New Male-Male Spanking Archive @ malespank.net - stories (fiction, poetry and more) about corporal punishment and discipline of men, teen males and boys

 FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) 

archive status  |  archive policy
archive features  |  archive updates

Is this the old J**** archive?

This is a continuation of the archive that was started by that person in 1995 and maintained by him until 2004, yes. At the end of 2004 he placed a message on the front of the old site to the effect that he wanted to move on in his life and not maintain it any longer, and that it would be deleted from January 2005.

To assist in that process of moving on, he asked those of us wishing to continue it to not include that old web ID/name or any reference to the old URL on these main pages as it would no longer be HIS archive. It is now therefore simply The Male-Male Spanking Archive, MMSA or New MMSA, and searching on that old J**** brand name should eventually fail.

The old archive was one of the main pillars of the Internet CP community, due to its sheer length of service and commitment to free access. For that selfless dedication, we are all extremely grateful and indebted. We trust that we can live up to that example as we take up the challenge of rebuilding the archive for the 21st Century web.

Who is managing the archive now?

Rather than being managed by a single person, the burden of which was part of what made the old archivist give up the task after many years of stalwart service to the community, this site is managed by an informal consortium of interested people, mainly archive authors, who will share the responsibility and upkeep. You can be sure that because of that self-interest, we are all extremely dedicated to seeing that the MMSA continues and prospers in its new home. The site reviewers are additional volunteers from the author base who mainly oversee the story submission process and maintain site policy.

Obviously, as authors, we are keenly aware of (and have respect for) the rights of the other authors too, and we will be consulting with them on archive developments wherever possible through the dedicated New MMSA forum.

Is this the official replacement?

There is NO official replacement, much as it would have been nice to have been able to call it that, and much simpler for users to understand.

The old archivist felt that he did not have the right to pass on the copyright permission of all the authors to have their work hosted on a website different from that they originally submitted it to. While that is probably legally correct, the likely wish of the authors in writing and posting stories on the archive in the first place was for them to be read with many others of a similar type in a single easily distinguishable place! Anyway, as he did not propose to ask them, he therefore felt unable to bless a single site to continue hosting it.

Instead, rather than leaving a clear path of succession that would ease the transition from such a long-held and well-known URL, he sadly left chaos as people scrambled to save the MMSA under the mistaken assumption that it would disappear imminently. While some of us attempted urgently to discuss creative options with him to continue the archive at a single new URL, he preferred to invite anyone who wanted to host it without any single site being given priority, so you may well find the archive hosted in many places and in various forms, some of which may still be postable. There is no mechanism in place or agreed between us to make those other archives agree on submissions, and we don’t know where they all are anyway.

At the end of the day, the official MMSA will be the one that gets linked the most widely and remains standing after all the others have died away. We very much hope that it will be this one. In any case, we doubt very much whether other sites will have the necessary long-term commitment to this community resource that we do, as shown by the comprehensive refurbishment, massive review process and program of fixing errors that we have already undertaken.

If you like the way this site works, please pass on the link everywhere you can and inform others in any public forums that we are here continuing the old MMSA. If you have your own website this New MMSA link resource may be helpful.

UPDATE, January 2007: after two years, it is fair to say that this New MMSA has been an astonishing success. Many, if not yet all, of the authors from the old archive have found us and embraced it and our commitment to them enthusiastically and are actively supporting it and posting in it, along with many new contributors. By that criteria, we are happy that it appears now to have achieved a de facto official status in the CP community. Thank you!

What about permission from the authors to publish?

It is our opinion (as authors ourselves) that in posting to the original archive, they were effectively giving copyright permission on their stories to the archive as an entity, rather than to that particular old URL. What they may feel about multiple other copies of that archive entity on the web without any form of central control or accountable management they can appeal to is unknown at this time, as is whether those other people who are hosting other archive copies are even considering the copyright implications and the wishes of the authors. This is particularly worrying when some of those sites are paysites, so those webmasters are effectively profiting from work submitted originally to a completely free site without the agreement of any authors.

