Subject: **** STORYCODES FAQ v.2.3 **** From: drbob@datashopper.dk (Dr. Bob - Denmark) Date: 1996/11/24 Organization: DataShopper Danmark, Copenhagen, Denmark Frequently Asked Questions about ABBREVIATED STORY CODES IN A.S.S. v 2.3 - Nov. 1996 The codes are split in 3 sections, each in alphabetical order: 1: Frequently used 2: Less frequently used 3: Overlaps, that I'd suggest were NOT used. Use one in sections 1 or 2 instead. All applicable codes could (and should) be used to describe the story, regardless of the level of their inclusion. However, the gender codes should come first, (males before females) and following those, it would be a politeness if the code for the essential theme in the story appears as one of the first. Please try to use this standard for Subject headers: Archive;'Title #Part No.'{Author}( codes )[Part No.!Total No.] Note the extra spaces between the codes and the brackets. And note that all the brackets SHOULD be included. If a part is unknown, don't fill it in, but leave the brackets. For instance: 'My first time'{}()[1!1] or TG ARCHIVES;'The thing #1'{}( MFF tg )[1!3] or TNA;'Sarah'{Joe schmoe}( MF mc )[1!1] Please NEVER use these characters in the Subject header: Colon, Question-mark, Slash, Backslash, Greater-than and Less-than. (For detailed explanation of the Subject-header format, see the appendix at the end of this text. ****** The CODES ****** 1: Gender designations: M An adult male (18 yo or older) B Boy - Teenager (13-17 yo) b Boy - Pre-teen (age 12 or less) F An adult female (18 yo or older) G Girl - Teenager (13-17 yo) g Girl - Pre-teen (age 12 or less) MF Heterosexual adult sex BG Young heterosexual sex FF Homosexual female sex MM Homosexual adult male sex GG Homosexual, young female sex BB Homosexual, young male sex MG or mG Permutations of this are an adult having sex w/ a minor _-solo masturbation by M, B, b, F, G or g. _^_ Dominance of first sex over second, i.e. F^M for Female dominating male. ~ signifying "with", i.e. M~dog for male with dog. 1: Frequently used: 1st First time anal Anal sex bd Bondage and Discipline best Bestiality. Sex with an animal (see also zoo) con Consensual Sexual Activity exhib Exhibitionism group* More than 2 people having sex hist Has a historical theme inc Incest interr Interracial mc Mind control nc Non-consensual Sexual Activity oral* Oral sex orgy* Large-group sex. When group isn't good enough. ped Pedophilia. Participants age 12 or below. should always be used with gender-codes b or g. rape Brutal nc, and victim should NOT enjoy it! real Supposedly true reluc Reluctant (First no, no, but later yes,yess,yesss!!) rom Romantic sm Sado-Masochism (inflicting pain) spank Spanking, Mild S/M Spoof Spin-off/parody of comic/movie/TV-show etc. teen1 Young teen-agers 13-15 yo. should always be used with gender codes B or G. teen2 Young teen-agers 16-19 yo. should always be used with gender codes B or G. tg Transgendered (Transsexual) voy Voyeurism ws Water Sports (aka golden showers, that is: people who like getting pissed on (as opposed to pissed off 8-). zoo Zoophilia. Caring and consensual relationships between humans and animals. (See also best) * should only be used if it's a major theme in the story since it is standard in most stories 2: Less frequently used: bear Hairy male. Usually gay. (Grizzly Adams) BC (with interr) Black Couple BF (with interr) Black Female bi Bisexuality of one or more characters. bibl Bible. Has a religious theme BM (with interr) Black Male breast* Abnormally large breasts cbt Cock & ball torture cd Cross-dressing (Transvestite) cheat married people having sex outside of the marriage, cheating on their partner, as distinct from swinging. coll College-theme copr Coprophilia (Fun with feces) dream Sexual activity during a dream, day or sleep. enem Enemas fat Involves fat people feet Foot or shoe fetish-story fist Fisting furry Athropomorphized animals giant Abnormally large (tall) persons goth Gothic (dark) setting hair Hair fetish hirs Hirsuit - natural unshaved genitals and/or armpits hs High School-theme _humil Humiliation of sex "_" (only if dominance-codes _^_ does not seem applicable!) humo Humor. Funny inf Infantilism job Place-of-work theme lac Lactation. Playing with milk. nec Necrophilia. Sex with a dead person no sex Off topic pett Heavy petting preg Pregnant. Sex with or making someone. rough Consensual, not always sm. sad For "just" inflicting pain. Can be used with 'nc' or 'cons'. safe Safe sex scat Scatology: Involving feces. ScFi Science fiction setting size Overdeveloped body-parts slow Where the sex doesn't occur in the first part of multipart story snuff Killing tort Torture. Severe non-consentual spilling of blood-'n-guts toys Generally, adult toys twink gay male: Young and hairless-type (Tom Cruise) va Verbal abuse. (Abusive and "dirty" language) veg Vegetable. Sex with food. violent Violent, not always sm WM (with interr) White Male WF (with interr) White Female WC (with interr) White Couple 3: Overlaps - Alternative suggested: bond Bondage bd disc discipline spank ds domination/submission _^_ gay Male homosexual MM hyp Hypnotism mc les Lesbian FF M+F or MF+ Several having sex at once group _dom Domination by sex "_" _^_ mast Masturbation _-solo sod sodomy (anal) anal tv Transvestitism cd yng Characters are young b or g virg Story involves virgins 1st APPENDIX: WHY A STORYCODES FAQ? Prompted by a couple of requests in the autumn of '95 as to the meaning of some of the more esoteric abbreviations, there were a couple of postings trying to explain them, including some by myself. This led (surprisingly for me) to a lively e-mail discussion with a number of people, all concluding that it would be nice if "somebody would help out" with a FAQ, detailing the what and why of story-codes. I took the plunge myself and decided to try it. Not because I consider myself more qualified than so many others, (I'd never done anything like that before), but because no-one else seemed