Darkalley_Muse

This is less about content in some story or on some web site, this is that timeless phenomenon of people wanting to force their morals, which they probably don't actually follow themselves, on others simply as a way of excersizing power and control over another. Censorship isn't about protecting teens from evil pornographers, it's about conditioning people to obey, can't stop the unwashed masses from thinking for themselves if they can read whatever they want on the Internet, just ask Kim Jong-Un.
It starts with banning adult themed content and before you know it they're burning The Cat In The Hat because that darn cat is obviously a criminal element we don't want out poor innocent children exposed to! 
Ok, I’ll get off my soapbox again, sorry for the rant but censorship is a touchy subject, I've dealt with it before from parents and school board idiots, did you know I had a mother object to us reading Winnie The Pooh to the kids one year? Evidently talking animals are an affront to God, personally I doubt SHE cares  

Very well said.
As much as I dislike the Celebrity subdomain here (and I’ve never been shy about saying so or why), I will concede that it does belong here, under the very appropriate real-person fiction limits we have. I’m not and never want to be the arbiter of what is permissible from a creative standpoint. 

If arbitrarily deciding that created content is worthless becomes a thing, regardless of the consumers of that content and their more informed opinion, then I demand all cultish celebrity television be forced to stop broadcasting immediately.
The point is, regardless of personal preference, all content is worth something. We are all different, we all have differing tastes, and there should be a place for everyone to play, whether their tastes run towards extremes, slash, celebrity or anything else under the sun. As long as no one is harmed, then there can be no logical argument for censorship. I agree with your view that this would lead to a decrease in creativity, and that would be a very sad thing IMO too.
 

The trouble with censorship, is, once you’ve started, it’s not just the authors who are punished that concern me, but those who start self-censoring, or decide to not write because of it.    Self-censoring, or electing “not-to” is worse aspect of these laws, IMO, as that’s material that’s permanently lost because it’s never created.  (Of course, those doing the censoring will argue that’s the point of censoring).

Well, I live in the same country that imprisoned Oscar Wilde for the crime of being gay, calling it “gross indecency” at whose sentencing the judge said:
Also the same country that convicted the brilliant (and gay) mathematician Alan Turing for “indecency” (why this seems to be a pattern!), making him submit to a “cure” (oh, no, wait… it’s getting worse – cure actually means chemical castration). From the court record, word for word:
To this day, there are still men living in Britain who were convicted under the same law – for being gay.
So… can I imagine being forced to defend the writing I produce in a court of law, in this country in which I live? Yes, I can… all too easily. They’ll probably come out with some new “obscene publication” law.
Although, apart from all the disturbing and horrific BDSM I write (which I would defend, even if it ended in prison time), the idea of an actual court starting down the path of the tl;dr “Why slash?” thing is a little bit hillarious.

Hmm… many outlaws will we have when they make writing/reading without a license illegal?   Fahrenheit 451 anyone?

It doesn’t include the written word… yet. Though the kind of people who think these things up will have that in their sights, I’m sure.
The age verification they propose is not satisfied by a “Proceed” question either. It has to be done via credit card or something similar. But then again, he makes the point they have no clue how the internet works. There’s no way to police it for content hosted outside the UK, which has no obligation to conform to any act passed by our parliament, and therefore makes the entire thing ridiculous. As he says, it’s the smaller UK content providers who are going to be hurt by this. Those who produce pornography that fits in a niche, that probably isn’t created exclusively by men, for men, and isn’t necessarily hetero or vanilla. Sad.
I doubt this has anything to do with what children see or not on the internet: there are plenty of parental control things out there, and if that fails, supervision of online time would work. I’ve always thought that letting kids loose on the internet is a bit like leaving them on a street corner. But anyway, I think that’s just a convenient facade to justify a war on pornography (especially certain kinds of pornography). Yet again, I find myself wondering what the hell people have against it. They don’t have to watch, it’s easy to avoid. I’m always tempted to think that some of us are just more adult than others. *sighs*  

What the hell is going on in the UK?  It’s all going tits up there.

Not going to reproduce the article here, but I will provide a link. Wow… I hope this does not come to pass :/
The most chilling parts:
https://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2016/10/19/they-are-coming-for-the-internet-new-porn-and-copyright-laws-could-criminalise-millions/
Thoughts, anyone? Anyone else who comes here from the UK?