We have taken every step to try and contact authors who left a contact email address in their stories or who we know personally through previous correspondence. Most have proved to be more than happy to continue being hosted with us; having a reliable, sympathetic and supportive platform for their writing is why they posted their stories in the old archive originally after all! Should any who have not yet found us be unhappy, when they do they are more than welcome to request that their stories be removed.

Simply put, the more widely this site is linked, the better the chance of reaching all the authors who have posted so that they are aware of the move and can either endorse it, and the stricter posting policy we are implementing, or not. We would be grateful for any assistance with this from community webmasters, site owners and users of any CP related fora.

Can I link to the New MMSA from my website?

Yes please! You can cut and paste the following HTML fragment directly into your webpage to make a simple text link (please try to keep as much detail in the link text as possible):

<A href="https://malespank.net/">the New MMSA at malespank.net</A>

or you can use the following HTML fragment to make this simple animated GIF link:

New MMSA link logo
<A href="https://malespank.net/"><IMG src="MMSA_anim.gif" width="270" height="65" title="the New MMSA at malespank.net"></A>

You will need to right-click the image and Save Picture As... to download it, then upload it onto your own server, adding any local path to it into the code above if it is not stored in the same folder as your webpage.

Is this archive going to remain free to access?

Absolutely. There is no intention of ever charging for access to the stories in any way. All main listings and the stories themselves will always be free to view.

However, certain advanced site features which consume server resources may need to be charged for to ensure that the site can remain operational as it continues to grow rapidly, to fund a move when required eventually to servers with less operational restrictions and to fund site development. More information and our current thinking on this situation can be found in this currently unimplemented subscriber FAQ.

I’ve enjoyed and used the archive for years and I’d like to put something back, can I contribute towards the running costs?

As of December 2020, over fifteen years of operating the New MMSA, there have been merely a handful of donors, literally countable on two hands, to whom the site owners are extremely grateful. Whether concerns over anonymity or mere lack of consideration for the costs of hosting a resource like this are the prime factor in this underwhelming response is hard to say, but the reality is that the site does cost someone money so that users can access it for free. Good intentions do not pay web-hosting bills.

Implementation of a subscription system to pay for the advanced site features that use most server resources is therefore under consideration, although the mechanism (a well-known and widely used web payment system) will not allow completely anonymous payments to be made. Please see the discussion in this subscriber FAQ for further details.

What is all this talk of reviewing?

One of the problems with the old archive submission process was that it was virtually automatic, as it was being managed by just one person. That meant that over the years, despite a clear public policy on the sort of stories that were acceptable, a number of unacceptable ones slipped through. In the current public climate these stories (while they may be perfectly legal AS FICTION in some jurisdictions) could place the rest of the archive at risk.

The management team have assembled a team of volunteers who have worked through all the stories submitted to the old archive, nearly 7000 of them. They have been assessed against our public policy of acceptability (below) and we have at our discretion removed any stories that we feel cannot remain. Where possible, we notified the authors and asked them to submit to other archives or resubmit with offending material removed. All new stories submitted will also be reviewed this way before they actually get added into the database.

The secondary benefit of the review process is to place content tags in the database for each story, to allow much better searching based on various story aspects. This can only be done by carefully reading the stories and human input, as automatic parsing would almost always give erroneous results. For instance, consider the line:

When Bob came home from school, his Dad said he was going to give him a spanking, and that he was lucky he hadn’t been caned by his headmaster.

This would fool a search that looked for stories about caning at school just by scanning for those words, as (in context) it doesn’t actually happen! Now all stories are tagged, accurate searching of the entire archive by genre, scenario, actual implements used and the age of the spankees is finally possible, along with content filtering and other factors.

The final benefit of this manual review process is that many mistakes and glitches in the old automated submission process will be rectified. If authors made a small spelling mistake in their names when originally submitting stories, then those stories became orphaned and separated from the rest of their work under an incorrect author name. These will now be reassigned correctly where the mistake is obvious. Also, some authors deliberately used multiple names to get around the old archivist’s restrictions on the number of stories they could post at once. The end result is that a large number of old author names have disappeared as their stories are correctly attributed at last to a single author.

How long will the review process take to complete?

