Suggestion - SMUT prefix in NSFW

[Odin]

I'd like to suggest having a SMUT prefix added as an optional alternative to the generic NSFW prefix in the NSFW creative writing and quests subforums.

Over the years the NSFW forums have gotten flooded with stories\quests that either aren't actually NSFW or are barely so with authors using excuses like "it's in NSFW because of violence and strong language!", or "there might, maybe, one day, be a future chapter or omake posted with sexual content and I want to leave that option open!" as excuses (although a fair amount also just straight up admit that they post it there because they're aware the NSFW forum will get them more views)

Cuz, let's be honest, while certainly not everyone that comes here does so primarily for sexual content that's not available on other forums a large chunk, possibly even the majority of forum goers, do. And it's become harder and harder over the years to actually find that content. (And on the flip side this will also make it easier for those who aren't looking for smut to filter it out)

I'm aware that users can add a smut tag to their threads but there are also several similar tags that they can add instead (which makes filtering by tag inconsistent) and tags aren't nearly as visible as prefixes when looking through threads given that they're smaller, at least on mobile on this site they're not visible from the main page (not sure about PC as I don't use it for viewing the forum), their placing isn't as prominent with the way prefixes are at the very front of the story titles, and they're often mixed in amongst a bunch of other tags.

I'm also not recommending that this be some sort of mandatory thing or anything that the forum staff would enforce or apply. It would just be an optional choice available to thread creators to select that prefix if they want to. (Although I do wonder how hard it would be for the forum admins to find any threads in those sub forums that have the smut tag and mass update them to also have the prefix)

Of course that will lead to not every story that the prefix applies to having it but I expect the sheer visibility of prefixes will make its existence common knowledge and that many authors who are writing that content will choose to apply it to make their story stand out more from the non-smut stories.

Thoughts, concerns, suggested changes, etc.?

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

My take on the overall idea is 'can't hurt'.

Some potentially useful information for finding smut as is-

I'm aware that users can add a smut tag to their threads but there are also several similar tags that they can add instead (which makes filtering by tag inconsistent)

Click to shrink...

The relevant Canonical tags for smut are:

Spoiler: smut

porn
explicit content
r-18
lewds
nsfw
lemons
erotica
bed-shattering smut
bitter smut
first time smut writer!
he's a bard. of course smut.
i just wanted to write wow smut okay?
only the finely picked smut from my own brain
over the top smut
shameless smut with some plot
smut ahead try finger but hole
smut for the smut throne
smut heavy before plot hits like a wrecking ball
tasteful smut
terrible smut
way more smut than initially intended
wide range of smuttiness
amature parody porn
artisanal hand-crafted pornography
bad porn
porn for the porn god
realistic porn
that means porn with feeling
behold my field of lewds
dumping excess lewdness onto the internet
ecchi and lewds
fic will have lewds -- this isn't crossposted sb slop
you're a lewd one
first lewds by yours truly
first time lewds
gooey lewds
hark for the lewds have arrived
hotter stickier and lewder
I lied lewds all around
kinks and lewds galore
lewd and crude
lewd and fun
lewd and proud
lewd as fuck
lewd fantasy
lewd hell
lewd shenanigans
lewd yet wholesome
lewdness in abundance
lewds accidental and intentional
lewds ahoy!
lewds for the lewd god
lewds inclewded
lewds of questionable quality
lovey dovey lewds
mix of lewd and wholesome
o lord give lewds
oh my how lewd
possibly bad lewds
probably high-lewd later on
proliferating lewds
silly lewds
so fucking lewd
some weird lewds
the dice gods are lewd
the dice got its lewds
the dice wants more lewds
the lewd spreads
weird lewds
writing exercises in lewds
all the fucking fetishes
fuckfest
lewd tags in chapter
lewd all the things
adult themes
dark erotica
erotic fanfic
rational erotica

Spoiler: pure smut

it's just smut
really it's just smut
borderline porn without plot
but porn's the focus
mainly porn
more porn than plot
mostly porn
mostly porn without plot
porn as plot
porn before plot
porn is the plot
porn with a little bit of plot
porn with the pretense of plot
porn without plot
just sex
sex scenes only
mostly lewds
mostly lemons
it was designed to be pure smut
lewds every chapter
"plot" before plot
pwp
smut-heavy with pics
the porn has the plot in a mating press

Spoiler: sex and violence

gore and porn
sex and death
killing games... but lewd
a lot of sex and violence honestly
the action is violent but the sex is vanilla

Spoiler: plot and porn

smut is not the only mature thing you'll find here
1 plot with porn
smut with plot but characters keep pushing plot
the smut bleeds in
plot and porn will weld together for the story
plot sociology and porn
plot with porn(sorry qq)
porn is part of plot
porn with feelings
lewdness of varying degrees
medium lewd
medium-lewd
varying levels of lewd
plot and 'plot' are like yin and yang
plot and plap
there's plot and there's "plot"
40% smut
porn with excessive amounts of plot
action and smut