I’ve heard agents can be incredibly rude unless you’re a “name.” 
I’ve also heard that increasingly, authors are managing to get published without an agent, and can also publicize their books, and go on blog tours, and reach out to readers all without that pesky agent, and the hand in the pocket. Just sayin’…

Ahem. *Gets on soap box*

What the fuck? I mean seriously what the fuck? How the shit can an agent reject a query letter with material within three hours of receiving it and then have the audacity to say “I’d give you feed back but it’d be overwhelming” in your form letter with links that have nothing at all to do with the material sent. The shit? Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me? As someone who is college educated you can’t analyze dick in three hours to come up with “overwhelming” anything—assuming you read it the instant I sent the fucking thing. Why don’t they just say the truth, “I glanced at it and don’t feel like reading it sorry.” I’d rather have that than some flat out blatant impossible lie. I’m fine with the rejection, I’m not fine with the glaringly obvious bullshit response. That is all. *Huffs and climbs off soap box*

TL:DR

What the fuck form letters.

Witches and Warlocks, I enjoyed last year’s AFF's Tales from the Shoutbox 2015, so lets do it again this year!  
Same guidelines, one shot (50k max), Halloween element/theme, original fiction, and tag your content).  We’ll start posting the weekend of October 22nd/23rd.  Please reply to this post so we know who’s interested (include title/summary, if known.)
Story link: http://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600108385
Reviews: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/64141-2016-aff-tales-from-the-chatbox-reviews/
Participants:
Desiderius Price – Title: Sweater.  Summary: Ifor and a girl with a sweater during Halloween. BronxWench – Title: Pumpkin Spice Summary: There’s nothing like autumn in New York City, unless you happen to be sitting in a coffee shop and the Otherworld is ringing the dinner bell. GeorgeGlass – Title: Polled.  Summary: A call from a political pollster takes an eerie turn. Tahn – Title: Trick or Treat?  Summary: Just your average family on an average Halloween night. Nothing suspicious here, nothing at all. angledust – Title/Summary TBD magusfang – Title: Little Red Riding Hood.  Summary:  Halloween might not be the best night to visit Grandma.    