It is now completed! All 7000 stories inherited from the old archive have been reviewed and tagged, although there will be a long period now when we will be double-checking the initial reviews and updating the tags to incorporate new features added to improve the search options after the review process began.

We are EXTREMELY grateful to the volunteer review team who donated large amounts of their free time to make this enormously important aspect of the archive possible, and who continue to do so as new stories requiring reviewing are now pouring in at a very significant rate.

What exactly is the policy on what is acceptable?

Here is the policy that was stated on the original MMSA site:

This archive welcomes stories about male/male spanking activity, but it is NOT intended that this archive be a forum to talk about, promote, or revel in sexual abuse of children.

All stories MUST contain male/male CP activity in some form. This ranges from traditional OTK parental spanking and boys’ experimentations to the flogging of sailors on ships and slaves on plantations, etc.

Female characters are permitted both as the participants and observers of the spankings but not to the total exclusion of male/male activity. You might have a great mother/boy or uncle/girl story but that is not appropriate for this archive. Junior getting it from dad, mom, sis and brother is fine. Sister spanking kid brother for spying is a no-no unless both her and her boyfriend tan the Peeping Tom’s butt.

Sex (whether anal, oral, or manual) is NOT permitted between an adult and a minor. Stories that do not conform to these guidelines will be deleted.

This seems fairly clear, and the archive will be reviewed on that basis, with the following changes/clarifications:

We will allow stories focussed on spanking BY females, but ONLY of non-adult boys/teens and where the CP intent is primarily disciplinary rather than erotic, for instance mother/son situations. Stories where the boy being spanked is over 18 will likely be refused. While there are many places on the web to post stories containing mostly ADULT M/F or F/M CP, there are far fewer to find sub-adult (*/m or */b) CP stories and the likely F/b scenarios are not out of place in the large domestic-themed portion of the archive.

Stories are tagged if they contain spankings of or by females so that these can easily be skipped in the search results and listings if desired. There are also tags indicating the presence of full or solo sex, whether that is with under-18s, and rare excretory content (scat or piss play) in stories so that these may be skipped too.

But fundamentally this is an archive focussed on male/male CP and BDSM stories, so we will delete or refuse submission to single stories (not part of a larger on-topic series) that contain no actual male/male or F/b spanking references, just non-spanky sex for instance. There does not have to be an explicit spanking scene, however, if the focus of the story is clearly about discipline in some way. Indeed, some of the most interesting archive stories have been short on action but long on philosophy about CP, sometimes from very unusual perspectives.

We have thought long and hard about the ramifications of including/excluding stories with sex between teens and other teens/adults. The problem is not really one of law, as that varies so widely from place to place, both in what it might restrict in literary depictions and what may be allowed in reality. For instance, in many countries in the world there is a gay Age of Consent of 14 or even lower, while in others even consenting adult SM activities are technically illegal.

Ultimately this is an archive of stories, merely fantasies, that definitely do not encourage or promote taking any similar actions in reality, but we have had to consider what we as managers feel is morally appropriate for the site. We have therefore tried to strike a balance that allows writers to express certain universal truths about sexual relationships, especially between teens where most people might feel sexual experimentation is expected and appropriate, while restricting stories that depict what most would consider to be sexual abuse or coercion by adults where children are unable to give informed consent, which would be illegal in real life in most places.

Therefore, in line with that Age of Consent limit mentioned above, stories here (especially in an obviously modern setting and where the narrative has no moral dimension beyond titillation) may NOT generally contain depictions of sex between adults and children under 14. That is our definition of minor for the purposes of this story archive. Under that barrier age there may be sex or sex play described between children/teens where the age difference is no more than two or three years. This is also consistent with some national legislation we have considered while drawing up these guidelines, which seems to protect children satisfactorily in those countries.

Remember, however, that what we choose to permit or restrict here is our moral and personal choice (while the stories themselves as written works remain legal in the jurisdiction of the webserver the archive is on). These are written works of FANTASY, therefore this has NOTHING to do with any national law pertaining to real sexual acts. These policy guidelines may therefore vary considerably from what is actually legal behaviour between two or more people of various ages in the country or state you are viewing these stories from.

