What's a tag?

[Melrick]

So, you’ve come across the word ‘tag’ on AFF or other story sites, in situations such as, ‘Always ensure your story includes the appropriate tags’. If your first response is, “What the hell is a tag, and how does it relate to my story?” then this is the FAQ for you!

A ‘tag’, or ‘story code’, will look like these examples: “M/F, M/M, Oral, Anal.” You can find a more complete list of the tags used on AFF here.

If your next response is something like, “Yeah but I wrote a story with a serious plot, and not just mindless sex, so including information like that might give away an important plot point!” I sympathise with you, since it’s a situation that I myself have encountered. There are good reasons for it, though, and not just because it’s AFF policy that you must include all the appropriate tags or risk having your story hidden until you fix it.

You see, everybody has likes and dislikes. If we’re talking non sexual content, some people only read fantasy stories, while others won’t bother with anything other than horror, for example. Sexual content is just the same, perhaps even more rigidly so for many people. A great many will only read stories that have male/male sex, for example, or only female/female sex, and really have no interest whatsoever in reading a story with any other types of sex in it. In fact, they might even be offended by reading about other types of sex. Some people are positively repelled by rape stories, so that’s a tag that people like that will definitely want to see listed before they think about reading it.

If you don’t list your story with the appropriate tags, then, aside from everything else, you risk getting nasty reviews from people that felt tricked into reading your story, or feel angry that they invested time and effort into reading a part of a story they never would have started if they had known what to expect in advance.

So while you might feel that including the tags compromises your story in some way, they are important. Besides, a well written story is still a well written story, and tags will never change that.