October 2, 2016
Firstly, I'd like to welcome all the new users we're seeing daily! Glad to have you here! Please do familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines. This IS a moderated archive. The news posts are always posted to the forum as well, and one does need to register to talk with staff about the news post. Click the forum link!
Software Upgrade
Thank you to all of you for your patience through the process. We all appreciate it!
The front end has a few more things to have done. Currently, manta2g is developing a new menu which will be mobile friendly/accessible. After that, she'll be working on selectable skins. Of course, the other bells and whistles you've all asked for as well, such as one click add to rec reading, currently reading, and etc. These are all on her to-do for that.
PHP has been upgraded to version 5.6.x. ALL the software is compliant, up to version 7 of PHP.
The forum has been updated to the latest version. The bug tracker is now here.
Site Outage of September 15
BIG thank you to the techs at Nexcess, particularly Ryan and Chris! They found the intruder who attempted to DDoS us, and blocked them. Thing is, when the service provider does the blocking, you can bet they have many more tools than I do, to make it STICK.
One thing this did, was uncovered where we needed to tighten security in the code even further. That has been done as well. Manta2g took care of that the same day.
I do apologize for not getting it fixed sooner than 8 hours after all this started, but I was at work through most of it, with no computer access.
Ad Blockers
Our banners are embedded in the site skin. They do not pop up or under. As we use banners to pay the bulk of the site expenses, please consider whitelisting the site in your ad blocking software. We’d greatly appreciate it!  The art is great!
The Comics chapter table
Restoration of the corrupted data is finished.
Unlimited subcategory levels
With this ability FINALLY in place, I’m starting to implement it. Where you see this, such as in the books subdomain, where I’ve already moved Anita Blake and Twilight back to their parent categories (where they should be, after all), an empty category will display the latest listing. Be sure to click the menu at the left to get to the story listings for the categories. Non posting categories are, by their nature, EMPTY.
Oddball characters in place of punctuation
This happened as a direct result of there being entirely too many character sets within each table. As I’ve said before, I stopped counting after I hit 12 or so that I found. I found many more after that. What happened, is that when I ran the conversion to utf8, where it was not a normal characters set which the query series expected, it converted the text instead to ANSI (Windows-1252). This is important, to know what it converted to, so you can do the temporary fix while I go through each and every individual chapter throughout the archive.
In your browser, set the text encoding to Windows-1252. This option should be in any browser’s “tools” setting. Except for Edge. I can’t find it in Edge. Urrgh.
Once I have finished the edits to finalize the character set conversion for the affected chapters, this is something you’ll no longer need to do. I will let you know progress on where this is finalized.
Reviewing
We’ve made some big changes to the review process. The biggest one is removing the REQUIREMENT of inputting an email address to make an anonymous review. Now, you simply leave the review. Just remember to add your pen name where it’s asked for, so that the author knows who it is!
While I’m on the subject of reviews, I’d just like to remind readers that the authors get paid nothing for what they do. I’m not saying leave a review to fluff ‘em. What I AM saying is that at least acknowledge you read what they wrote. Maybe it’s an old fashioned thing because I’m an older gal, but I feel if I’m going to take the time to READ something, I’ll take the extra minute or so it takes to acknowledge I read the chapter (or in some instances one shot). When I have more time to be more verbose, I am. BUT, even when I don’t HAVE a lot of time, I still at least say that “hey, I read it, and thank you for the update” or something along those lines.
To the authors, a reminder that you can set or unset whether or not you receive anonymous reviews in the first place. Not all authors want anonymous reviews, which is why the option is left TO the author. The author is also able to set or unset whether or not to receive an email when a review is left.
Story Tags
One of the other things we do, as we go through each chapter, is to go through the story properties and remove the non-searchable characters from the tags. With the search made to where you can search with two or more characters, instead of four or more; this made it so you can search the tag field itself now. In order for it to work properly, this means that the ‘/’, ‘&’, ‘-’ and other characters like that that are not searchable have to be removed from the tags themselves. i.e. M/M becomes MM, M/F become MF, etc.
Dribs, Drabs and Doggy Tales
This is the forum where they all are listed. This is the current one. These are open ended, so if one set of words doesn't work for your muse, look at others!
Funding Status
As always, we appreciate and thank everyone who can donate. It's certainly not required of the users, but every little bit helps! I'm in the process of setting aside an emergency fund, equal to 3 times the monthly expenses. That will be noted on the donation page as well.
Deletion notification
For Accounts
When deleting an account because the user is underage, a plagiarist, or whatever else would be a reason to delete one entirely, we do NOT send a notification.
For Stories
When deleting stories, this is done for non compliance with the ToS. Stories are HIDDEN long before they are deleted. The user is told there is an issue, and given 7 days to comply before the story is hidden. Upon hiding, the story is left for 30 or more days (it ends up being more when I have a heavy work load IRL) before it is deleted. If the issue is CORRECTED, the story is restored to public view.
Disposable email
Disposable emails are not checked, and we don’t allow registration with them. Upon finding an account registered with a disposable email address, it is deleted.
Email address visibility
By default, the email address is hidden when you register. It will only display if you put it in the bio area of your profile.
Tech Bits
Archive Cleanup
Now, because of the new tools that I (and other staff who do this with me) have at our disposal, this should proceed at a much faster pace. For example, I fixed a 52 chapter story with errors from the old crash in 4 ½ hours last week. That same story, fixing it the way I had to before, would’ve taken me roughly 40 hours to get the exact same results. The new tools make it so I cut out several steps in the process, as I no longer have to do this all directly in the database itself. It also means that the people who help me with clean up, can help me with this part as well, not just finding the issues and giving them to me, which is what we did before.
Something which I do want to stress with you all, is that I completely agree with what was said during the restoral after the big crash in 2005. It’s really not the responsibility of the users to fix all this. It’s the SITE’S responsibility. This is why I don’t insist that people fix it themselves. Does it help to have users do this to? Sure it does! But, I don’t expect it, as it’s the responsibility of the site.
Tech support, directions given
Just to reiterate, when I email out step by DIRECTIONS on how to do something, that is exactly what they are. Not suggestions, but directions. If followed as stepped out, it works very well. This means that the user must follow them in the order the steps are given.
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Please remember that the authors you read do like to hear from you! Leave them a review or two, and let them know how they're doing!
DemonGoddess061

15 September 2016
With much help from Nexcess, things are now resolved.  Apparently, someone was attempting either a DDoS or a hack, neither of which was ultimately successful.  Nexcess will be monitoring for unusual activity, and manta2g is adding further security layers to the code.
I'm 90% complete with data restore in the comics subdomain.
For stories where the chapters didn't quite convert right (it's a long and involved process as to why, so I'll not bore you), you'll see black diamonds with question marks in them instead of punctuation.  To temporarily fix this, set the encoding in your browser to Windows-1252.  This will make the punctuation display.  We are manually going through and fixing all these chapters, so that the conversion to utf8 is finally completed.

After a week and a half, I think, of disappearance I have finally finished what I set off to do. Danse Macabre is finally available to the masses! Hurrah *shoots off streamers* It's free on Smashwords and .99 cents on Amazon and Nook (I couldn't figure out how to make it free) until the 24th and it's 12.99 in paperback... because amazon -.-.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013VVSIDK
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/danse-macabre-christina-quinn/1122520020
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/568827
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1514116650/ <-- print

Guest Ben, first you must sign up for the Archives, which you will find here: http://www.adult-fanfiction.org/html-index.php
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Hrm, given the story I'm writing, I keep seeing myself dying by the horrible fate of the blood eagle. That said, it's more likely that after not paying my rent for several months I'll be discovered mummified at my computer. Hopefully having attained the exact opposite of enlightenment. I like the world and universe, can't see why people are so hellbent on ascending to higher planes of it.

If you wanna censor things 'cause of what crazy people might do, pretty much nothing can ever be published...