If that concerns you, or there are laws there which restrict the activities which may be depicted in written material and which may be broken by you downloading a story with such depictions, we INSIST that you use the no sex search options to restrict the stories which you may browse here for your own protection. We are NOT responsible for what you may browse to accidentally in this site.

Additionally, and this is new, stories containing rape or EXTREME physical cruelty (or using controversial settings that might cause offence) without any redeeming morality MAY be deleted/refused submission at our discretion. Authors will be contacted where possible to notify them if there is concern about this.

Isn’t that rather hypocritical, removing stories with extreme cruelty from an archive that still contains stories about disciplining children?

Perhaps, but it’s a moral choice and that sort of hypocrisy is part of society in general. It’s certainly much less hypocritical than the way many modern parents allow their children to browse the web unfiltered or gorge on a regular film/TV diet of explicit sex and violence that’s often (deliberately) pushing acceptability boundaries even during the ad breaks. We live in a hyper-sexualized society now that accepts barely-clad porn-pose underwear models splashed across billboards everywhere yet will complain about there being visible porn on the magazine shelves...!

As the archive managers we are free to define the rules any way we want in order to satisfy ourselves that physical/sexual abuse of children or rape is NOT being promoted or encouraged by the stories within it. Policy must always be guidelines, however, that can respond to the exceptional without being followed blindly. These stories always contain some sort of situational context and often a moral message within the writing, which indirectly defines what may be acceptable within them and what is not. Not all stories about CP or sexual abuse glorify it. In any case, writing that reflects historical practice and truth, or that isn’t set in the clearly here-and-now with all the normal social rules that implies, does not need to be censored for modern political correctness.

For instance, school stories with canings in them might be considered almost barbaric by modern 21st Century standards, but the reality was widespread and commonplace until only 40 or so years ago, well within living memory for many readers worldwide who will recognise their own schooldays in some of them. Judicial discipline, especially birching, and navy floggings, that were fully expected to draw blood, were again only comparatively recently repealed in many countries, and do still occur in others today, as indeed does physical torture in many jails worldwide, so stories containing these even if not in a historical or fantasy context will be perfectly acceptable here.

As a more extreme example, hanging and other forms of capital punishment are also pretty nasty, and murder in any form is obviously an ultimate form of physical abuse that is totally illegal, but there is no shortage of mass-market books, films and TV police procedurals with quite gruesome descriptions of them! Consider that many ancient civilisations did lots of things that we consider rather horrific now, like sacrificing children and slavery, but it would be ridiculous to block authors writing using culturally accurate storylines about them if that is their setting. You can’t erase or obscure history by preventing people writing about it, and the fact that these stories are collected on the web rather than on the shelf in your local bookshop makes no difference to their cultural and artistic value.

It is worth remembering that many children are still disciplined at home (mildly!) in ways that the clear public majority in many countries continues to believe is not abusive, but morally acceptable within the family. However, stories in an obviously modern setting where children are disciplined with an excessive level of force and cruelty appropriate only in a fantasy or historical setting, purely for the apparent enjoyment of the flogger without any possible benefit to the child, might well be considered by us to promote or glorify abuse and will probably not be welcome here.

Decisions on stories where these issues arise will be taken VERY carefully by committee and are necessarily subjective. It’s the old story of the American judge defining pornography: I know it when I see it!

But don’t these stories promote child abuse in any case?

We’re not going to legitimise this theoretical nonsense by discussing it and we don’t have to apologise for the archive contents. Again, by definition murder is illegal, yet no-one in their right mind is surely suggesting that reading a detective novel or watching a movie about the Mob actually encourages people to go out and commit crimes! Shut down Hollywood! Ban Agatha Christie now!

Reading stories about spanking children does NOT create child abuse. It might, however, create very healthy discussion about it and the rights and wrongs of physical discipline (which IS still legal in many countries under increasingly strictly defined circumstances), and the archive management is very happy to provoke that free, open and important discussion. We in NO way condone ANY form of actual physical harm to children outside the law, however.

The ONLY person who creates child abuse is the one who actually takes a real child and hits them, whether in anger or for pleasure. No matter what they may have read, heard or watched, on the web or anywhere else, only THEY are responsible for their own actions, no-one else.

