Story Codes Post

[AmyAmy]

Thanks for the new story codes post 64Fordman and ElectroPainLover. It's a very extensive reference.

I'd like to suggest that new stories add something else, going forward - a Keywords field you could discover on stories one day in the future, or that might already be supported by your software.

Basically, it's a free tag field, as used on so many forum sites. Rather than being bogged down in deciding whether a story quite fits a code, the writer can pick the few keywords that best sum it up.

e.g.
Rubber Latex Bondage Hood Consensual
or
Aphrodisiac Orgy Cheerleader
or
Hotel Trapped Transformation Rubber Latex Femdom Seduced
or
Bondage Tricked Forced Punishment Humiliation Marriage Pony
or
Horror Possessed Humiliation Public Dildo
or
Fantasy Plant Swallowed Aphrodisiac Transformation
or
Femdom Sissy Rubber Punishment Training

While it duplicates the story-codes in some cases, it has a tighter focus on exactly what the story is about.

Basically, the main genre and tropes of the story. I could look at the story codes for a hundred stories, and struggle to correctly identify the genre of half of them, and the tropes of three quarters, and yet readers know those genres and tropes intimately; they know exactly what they are looking for.

This could eventually solve the problem of genre pigeonholing that occurs when stories cross multiple genres, or subvert genre convention. The useful genres of erotic stories are super-narrow, and readers are (in my limited experience) extraordinarily specific about their expectations. A reader might like rubber stories with bondage, but not consensual or forced, only reluctant, and not if there is fantasy or sci-fi, and with humiliation but not breath-play.

With story codes, a writer might be left wondering whether to code her story as fetters, or cuffs, or not mention that detail at all because it's so minor. With keywords, the writer picks out what matters and ignores the rest.

Keywording legacy stories could be a possibility one day. Who knows? Why not starting asking authors to add them now?

[64Fordman]

Thank you Amy,

Your main question about searching keywords will have to be answered by Gromet, as I fear the entire site would have to be rebuilt from the ground up to accommodate something like that.

As for the codes, I have been through the site for various reasons, including adding codes to older un-coded stories, and never found over coding to be an issue. Codes should be, and are, used for significant story elements.

Something I believe would be more helpful, and doable, is something you mentioned recently. A short synopsis written by the author to tell the reader what the story is about. Call it a grabber, teaser or elevator pitch, but 3 or 4 sentences in the author’s words to describe the story. Authors could add it to the forum after their stories get posted.

[AmyAmy]

Your main question about searching keywords will have to be answered by Gromet, as I fear the entire site would have to be rebuilt from the ground up to accommodate something like that.

I didn't actually ask such a question, nor did I suggest the site should be hastily changed to achieve that end. Rather, I observed that if the capability for keyword search ever results from moving the site to new software, then you would have them available to work with, rather than just story codes. In the meantime readers could see them by opening a story and looking at the top of it, where the storycodes are now, there might, for some new stories, be some extra information...

The story codes aren't searchable either, at this time, are they? And if they were made searchable, it seems like it would not be a giant conceptual leap to search keywords in precisely the same way. That said, I can see there is some kind of magic going on with codes, as they appear on mouse-over of the archive entries (except where they don't).

Though, not all stories have codes either, as I discovered only a couple of days ago.

What I suggested, regardless of any technology, or code, or rebuilding, is that authors begin to add the keywords to their stories, so that the information exists.

Information that doesn't exist can never be used.

Creating new information for hundreds or thousands of stories is hard, moving it about once it exists, is mechanical.

Summaries / teasers would be useful too, but I've made that suggestion in the past and it didn't seem to be gaining any traction, so I suggested something else. It's a bit defensive to jump straight to "your idea would require rewriting the entire site" as a response, and it isn't correct either, as what I was proposing was that authors add a keywords field, just like storycodes field, which requires zero changes to anything except what is allowed into the final online document text.

e.g.
Storycodes: MMf; XX; nc
Keywords: Cheerleader; Blackmail

But if I was going to go further, you could add keywords in the same field as story codes, and anything that's not an existing code is self-evidently a keyword. That would work for any non-standard codes that might be floating about in old stories too.

e.g.
Storycodes: MMf; XX; nc; cheerleader; blackmail

As you can see from my examples, keywords and codes overlap, but they are conceptually different, though perhaps technically indistinguishable.

Ah well, I thought this possibility might have had a pretty low bar to jump over, as all it really did was require an author to think of two to five words to tag their story.

Alas, it seems it is already controversial/unwanted and probably running counter to some discussion that mods have had I know nothing about. I should probably just shut up, but I am put out a bit and feel I have to respond and clarify, because there is a gap between what I was suggesting and what was argued against, which is what we call in the trade "a straw man argument".

