang Rape, 22 in German - so a total of 53 new stories in 3 months. If you only look at the English ones, then you get 31 with 6 of those coming from me. And yes, there were a few more stories in the other boards, but not that many.

I had to realize that my memory of this brief period when I wrote a ton and got to know Irenova, Vela, JustJess, Shocker, LaLia and a few others was objectively not more active then what the forum is here. The experience was just more intense for me personally. The truth is: Over the course of three months, you easily get more new stories here than you did over the course of the last three months on RavishU. And those final three months on RavishU were described to me by several people as remarkably active.

After looking at activity data so much, I've come to the following conclusion: This community has, most likely, never had a contest as active and as vibrant as the Gang Rape Galore contest we had in June 2025. And the first round of the Ravished in a Flash tournament that just ended, that might have been the second most active contest event our community has ever had. I can not say that with absolute certainty but after everything I've seen from RavishU, RapeCage and TBV strongly points in that direction. Maybe RapeDesires or Savage Violation had some crazy contest event, I don't know.

So, I can only appeal to everyone who read to this point: Take 20 minutes to read at least 4 of the stories in the upcoming quarterfinal of the tournament. It will take 15 minutes to read, another minute to rate them. And while you are at it, you will likely realize that you want to read the other four stories as well.

[Lucius]

On January 17, the contest gave us the first day one the forum with 100 or more posts. Thank you very much again to our competitors who signed up on short notice and made that possible!

Engagement is irreplaceable, and I hope to see days with 100+ posts in the near future.

To everyone reading this -- do post and rate the stories. This forum shouldn't wither from inactivity, and I've been happy to see new users commenting.

There are plenty of amazing stories that have 3,000+ views, such as "Brotherly Bond" by @Vile8r, and still have a modest rating and not that much feedback. I've seen gems with 4,000+ views with a rating still in the single-digit.

Too many stories linger in obscurity, the Forgotten and Underrated thread deserves greater attention.

I greatly enjoy writing here and having discussions on the art of writing a good sex fantasy story. Thank you everyone who makes this site possible and keep it running.

Thank you for sharing your stories and thoughts!

[Shocker]

I’m very pleased to have seen ratings from new users for my stories, some even including comments with the rating. To those users thank you very much. If you made those friendly comments in the forum I would even have been able to respond to them.