Spoiler: plot before porn

comedy before smut
plot until smut
romance and smut later
smut is relatively tame and few
most lewdness implied/offscreen
honestly... closer to lewd romance than 'plot'
smutty omakes sometimes
smut in side-stories only
sex scenes by omake
lewd in omakes only
lewd omakes only
lewds by omake
lewds in the extras
no lewd in main story
"plot" will be in index
nsfw in side content
nsfw omakes are encouraged
op wants lewds
vaguely lewd

Spoiler: eventual smut

no smut til third year
smut after i learn how to write it
smut and romance is coming
but will be a long time before any lewd
it's a baratheon so yes lewds but later.
lewds don't happen until around canon time
no lewds until ~16
nsfw in side content eventually

Spoiler: possible smut

as lewd as you want it
lewds allowed
lewds as soon as you go for them
lewds available
lewds can happen
lewds may or may not happens depending on choices
lewds not the intended goal
some options more lewd than others
the dice decides your lewds
most SFW
mostly SFW

Spoiler: sfw

probably no smut
probablynoporn
there probably won't be much porn lol
author won't be writing sex scenes
may not have sex stuff
offscreen lewds
no sex probably
not truly nsfw
first SFW story
mostly safeish to work
sex might not appear at all
no lewd just swearing
no lewds is new for me too
no sex yet
currently not nsfw
SFW for now

If you search for (or exclude) the spoiler title tag, you'll also get the results for (or exclude) all the tags within the spoiler. I'll also be consolidating some more smut relevant tags in my next tags batch, whose focus is kinks.

Be aware that if you search for multiple tags, it'll return threads with all of them, not threads with any of them - I wouldn't advise searching 'smut' and 'pure smut' simultaneously, as you'd only get 47 results, rather than the 3,161 + 133 threads those tags are composed of. Filtering your results by exclusion can be more nuanced, as there's no such issue.

 

[Smuthunter]

I'm all for it. Non-smutty fics being allowed in the NSFW subforum is stupid in the first place but that ship sailed years ago.

 

[Sogen]

I'm all for it. Non-smutty fics being allowed in the NSFW subforum is stupid in the first place but that ship sailed years ago.

Click to shrink...

Agreed. This is a workable alternative, the only problem I can foresee is getting authors to actually use it.

 

[KaneLives]

Biggest issue. Tag enforcement. It's off the table entirely. Having a perfect system is all well and good, but if it's not used... then what's the point. I had a similar idea, and while good on paper, it only works if a super majority use it correctly.

 

[SnarkLord]

I..want to say no.
Not just because of already mentioned tags xiating and enforcement being 'AhahahahaNO'
It's because of setting expectations
Like
Dull honesty here
If you preface a story with SMUT, it being the very first thing people see, before even what the title is...I'm not expecting a story that has a good/balanced mix of plot and eroticism.
No
I expect it to be 'sex. Sex again. Sex some more. Give the thinnest of excuses why the story exists while everyone rehydrates. Then it's sex again.'
A very, *very* small amount of stories ive countered on this site fits that.
And i'd honestly think alot of readers would have the same expectation upon entering such a thread.
And while i do very much enjoy smut in my stories...a thread where it's all smut and little to no other content? ...that's maybe once in a blue moon, if at that..

Also
The moment it's implemented you'd have the two of extremes of 'this has so much porn, you should totally label it smut instead of nsfw' and 'there's not enough porn here to justify it labeled smut instead of nsfw' (with the latter extreme having optional 'brilliant' commentary like 'the author should stop trying to write any kind of story here they labeled it smut and im only interested in smut' or , 'what you're writing/how you're writing isn't smut, you should completely change how and what you write for it to be smut')

 

[Pupika]

I expect it to be 'sex. Sex again. Sex some more. Give the thinnest of excuses why the story exists while everyone rehydrates. Then it's sex again.'

Click to shrink...

It's similar for me. The first thing that came to my mind reading the suggestion was the "Porn without Plot" tag from AO3. If I saw a thread prefixed with [SMUT] I would expect it to be nothing more than sex. If the title piqued my interest I might click on it if I'm in the mood for smut, but more often than not I would more than likely just skip past it.

 

[Odin]

I..want to say no.
Not just because of already mentioned tags xiating and enforcement being 'AhahahahaNO'
It's because of setting expectations
Like
Dull honesty here
If you preface a story with SMUT, it being the very first thing people see, before even what the title is...I'm not expecting a story that has a good/balanced mix of plot and eroticism.
No
I expect it to be 'sex. Sex again. Sex some more. Give the thinnest of excuses why the story exists while everyone rehydrates. Then it's sex again.'
A very, *very* small amount of stories ive countered on this site fits that.
And i'd honestly think alot of readers would have the same expectation upon entering such a thread.
And while i do very much enjoy smut in my stories...a thread where it's all smut and little to no other content? ...that's maybe once in a blue moon, if at that..