[64Fordman]

I believe I was in error, I mistakenly associated your comment to the ability to search the text of the story. I now understand and you are correct, it wouldn’t matter to the software if the story code was a whole word or an abbreviation. In fact they could easily be added to the list of codes for use in future stories, so if you wanted to assemble keywords you thought would be useful, I would be delighted to add them to the current list.

And please don’t stop commenting, ideas are like fighter pilots, the good ones have been shot down a few times.

Thank you Amy

[ElectroPainLover]

Amy,

First off...I would like to agree with Fordman...please do not quit posting your ideas. Any idea is worth posting and passing it around to be considered.

As for searches, I believe the whole story will be searchable for whatever words. Storycodes simply act as 'keywords' to offer a 'known set' of specific words for people to search for to narrow their search results. Most search engines search the whole document for the words offered for the search. Storycodes will only be singularly searched within the Forum in the 'Feedback' area because it is only; the Author, Title, Storycodes, and, story-link in each of the Feedback section. Stories within the Plaza has the whole text of the stories to search through and can find any words within the text.

Gromet can correct me if I am wrong on what the search aspects he wishes to incorporate...but, I believe this will be the easiest search engine to place into use.

Dana

[AmyAmy]

On the topic of story codes, what do people think about the coding of multi-chapter stories?

I know that many of these are coded individually per-part, but a reader is probably only going to look at part 1 when they are considering starting the story.

I think, where the chapters are written together to form a whole story, it can make sense to code all the parts as a whole, instead of coding per chapter.

There are other cases where the parts are disparate, for example, a series that got added to, or something like Narelle's Discovery, where the first part is a sort of prelude to the second two. (That said, each of those three parts would be three or four chapters normally, but they were posted as uber-files, presumably to save time).

This leads me to another thought: storycodes to indicate length. For example short to indicate stories barely longer than a page, long for anything with more than 21,000 words or so total, and novel for anything over 45,000 words. This would match up the common perception of novellas being around 25,000 words. If you wanted to be extra thorough, you could have a code for stories over 200,000 words, epic for example.

Of course, readers can see how many chapters there are in most cases, but as I note, sometimes several chapters are folded together into a single post per story (as with Narelle's Discovery) or otherwise merged (as with Betrayal, which has four times as many chapters as it appears to do in the story list), so it's not as obvious as it might be. While the merging sometimes appears to have been done to get posts in the 6,000-8,000 word range, other times it hasn't, with each part of the Narelle's post clocking in at 17,000-20,000 words. And we know that some readers are only interested in a quick-hit, and don't want anything longer, and that there must be some rare types who are far more interested in novel-length work.

Personally, I've never been sure how to code a multi-chapter story, or just didn't want to, because the idea of coding each chapter, as if it can or should be read alone seemed an anathema to me. But of course, there are authors who write highly episodic chapters, and who add chapters to ongoing stories from time to time, and in that situation, coding individually makes the most sense.

Is there a Plaza policy? And what do people think generally?

[A Pensive Pen]

Interesting thread with some great ideas (see below), but with all due respect I don't think keywords are necessary.

Other people may think differently, but I personally don't have a problem getting the gist of a story from codes as is. I may not know the exact plot, but I generally can see what I'd be getting into. I do get surprised once in a while, but not often enough where I see any issue to be resolved. The storycode system here (more extensive than any I've seen) displays plenty of info on a story already, and even goes beyond the (new) long list that was just posted on the forum. A story on the Boundstories page right now contains the tag "wood nymph" (which is not on the new list), for example.

I could see a problem is the range of codes was restrictive and vague, but it isn't, so I don't.

That said, I think there are some good ideas being tossed around here. Listing the story length would be good, though I'd suggest just listing the number of words. Users can decide for themselves what's 'long' or 'short.'

And keywords or no, Amy's right that some indication of what a story's about could be helpful. People here are talking about blurbs, and Literotica does this exact thing already to great effect (but, ironically, they need to fix their code system!). I wouldn't make it 3-4 sentences, personally, but rather 'Twitter' length: 140 characters or so. Enough for a hook, not a synopsis.

Finally, it would be nice if storycodes were also links. Click on a code, load a list of stories containing that code. Pretty common feature on sites nowadays.

[AmyAmy]

I'm sure the codes work for some people. They must have served some practical purpose when they were invented, and yet for me, the classic codes generally inform me of things I care nothing about.

I do care about genre, tone, length, and general standard of literacy.

Codes may sometimes indicate genre, but the Plaza mostly depends on the different "sites" to indicate that, and it's never been kind to cross-genre stories.

