A few days ago Rageblade & Trygon were banned from this site. Rageblade agrees not to do it again and started spamming us with bot accounts (including his own). Trygon (another banned user, funny how that works) claims we have 'spyware' on this website. Strangely, google hasn't noticed any and the pages they tested were the forum index and the home page.

Google's Malware Check

I suppose I shouldn't expect any better from people who were immature enough to force me to ban them in the first place. However, it did teach me a valuable lesson:

Some people are willing to compromise the accepted ethical standard in fits of impotent, childish rage or for competitive advantage.

I probably should have simply banned them because I knew their past behaviour. However, I believe everyone deserves a second chance. Simply because some people choose to burn it to keep themselves warm instead of using it should not govern my behaviour.

Trygon's admission of guilt:
Based on Trygon's actions of re-iterating the claim on his own site without actual evidence.

Rageblade's Admission of guilt: (Of course he used his own IP and account to start spamming as well...clearly a mastermind of SPAM)
(11:22:00 PM) The Blades Pulse: Don't sleep.
(11:22:10 PM) The Blades Pulse: Me & Trygon have only 9 more pages to go

Novelr suggests recruiting web fiction / web lit / online fiction / [insert term here] readers from the 'greater pool' of non-converted potential readers.

I agree with the strategy for the most part there seems to be one strategy that occurred to me and no one else so I figured I'd list it here.

Eros's Strategy for Erotica

[Building a community with a high number of readers who read something vaguely resembling online fiction]

#1 - Develop a platform / community with a high potential density of readers (in my case, play-by-post erotic roleplayers).

#2 - Promote that platform, grow it into something sizable and tangible that is likely to survive minor bumps in the road without your full attention.

#3 - Divert the time to create a weblit that caters to the interest of the potential readers. (e.g. erotic oriented weblit) [Only works if you have actual talent, probably. I'm sorely lacking in that department. I'm hoping practice will make up for it!]

#4 - Feed off the existing user base that has 'bought in' to your platform / community to get a core reader group to give feedback on your (pathetic, poorly edited) weblit to polish it up a bit.

#5 - Publish your (hopefully better) weblit on the same site. Use it as link bait to help with SEO (erotic is part of many terms this site is trying to rank for already. erotic online fiction anyone?) and promote it like you would anyway. This allows you to double dip in the reader pool (converting existing users to webfic readers, converting new users into webfic readers and possibly dragging them into your community).

Of course, unlike Novelr, I'm not basing this off of tried and tested methods...I'm taking a shot in the dark. If it works, perhaps some other lucky individual might be able to duplicate this and use it to grow the WebFic reader pool to the benefit of all. Perhaps not. We'll see.

I know this strategy seems counter intuitive (doing all the heavy lifting of creating a community and marketing it then start publishing weblit). I mainly chose it because my primary goal of this site is not weblit-related. It is building a erotic RP community, using this site as a platform for other projects, and practising the skills of my chosen profession (Computer Science / Information Technology).

That said, I suspect my WebLit would have certainly failed if I adopted a different strategy. Mainly because I tend to lose interest in a single project. A larger project (erotic RP community at its core with its fingers in several pies such as erotica) gives me the kind of variety I need to remain productive and interested.

Hyperfiction is the future of web publishing (core of the article, really)

Probably worth a read if you are into web fiction / weblit / [insert name here].

Novelr's Webfic vs. Weblit Debate is from a couple months ago, admittedly. However, I do need to catch up on these things since I am planning to run Guiding Darkness (and some short story erotica, and maybe another...so sue me. I'm insane and I love projects.) as a serial off of this site.

Platform unity is good. But it is only good if that platform is recognised by 'customers'. Right now, there isn't enough volume on the terms webfic and weblit to matter and it could be years before it is the case. Personally, I'm going to use both terms to hedge my bets and guarantee I'll at least have some rank in the SERPs for both terms.

To me, unlike Eli James who writes Novelr, the semantics are irrelevant. Completely. What matters, to me, is the ability to draw organic search traffic to my website. That is all that matters. Bringing more targeted eyeballs to my domain on the Internet so I can entice them into staying.

As you can see, Online Fiction is the high volume term to milk. Thankfully, web fiction guide is second for that term and may one day be first. Web serial can be confused with the video-based equivalent but getting on the first page for that would be awesome too.

I do agree that the hash tags #weblit and #webfic are best for Twitter & Identi.ca. Both terms are already heavily used there.

Ultimately, converting readers to web fiction is best done by drawing people in from various sources (such as web-based roleplayers) that already have a high volume of reading/writing going on by the users of such sources.

The plan, at present, is as follows:

1) Amuse myself.

2) Post weekly Erotica on Saturdays (starting sometime in March)

3) Post things related to this site, Web Lit, Erotica, et al.

4) Put my Dev Blog for this site here (mainly because I don't think people care much and it'll give me a chance to create more content for this blog.)

5) Put up links when I start posting the Serials (e.g. Sometime in the foreseeable future when I'm not focused on other things and/or have a thick enough buffer I can skip a month without a problem)

6) Engender trackbacks/cross-blog conversations to increase backlinks and traffic. :P But that is true of virtually everything I do involving anything off-site anyway.