Also
The moment it's implemented you'd have the two of extremes of 'this has so much porn, you should totally label it smut instead of nsfw' and 'there's not enough porn here to justify it labeled smut instead of nsfw' (with the latter extreme having optional 'brilliant' commentary like 'the author should stop trying to write any kind of story here they labeled it smut and im only interested in smut' or , 'what you're writing/how you're writing isn't smut, you should completely change how and what you write for it to be smut')

Click to shrink...

Personally I largely consider what you're saying a feature rather than a bug. If someone's writing a story\quest that can be considered "smut" or "porn", regardless of if it also does or does not have plot, then it should have enough and\or high enough quality erotic content to be able to masturbate to it and should be labeled\tagged as such. Just having one or more sex scenes in a work doesn't automatically make something "smut" or "porn" nor does writing a 100k word novel that includes a single relatively short erotically descriptive sex scene. On the other end if your work has descriptive sex scenes every chapter\post or two then, well, sorry if you don't want it to be "smut" or "porn" but that's what's being written in that case.

There are threads that are going to manage to fall into true grey areas but in my experience it's generally not hard to tell true smut from non-smut 99% of the time and authors already have to make a choice of whether to define their content as smut\porn in tags with those cases so this isn't too much different other than the fact that it's a more strict yes\no choice. And it's not like this would replace the tagging system or take a notable amount of effort to use so authors can always easily change it if they want and\or use more nuanced and descriptive tags to better define exactly what type of sexual content is present. There's also nothing preventing an author from noting in their thread title in some way that their story\quest is an actual story in addition to being smut if they feel that strongly that it would be ignored as nothing but sex.

(In regards to the amount of pure smut content that gets posted to the site now, that is in fact the primary issue that brought this up in the first place. Such content used to be much much more prevalent than it is nowadays and the influx of authors flooding the NSFW forums with content that either isn't actually NSFW or that they intentionally make just barely meet standards for what could be considered NSFW in order to post it there to get higher viewership is a large reason why such content has gotten drowned out on the site over time. While this certainly wouldn't fix such a problem hopefully it would at least help some)

EDIT: Also the fact that it does have a relatively strong "yes this story has a lot of sexual content" implication will hopefully prevent people from inaccurately using it on their threads in order to trick people into reading their content the way they currently do by putting stories\quests in the NSFW forums that really shouldn't be there.

Biggest issue. Tag enforcement. It's off the table entirely. Having a perfect system is all well and good, but if it's not used... then what's the point. I had a similar idea, and while good on paper, it only works if a super majority use it correctly.

Click to shrink...

The site's never going to have any sort of enforced method of defining what level of sexual content threads have. The practical restrictions on implementing such systems simply makes it unfeasible and many such systems such as reader tagging, aggregation, additional alternative sub forums, volunteer additional staff, etc. have previously been brought up and dismissed already so there's no point in waiting for such a perfect system to exist. This at least is something and given the prominence of prefixes when viewing threads, the ease of setting and\or changing prefixes, and that there would only be two prefix options to choose between rather than the relatively freeform and vast number of options available for tags would hopefully result in it getting used relatively frequently when it's appropriate.

 

[Passing Pinecone]

There's also nothing preventing an author from noting in their thread title in some way that their story\quest is an actual story in addition to being smut if they feel that strongly that it would be ignored as nothing but sex.

Click to shrink...

... This feels like, through the power of scope creep, we'd get description-in-the-tags in the title.
[SMUT][NSFW][BUT NOT COMPLETELY SMUT][THERE'S A LOT AROUND CHAPTER 15][AND I MEAN A LOT][BUT INTERMITTENT OTHERWISE TO ALLOW FOR THE PLOT][SOME IN THE FIRST COUPLE OF CHAPTERS TO SET THE TONE][BUT SERIOUSLY THE STORY IS ALSO GOOD][FATALPULSE STYLE ON OCCASION][BUT LIKE THE MILDER SORT][EXCEPT ONE OCCASION WHERE IT ISN'T][CHARACTER DRIVEN][THEIR PSYCHOLOGICAL HANGUPS MOTIVATE THEM, AS EXPECTED][THERE'S CHARACTER DEVELOPEMTN TRUST ME][BUT THE SEX IS ALSO GOOD AND WORTH READING THIS FOR] Is It Wrong To Have A Young Woman's Record Of Training Companions In the World Dungeon? (Acchi Kocchi/Worm AU/K-SysApoc/others)

 

[Lady Naga]

I'd read that.