Much like the old archivist, however, we STRONGLY believe that the law has NO place interfering in adult sexuality and what consenting adults (or indeed consenting teens) do to each other for their own pleasure in private. If this archive continues to encourage free thinking and uninhibited yet responsible sexual activity and enjoyment we will be extremely pleased to have contributed to an improvement in 21st Century morality!

Will there be a mailing list?

The old MMSA had a dedicated mailing list that provided notifications of new stories added on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this site has no access to the old email list. In any event, we are aware that the old archive mailing list developed serious problems as many mail gateways erroneously considered it as spam and refused to pass on the messages, which is not something we want to happen here, so we feel it’s probably better not to duplicate it. It’s easy enough for people to browse the newest stories list occasionally or make a search.

Any important newsflashes about the archive will be placed in the public area of the New MMSA forum which can be viewed without registration.

What is the New MMSA forum?

Many writers have provided email addresses in the past so that they can receive feedback from readers, hopefully good! Although feedback is still possible direct to authors from their stories, we feel a community discussion space is a useful extension that may allow more direct participation between the writers and their readers, that may also encourage better writing (and possibly better appreciation of what has been written).

This is a place where questions about archive policy can be addressed and discussed publicly with the managers, and we will provide important news announcements. It is, after all, and now more so than ever before, an archive FOR readers BY authors. One of the main problems with the old archive was that actually getting to discuss anything with the old archivist was next to impossible. Questions will now be answered and news provided clearly in the open.

Otherwise, while on-topic subjects are obviously preferred, we enjoy a wide range of both light-hearted banter and serious debate and we actively encourage participation from both authors and readers. Please join in – we look forward to welcoming you there!

To participate fully and view the membership areas you will need to register at the New MMSA forum. For security, you will need to provide a REAL email address to register and you will NOT be able to complete registration until you have confirmed receipt of a welcome email at that address. ALL registrations with invalid email addresses will immediately be deleted.

What are all the small coloured icons in the listings?

These are the visual representations of the tags added by the review process for a story. They show the various aspects of the story we have chosen to make searchable, such as the age of the people being spanked, the implements used, whether the story is prose, non-fiction or poetry, the type of scenario such as school, domestic or judicial etc., any particular story genre such as fan-fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, historical etc. and any site recommendations. There are also tags which allow some unwanted content filtering in the main listings. There is an MMSA site help page that provides the complete icon listing and other information on customising the website, which is always accessible using the questionmark icon at the foot of every page.

Our story search links, including a full text search, return immediate filtered results using these tags.

What are these new story recommendations?

This is a new feature designed to increase the interactive value of the archive and reward the best writers, whose stories can be recommended by YOU, the readers, if you wish to. It allows you as a reader to help other readers by letting them know which stories you found most enjoyable or worth your time.

At the bottom of every story is a simple form where you can vote to recommend a story to other readers based on its overall writing qualities or its raunch factor, or both! The votes are accumulated in the database and when enough people have recommended a story it will gain a visible marker as a readers’ choice. It is possible to use this as a search criteria so that the best stories in a category can be selected and listed, and there may be other dedicated lists available using the recommendations in future.

There is also a further recommendation available to the site managers and reviewers to make immediately, when we come across particularly good stories that deserve high recommendation. You can be sure that any story that has been recommended in either way will be well worth reading!

If you particularly like a story, PLEASE vote on it! Every recommendation counts, even if the story has already reached recommended status, as the thresholds for that status may change over time as the archive matures and as we assess the overall voting response from readers. Voting on the early stories from the old archive is especially encouraged, even though some have been around on the Internet for 20 years or more. Many of those authors are still contributing and will be very glad to receive your feedback.

What are those other neat and strangely familiar images around the site?

malespank.net tawse pictogram

They have been created specially for this New MMSA website. They are based on the original 1972 Munich Olympic Games pictographs designed by Otl Aicher, which have been more recently expanded for commercial signage applications by a company called Erco. Otl Aicher was the head designer for the 1972 Olympic Games, who created one of the most famous and consistent design identities of recent time, including one of the most flexible and widely used modern typefaces, Univers, which was used to create our main site logo.

