Sunday, February 24, 2008

Adult Fiction Decision
Thanks all for your feedback. I read every single comment and have been reading fan fiction on other sites to get some sense of it.

This is a VERY difficult issue for me personally. I have nothing against the adult fan fiction community and I know that offering adult content would increase our audience.

Sarah/Dagger said that the most important thing is not to backtrack. I agree with this. Allowing content and then taking it away or censoring it would be too upsetting to members.

We're probably going to launch and not publish any works above a PG-13 rating...by keeping it strict at the start, we'll avoid the backpedaling problem. We can always pedal forward, though, depending on how things go. We'll also solve the problem of ratings, since the difference between PG-13 and NC-17 is much wider than the difference between R and NC-17.

I know that this move will alienate some fiction writers and readers and communities. The best I can say is that we never had a fan fiction site before, so you're not losing anything, you can still keep your adult stuff on other sites and if you want to promote your general purpose stuff, we'll be happy to host your works. It's the same with our community of adult artists who upload their normal content to us

My hope is that, since 80-90% of all fan fiction on fanfiction.net is appropriate for teenagers, that we'll still build a healthy and thriving community.

In many ways theO is an extension of myself, so not all decisions I make are purely related to building traffic or making everyone happy. A lot of the decisions I make are related to what I feel comfortable with personally, you know?

I hope you understand and that this doesn't deter you from submitting your general audience work to us, I just don't want to lead you guys on and would rather get this out of the way now..
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