The codes almost never indicate tone, though sometimes a glaring XXX might give a clue. Keywords might reveal tone, depending on the author, but it might be asking a bit much to try and classify it, so I didn't go there.

The codes don't say anything about length, and while I think it would be great to see word-counts, you would surely require really special code to search on them, whereas short, long, novel, epic, etc, are trivially searchable, should a keywords search feature exist. Also word counts require readers to have a familiarity with story word-counts they may not possess; that's something you learn from writing. I guess they'd have to get used to it.

As for general standard of literacy, well... I doubt that's ever going to be included, so I'm completely out of luck on that one.

Of course, you're correct in pointing out that the Plaza codes often include relevant words that aren't traditional story codes. Actually, I was well aware of this. They seems exactly like keywords. Spooky. The only thing that stops them being keywords is a state of mind and any kind of guide whatsoever on how they should be chosen. You see what I'm getting at here now?

[AmyAmy]

Just another thought on lengths, commercial story lengths tend to fall into some broad groups as I described above:

• Anything below 19,000 is probably not going to be considered a novella, and thus is short.
• Anything above that but below 45,000 is probably not going to be considered a full novel, so is a novella.
• 45,000 and up are novel length, but as we know, novels come in slim, regular, fat, super-fat, and so on. It used to be easy to tell by opening the book and looking at the print size.

Nowadays online, they all tend to list word counts, so maybe that is the new currency.

Ironically, on Amazon or wherever, I can't search by almost any of the things I want to, and so we have Goodreads setting themselves up as the gateway to everything. You can discover books a lot of places online, but searching for them on the big retail sites is hopeless unless you already know exactly what you want.

But here, the stories are for free, so you have to do a much better job of everything, right?

[AmyAmy]

And on genre...

I've had readers complain to me (on several occasions) that they cannot stand sci-fi or fantasy elements in a story.

There are no approved storycodes for genre, though there are Fetish Codes - General that clearly relate to it.

Here are just a few of them:

• Alien: activity involving beings from other worlds/planets.
• Goth: gothic or dark setting.
• Hist: has a historical theme, set in the past. Or alternate history.
• Myth: story contains mythic elements, folklore.
• Pony: ponygirl or boy, people as equines.
• Sci-fi: science fiction or futuristic elements.
• Magic: magic acts, slight-of-hand and illusions.
• Majick: use of witchcraft, spells, potions or occult magic.
• Witch: use of witchcraft, spells or majick.

One term that doesn't appear in that sub-list is Fantasy; maybe because of its ambiguity. What do we mean by fantasy? Apart from a few stories marked True all the stories on the Plaza are fantasies. Maybe it is safe to assume that if a story has the code Fantasy it means a fantastical alternative reality? Maybe not? I'm unsure.

There is an amusing distinction between Magic and Magick, and the term Witch (does it imply gender? The write up doesn't say it does, and there's no Warlock, but it is a highly gendered term in the Potterverse).

Are my dark supernatural stories with Lovecraft influences Gothic? Or do they suggest a different word? Mythos, for example? (Quite different from Myth

Some readers may, in fact, object to anything that deals with the supernatural, alternative 'Gods', or anything like that on religious grounds, but don't want to say it directly? Should there be a word to warn them off, such as Mythos or Pagan?

Other words that might have been in the list of Fetish Codes - General that spring to mind are:
Medieval, Noir, Crime, Detective, Investigator, Journalist, Abandoned (building ... though it might be better in locations instead), Antiquity (anything pre-Medieval), Renaissance, Regency, Victorian, Thriller, Drama, Horror, Vampire; Ghost; Werewolf; Possession; Monster; Urban, Space Opera, Comedy, Farce, Tragedy, Literary, and ... ok the Plaza is probably not going to overrun with Regency romances or literary novels any time soon, but it does have stories in some of these genres, and conversely, I'm not convinced there are a whole lot of Magic (not Magick) or Gothic stories, but again, I'm at a loss to decide whether a setting is dark. Is Narelle's Discovery gothic in story-code terms? I'm not sure, and I think a reader might assume it's just a synonym for Vampire (a sexy genre the Plaza is peculiarly ill supplied with). It seems to me there's a big difference between a story marked Hist set during WWII, and one marked Hist set in the Byzantine empire, and would Robin Hood classify as Myth? Certainly a puzzle, which is why I always struggled with the less basic codes.

How is a choice made to include some terms and reject others? Some of us might feel that the abandoned building genre is super-hot. Some readers may be actively searching for investigator or journalist in peril stories. If I could somehow pick out a list of all the horror stories on the Plaza (yes, I know there's Halloween), I probably would, and so on...

So from these few examples above, it's clear that the establishment of genre in approved story codes is strangely selective and doesn't even particularly try to pick out the different genres of bondage or rubber story, though those are the most common kinds of story on the Plaza.