Consenting adult CP is a fun activity that gives a great emotional and physical workout for all taking part, so the original brilliant concept of the geometric man to show various sporting activities is therefore perfectly extended by this new set! The various sets of actual Olympic pictograms, of which Aicher’s originals are generally considered the best, are archived at the Olympic Games Virtual Museum.

Can new stories be submitted to the archive?

Yes, of course! To post, you will need a unique author account, so that all your stories can be managed by you and so you can be sure that when you submit new ones they get attributed to you correctly. All submissions and story management are done through our web site using this password protected account, including notifications of story acceptance/rejection. There is however no facility to submit stories by email as there used to be, except in exceptional pre-arranged circumstances.

If you are an author who posted stories to the old archive now appearing on this site, but haven’t been contacted by us with a password to access your account to manage your old stories, or to add new ones under your old author name, please contact us directly (use the email address at the foot of the page) so that we can validate your claim to them.

Can I still post as Anonymous?

Because this version of the archive is designed specifically to allow authors to manage their own stories fully, we have chosen to drop the old feature by which authors could post as Anonymous. Initially, if you were unwilling to create an account in order to have a unique author ID, you could still post to this archive as Anonymous, although you would have had no further management access as author to a story submitted that way.

However, given the fact that we do NOT require authors to submit valid email addresses or use real names for their accounts, and the ability of users to access the site using proxies and other surf anonymisation, there is absolutely NO practical difference between posting using an effectively anonymous author account and merely dumping a completely unattributed story here anonymously. We would much prefer to have stories correctly attributed to and able to be maintained by their legitimate authors, who are then able to take credit for them, so this facility has been removed.

How can I update or delete my story?

Every new author will create their own new user account in our archive database, so for them this will not be a problem. Through this they have the ability to easily manage their own stories by adding to the list, and a full edit/update facility is now in place. We have recently agreed a new procedure for removing stories, and this must now be done by request in writing to the site administrators, with a cooling-off period to help us find alternative ways of handling removals. Authors’ rights over their stories will not be affected. Full details of the new policy for authors with archive accounts can be found in our submission guide.

For existing authors, it is just a matter of validating them to give full access to the correct author account and their stories. This is tricky, however. The problem is that many of the existing stories in the archive were submitted almost or completely anonymously. Only the email address submitted (if any) remains as proof of the author’s ownership, and that as everyone knows is all too easily forged.

Apart from the authors that are known personally to the management team, therefore, it is going to be very difficult to ascertain whether someone writing out of the blue and asking for their stories to be removed or updated is indeed the legitimate author. The old archivist’s instinct was to ignore all such requests in case they were mischievous, unless there was extremely clear and unequivocal proof that the person was who they claimed. What that might be remained to be seen in the circumstance – as he used to say, you are free and welcome to try to convince me...

Ultimately, the security of the archive is paramount. We cannot allow a situation where people could maliciously and falsely remove stories that weren’t their own, and if necessary we will remain sole arbiters of what can and can’t be removed/altered without proof of ownership. We want to assist authors in managing their own work, but we will obviously be cautious. In general, while a story remains unclaimed in an inactive author account and it conforms to the acceptability guidelines stated clearly above, as it was posted in good faith it will remain posted and publicly accessible without EXTREMELY good reason provided to us. This in no way affects our respect for the legitimate copyright privileges of the original authors, where this ownership can be proved to us.

Can I edit my story to fix spelling mistakes or update it?

Yes! There is a full editing facility in place, just log into your author account and find the update link there. Because editing could conceivably change the acceptability of the story, we have to review the changes to make sure it’s still OK and if necessary change the content tags, and we will let you know when any alterations are approved (or not). You can either upload a new file or edit the raw HTML we have stored if you are comfortable with that.

It may be worth checking the HTML of your older stories carefully in any case, as many were mangled in various ways by the old archive posting scripts, including removal of apostrophes in particular. We do encourage this – we are very keen that all your stories should be as readable as possible, both grammatically accurate and well-presented!

