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Well, I learned a lot. While this is indeed not the outcome I sought (in several ways), I want to thank the moderators for their swift and educational responses. I appreciate the work you do here. AFF remains one of my favorite sites.

As I recall, the word “snuff” was included in at least two of the story summaries for the stories I removed. Were it not for the larger issue of fan fiction for profit, I’d have merely hidden the other four and asked that the warnings be made clearer if I did not think the current tags were sufficient. After 6 years moderating for AFF, I’ve been sandbagged by more than enough unexpected content to be well able to know when tags need to be added. I read things every week I’d not read by choice, but I do it because I value what AFF stands for in terms of artistic freedom. And yes, we try very hard to make sure trigger issues are labelled, but the answer isn’t always simple. For example, I do not consider the Shota or Loli tags an acceptable substitute for Minor1 or Minor2. They are not clearly defined by age ranges, and are anime-specific. Similarly, Noncon is never a substitute for Rape as far as I’m concerned, and I will not accept Noncon in place of the Rape tag. We actually don’t have much snuff fiction here, and while we all might have varying ideas of what constitutes Contro content, we have a clear label for BDSM as well as for SandM. I’m not sure how specific you want Torture to be defined, but I’d strongly suggest having to add tags for every possible act of torture ever conceived of by the human race would be exhaustive to create and not terribly useful. Despite a personal fondness for the Wicker Man, I can’t imagine Ritual Immolation would be a frequent tag choice. Similarly, I would not recommend free-for-all tagging such as I’ve seen elsewhere. It would completely negate any ability to search by tags, a feature we’ve recently been able to expand, and one which has been requested for quite some time. But in this particular instance, we were asked to review newly posted material because of unlabeled content. A larger issue was revealed, which resulted in the stories being removed from the site, and which disappointed other readers. The long and short of it is that we’re not going to please all the people all the time, and in this case, I’m not sure anyone came away happy.

Is anyone really surprised that Trump doesn’t like (or even understand) intelligence? After all, they’ve got nothing in common. It’s like a bad match up on a dating website. This is the guy who probably still thinks he can “turn off” the internet. The guy who’d have more money now if he’d just saved the loan his father gave him, instead of fannying about with it, making as many people miserable as possible. Much as I dislike certain aspects of US Intelligence services, if I was about to be President, I’m still damn sure I’d trust them over Putin. What a complete and utter wazzock… I wonder if he’ll be able to bring himself to trust the intelligence services the first time they say: “Get down!” I must stop watching the lunchtime news.

Looking at it from the readers perspective, a sudden change of tags is kinda like bait and switch, IMO, because if it happens after they’ve already invested hours, and potentially hundreds of Kwords, reading the story, only to suddenly have it change. Outside of a oneshot collection, where each story isn’t really related and hence skippable, it could be rather maddening. A reminder on a particular chapter, sure, but I’d rather not make it the first introduction of a tag. That said, as I’ve got WIPs, I’ve had new ones suddenly decide to invade the story, at which point, a chapter-level warning is a good way to let the regular readers know about it (while also updating the story summary).

Thing is, we’re actually pretty flexible with this. If you cover the main aspects of your story in the open tags, and then add “additional tags at the beginning of the chapter”, you can still keep from acting as your own spoiler. For example, you have a story which is het, set in an alternate universe, and an angst fest. So your main tags would be MF AU Angst. Then, you want to get into something which is a BIG trigger for most readers, such as rape, but it’s ONLY in part of a chapter. You tag in that chapter, at the top. It’s still an acceptable form of tagging, if your readers don’t like this particular content, they can skip the chapter and wait on the next one.

Authors can also add tags of their choosing above and beyond the ones that are mandatory. I added the snuff tag to one of my stories at the beginning of the chapter just because I didn’t want readers to stumble upon it unwittingly but I think a lot of authors aren’t aware that some of the things they write are that (searching for a word here because I hate to use distasteful but that’s the one that springs to mind) to some readers. Or they believe that simply coming to a place like AFF, where most everything is permitted as long as it’s tagged and disclaimed correctly, means the reader knows what they’re getting into. Which is, of course, not true, many people come here to read things that are not just adult in nature but the name sort of implies that everything is, hence the misunderstanding.

If you read our Terms of Service, you will see the following: Further, the very nature of fan fiction involves the use of material whose copyright is not owned by you. In order for that material to be covered under the Fair Use provisions of US copyright law, you cannot make any form of monetary profit from that fan fiction, which includes soliciting donations to a Patreon account. You can read that here: The site can face grave legal consequences if we permit for-profit commissioned fan fiction to be posted here. That affects every member, and while you might have seen one person report this, please understand we investigate every report and base our actions on that investigation. In this case, it had nothing to do with the content. If the stories involved snuff and were clearly labelled, there would be no issue. However, accepting money for work based on a copyright you don’t own is illegal, and is not allowed here. You may note none of the stories removed were original works, and no story was removed unless it contained a link to the Patreon account and a statement that it was a commissioned work.