No answers here I'm afraid, only questions.

[AmyAmy]

Clearly, it's a bit of a task trying to come up with a clear set of all inclusive codes, and the new list is very helpful.

But of course, I have questions and suggestions.

It can still be hard to figure why one thing got a code and another didn't, especially in the core area of bondage and rubber.

I've been trying to work with the codes on a recent story, and the following popped up as "missing", perhaps intended missing:

Spreader: a restraint used to hold a pair of cuffs apart at a fixed or extensible distance.
Table: a gynecological table, or custom bondage table.
Chair: a fetishized medical or bondage chair.
Tattoo: permanent coloring of the skin in a design or as make-up.

I think spreader is such a staple of bondage, it deserves a word, as does the ubiquitous chair.
I'm a bit unsure about chair, as there's also the gyno table trope, and not strictly a chair.
Tattoo is quite a distinct trope in various sub-genres, and worth of note.


Other possibles:
Dildo: a solid object used for sexual stimulation, usually combined with the Insert code.
Vibrator: vibrating stimulation, either inserted, or external.
Ben-wa: weighted balls inserted into the vagina for stimulation or muscle training
Waist-training: a long-term process of body-modification, often involving a corset.
Gaslighting: manipulation of evidence so the victim believes they are making mistakes about what is real.
Blackmail: in this context, coercion of a victim into sexual acts or situations by threatening revelation of catastrophically embarrassing material.
Lobster: scenarios where a character is made to do increasingly extreme acts through such gradual steps, they don't see the change.
Shop: sexual events take place in a shop, with the threat of discovery, or involving customers.
Recorded: situations where events are photographed, or filmed for blackmail or publication.
Anonymous: events where some form of disguise or anonymity are involved.

The first three (dildo, vibrator, ben-wa balls) all fall under Toys, but a couple of them are so frequently used that you might use them in preference unless numerous toys are used.
What makes the balls special is that they are used in scenes where the character is in public, with the balls in.

It's like there needs to be a word to describe insertion that continues into a public setting, but I can't think of one. Now if there is one, it would be a good word to have.

Lobster is a silly word, but it does describe what in some cases is practically a genre. You could use Incremental instead, if you were going to have such a term, and think Lobster sounds like a weird fetish for pincers.

More thoughts:

While Femdom has always been a code, what does it tell us over F/m ?

Why is there Mod and Bodymod? What is the difference exactly? When is one chosen over the other?
Why not distinguish ring-gag from gag?
Is drool worth a code?
Why are blinders/blinkers only in a ponysuit?
Why is urine only mentioned as something people want to drink?
Humiliating public pee scenarios, and pee voyeurism are not uncommon tropes.
Is Steampunk common and relevant enough to justify a code?
It's really weird that Drider is justifiable as a code, but I totally agree it is!


What do the codes for Top and Sub add? Surely they are implicit in D/s ? Can they appear separately? If they do, what does it mean?

Can the difference between bdsm and D/s be made easier to understand? bdsm is written up to sound broader, and yet I sort of feel the reverse, and that is more specific than D/s, which may not involve any bondage and may be entirely psychological, or at least, not involve any pain at all.

What about events that don't really occur, such as a character threatening to put another in a cage? Would it trigger the Cage word for completeness, or only it it was the core of a scene?

[Gromet]

Thanks for all of the suggestions for updating the storycodes, it's always a work in progress as stories come in with new themes, ideas and fetishes.

I've updated the storycodes page to include some of the suggested codes. Again it's a work in progress and changes will occur. The specific story sections will also be updated ie: Doll; Pony etc.

http://www.grometsplaza.net/pages/storycodes.html

Any suggestions are welcome.

[64Fordman]

Thank you Gromet, and thank you Amy for all the thoughtful comments and analysis.

There is a story here with the code ‘mast.’ Naturally I thought I knew what was being referred to, but somehow that didn’t fit with the rest of the codes, so I read the story. The author was referring to a ship’s mast.

The updated story code list I assembled was never meant to be complete. In fact, I didn’t create the new story code list, all of you did. All I did was go through all the sections of the Plaza. One dollar store legal pad later, I had assembled a list of all the codes with all their variations that have been used so far. From that, the list was formed with an attempt to standardize commonly used codes. Some redundancy exists due to the number of occurrences of similar codes.

Additionally, and most important, the list is not intended to limit or suppress creativity. A writer should never let the story codes control their story, the story codes should evolve with the imagination of the writer.

So if you have just completed that story exploring your drive-in movie fetish and you want other like-minded readers to find it, go ahead and create a story code, just check first to see if one already exists, then make it unique. It may even get added to the list.