My story is posted, but under the wrong name – can I correct this?

Sure! This archive has been around a long time, and because of the old insecure story posting method, that allowed mis-spellings of author names to be commonplace and remain uncorrected, a lot of mistakes were made. Perhaps too in the beginning people were less comfortable posting even under a pseudonym and felt safer posting as Anonymous. Most of the very oldest stories were posted that way, anyway, and it is clear that many of those stories were helpfully republished from other printed sources, probably not by the original writers.

We have actively fixed attribution errors where we found them. The review process allowed us to take note of story comments like See the first part of this story posted under the name XXXX by mistake... and we have made story searches to try and find missing parts of series. Just looking for mistyped author names and comparing author email addresses allowed us to remove almost one hundred duplicate and superfluous author names!

We would be delighted if authors can come forward to finally reclaim their own work, or if people wish to correct any misattributions that they are aware of. Just email us with the information and we will consider it fully, bearing in mind the general proviso about proving ownership mentioned above.

Are you moderating for content only or for quality too?

We do not intend to remove any stories that do not reach some subjective quality threshold. There may be some that are, however, so truly awful in their spelling, grammar and basic literacy that we may be sorely tempted! Where we have concerns we will work actively with authors to encourage self-editing and promote understanding of the need to write to a common standard. However, there is no excuse for this – good spelling and grammar checkers are standard even in email software these days, never mind writing software. If you want your story to be read, the very least you should do is ensure that it is readable before you post it... It is NOT the job of the archive to edit your work for you!

We would hope that in future authors will strive to be the beneficiaries of the new reader recommendations system, which will surely reward those authors who take the necessary care and patience over the basic as well as the finer points of the writing craft...

What are your guidelines on the length of stories?

The length should be whatever feels comfortable for you as an author. There are some very long and truly excellent stories in the archive, but some readers may not have the patience to read these, preferring shorter ones. There are no technical issues with uploading extremely long stories, but if you can split them into logical chapters it will be much easier for you to manage and for your readers to enjoy. We will join the chapters up into linked series when we review them so that readers can move straight from one chapter to the next.

There is no policy on minimum length of SINGLE stories, but we have noticed a tendency for a few authors to post in EXTREMELY short chapters, a mere few paragraphs at a time. This uses more resources in the database and slows searching and site access for all users. Also, because exposure on the Newest Stories page is precious to all other authors, who may have spent much time crafting a longer piece which then gets pushed rapidly off the page due to stories having been split into multiple tiny chapters, it is inconsiderate.

We will therefore be considering the length of stories split into parts carefully and we may refuse submission if we feel they are excessively short. If a story is to be continued, then please continue writing and finish it and THEN post a full-length piece. Posting it a page or a few paragraphs at a time is absurd and disrespectful to other site users.

Are there any other guidelines on writing for the archive?

We STRONGLY recommend you read the separate story submission FAQ for further pointers on acceptable content, formatting for the site, style guidelines and information on how to submit interactive stories. Any questions not covered in that or requests for clarification should be asked by email or posted in the New MMSA forum.

Will you be doing any story editing?

See above. The simple answer is no, although a certain amount of reformatting may take place to improve the visual appearance of a few stories, generally where the available HTML is very old and non-conforming or was actually broken in the old archive submission process. We are also working to make all the stories validate as HTML5, so some obvious errors may be fixed in that update process.

With the new author account system, it is now in the capability of authors to easily make small typo corrections or more substantial edits (for example to fix where the old site submission scripts ruthlessly removed every apostrophe) without deleting/resubmitting, and we very much hope they will take advantage of this feature for their own benefit.

Having said that, as indicated above we are concerned that some authors appear to be uploading EXTREMELY small chapters, sometimes only a few paragraphs long, which could be easily joined into a story of a respectable length. We reserve the right to join any such mini-episodes together into chapters or full stories of a more decent length so as not to waste our resources.

What about all the d_a_m_n_ed underlining?

That should ALL have been removed now! No more c_o_c_k_tails in Sus_s_e_x_ ...

I have another question...

Email us with it at the address below, or post it in the New MMSA forum. In the meantime, enjoy the New MMSA!


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