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