to want to, and I think there were good reasons on all sides to use codes more than is frequently done. Constructive criticism and suggestions to improvements received gratefully. Flames will be cheerfully (and totally) ignored. Story Codes - Why bother? The story-codes are a micro-description of the content of a story. They're written by the poster on the Subject-line as a courtesy to the readers of the newsgroup and are very helpful in deciding whether or not to read a particular story. But they also help to ensure that all the people who are expected to have an interest in reading that particular story, become aware of it and its contents. After all, if the writer/poster wasn't interested in reaching as many of his potential readers as possible, then why post it in a.s.s. in the first place? Unlabeled stories can, (and often will), go unread due to unsure content - particularly by those paying per-minute connect charges and due to the large traffic in this group. Frequently there are days with over a hundred postings a day. Admittedly, a goodly number of these can be from that sad (an highly annoying) phenomenon on the Net; the generally infantile flamers, spammers and indiscriminate crossposters that occasionally clutters up the groups, but usually there's still such a large volume of stories left, that most readers are forced to apply some sort of "selection" on what they have time to read. Obviously, a reader will pick those stories first that are directly flagged with codes for his/her particular interest. Next will probably be stories with codes at least related to their interest, or having intriguing titles, and at the very bottom, the "unspecified" stories. The result is, that sometimes very good stories are left largely unread. Unread stories means no feed-back, and no feed-back can mean discouraged writers, who might eventually stop posting, because they feel they're just dumping their stories in a big black hole. This would be a pity for all concerned. So even though it is not the general topic of this FAQ I'd like to make a little plug on behalf of the contributors to a.s.s. If you'd read a story and liked it, drop the writer a line telling him/her so. It doesn't have to be a doctoral thesis or a Ruduyard Kipling novella. Although most authors don't mind if you also, (even if very briefly), mention WHY you liked their story, even a one- or two-liner is usually appreciated. You might be surprised at how many writers even appreciate negative criticism (if it is CONSTRUCTIVE) since they can (and very frequently DO) use it to improve their writing by learning what works and what doesn't for their readers. Eventually this makes for better stories, which ultimately benefits YOU, the reader. So start using the "Reply to:" function, but don't forget: Address them to a.s.s.d. or e-mail direct to the poster, but NOT to the a.s.s news-group! EXPLANATION AF THE SUBJECT HEADER FORMAT: Archive;'Title #Part No.'{Author}( codes )[Part No.!Total No.] This allows a person to killfile the author by killfiling the text /{Joe schmoe}/, or to killfile this particular story title by killfiling the text /'Sarah'/, or killfile all mind control stories by killfiling the text / mc / (note the spaces around either side, which only kill the code if it appears as a complete word.) Note that killfiling the story title /'Sarah'/ can be done without killfiling authors whose name happens to be Sarah, and vice versa because of the use of the limiters ()''[]{}. One of the advantages of using this subject line format for articles posted to this group is that at some future date, this group could be automatically moderated (by a perl script or other program) to discard all posted articles which do not have a subject line in the correct format. This would definitely cut down on the spamming and unrelated conversations that appear in this group. When the program discarded a posting, it could send back a message which included a mini-FAQ explaining why the posting was refused. Such a program could also automatically discard uudecoded postings, etc. Another benefit of "correct" subject lines, is that it will be possible to archive such postings much easier (read "faster and better") in more advanced libraries, such as The New Alexandrian. This however, means that these characters must NOT be part of the Subject header: Colon, Question-mark, Slash, Backslash, Greater-than and Less-than i.e. : ? / \ < > since they are reserved characters than cannot be incorporated into a long filename. (For further information about The New Alexandrian Library, how to request files etc, e-mail the following EXACTLY as shown: To:drbob@datashopper.dk Subject:TNA-RQ-INFO Message:FAQ A POINTER ABOUT POSTING ETIQUETTE: Finally it would be nice if the stories were posted as plain ASCII- files. Please do not encrypt or compress them in any way. Do not tar, gz or zip them! Do not uuencode them! Do not BinHex them! Unmentioned compression or encryption schemes should definitely not be used either. HTML and MIME are likewise undesirable. Use plain text, formatted to 72, 75, or at most 80 columns. Do not use files saved in formats other than plain text. No MS-Word, no ClarisWorks, not Adobe Acrobat. There are Service Providers out there which, for reasons best known to themselves, (and very few others), refuses to handle larger postings. A posting of for instance a 2900-line story is rejected, while the same story, split in 3 separate postings of 1000 lines each (including extra headers and such), is perfectly acceptable. To avoid such problems it is generally a good idea to keep posts under approximately 1500 lines, but do not break posts into many, many pieces, since parts are easily (and frequently!) lost during network transfers. Comments, suggestions etc. welcome, but please, NOT in a.s.s. which should be reserved for stories, not discussions. E-mail me direct, or post it in a.s.d. 8-) Yours Dr. Bob - Denmark drbob@datashopper.dk