There's been a lot of talk lately surrounding the writeoff's content policy and what should and should not be allowed on the site, starting from discussion of the story Monsters. There was hot debate about whether this story or others like it are allowed, and if it is where exactly is "the line" of what is considered acceptable?

The current rules say the content level is "T for Teen". But this is a bit of a lie. We've already had a number of stories that cross what would reasonably be considered socially acceptable under this description, but I've not banned them because the stories didn't actually violate the spirit of the writeoff.

Since the written rules don't really reflect the actual rules, we should probably clarify what the *actual* rules are and make them the written ones.

So what is "the spirit of the writeoff"? In my mind, the writeoff is a writing workshop which uses competition as a means for helping authors improve their skills. In other words, it's a workshop first, and a competition second. What sort of things are acceptable in serious writing workshops? Usually, pretty much anything. So if someone submits something that's an honest, serious attempt at even a very sensitive topic, it should be allowed, even if it sucks[1].

Reading the above you might be thinking, "So, what, there's just no rules at all now?" Well, not quite, there is one type of writing that is really not suited for the writeoff: porn. As Cassius mentioned, workshopping porn is a nightmare. And as a writing exercise it's really orthogonal to what everyone else is trying to do, so we're just gonna say "not here thanks" for porn.

The specific wording of the intended rule for what's not allowed:

No porn or anything overly gratuitous

The "anything overly gratuitous" part of the rule is to reinforce the idea that entries should be serious attempts.[2]

There's another side to this coin, though. While it'd be nice for the writeoff to be as flexible as possible in what it permits authors to submit, there's also the issue that a lot of readers simply don't want to read certain stuff. The aforementioned Monsters featured pedophilia, and there's other similar topics which people are perfectly reasonable in saying that they just don't want to read. So to address this side of the coin, I've proposed adding a flag system which would behave as follows:

(1) Submission form has a list of flags. Submitter must select all that apply. Failure to properly flag stories results in DQ.
(2) Top of story has a box that says something like. "This story is flagged as containing <list of flags>. Discretion is advised." Users can opt not to show this warning in preferences.
(3) Users can opt not to have stories containing certain flags appear in their slates in preferences. Also, stories in the gallery containing these flags will have a warning icon beside them labelled with the above warning text.

With this system, the main hard part is deciding what the list of flags should be. So far what's been suggested:

Certainly going to be flags: pedophilia, rape, suicide, gore
Probably going to be flags: drugs, gambling
Maybe going to be flags: hate/discrimination, death, sex
Hotly debated flag: horror

There's a huge risk of this getting out of control, so I'm going to be pretty strict on what is and isn't a flag. Flags are not tags. Flags should be things which a reasonable adult would be sensible in saying they don't want to read that because it makes them extremely uncomfortable.

[1]: People brought up "literary merit" as a potential defence for edgy fics and I think that's definitely not the way to go. This essentially punishes people for mistakes, rather than bad intentions. People need the freedom to fail.

[2]: I'm pretty sure "overly" is redundant but the rule seems wrong without it.

I'd be supportive of the first tier of tags, i.e. pedo, rape, suicide and gore. I'd object to the others and probably refuse to use them if they were implemented.

I agree with CiG. The first tier feels appropriate as something to implement while the lower tiers feel arbitrary. We are all some version of adults and in a workshop via competition environment placing too many flags seems counter productive. I otherwise like this idea.

6240483

6240540
A lot of the second and later tier tags may feel a bit dicey, yeah, but I'd be in support of Drugs and Horror at the very least.

Drugs because I've associated with people in the past whose lives depended on avoiding that kind of material for their safety, and horror because someone legitimately, actually left the writeoff after being exposed to The Archetypist against their will. That's the only example I or anyone else could think of about someone vocally quitting the writeoff over a story besides pedophilic content.

6240595

I still have to make my mind up about the flags, it will require some more deliberation to decide if I like or dislike them.

That said, the drugs flag seems far too broad without a pretty tight explanation on when to use it. For example, to use a couple of borderline cases, would Brave New World require it? What about Dr. House? What about Sherlock Holmes (can't remember the specific story)? Does alcoholism, or the consumption of alcohol in general, fall under the flag? What about being dependant on painkillers?

6240606
Well, I'm not Roger, and this isn't my writeoff, but my conception would be a story that focuses on real-world drugs to a significant extent. Like, uh, Huxley's Soma isn't super discomforting, but if you write a story about a heroin or a coke addict or someone's psychedelic drug trip, that could possibly warrant the tag.

I don't have much right to stick my nose in this debate, so I'll only say I think "hate/discrimination" is the most problematic of the suggested tags. In one sense, every story ever written is about one or both of those things. Also, I fear it threatens confusion because hate is an emotion while discrimation is an act. Lastly, it's quite subjective, as what one may consider critique another may consider hate. This is especially the case for any story straying into politics. A problem would likely arise with authors believing they've correctly tagged their story, and readers not, but neither side having truly better justifcation than the other. My experience of an emotion won't be yours, and my definition of an act as broad as discrimination is likely to differ from yours as well.

6240618
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to be polemical, it's just that I think this flag (drugs) is vague enough as to have people either err on the side of caution (see my other borderline examples) or to skip it directly as a story element because they don't want to further fragment their audience. Or to risk disqualification.

The other top tier flags are quite clear, as is Horror, so I have less issues with their use.

I don't know, maybe giving some concrete examples in the flag description could solve the problem.

6240659
Understandable, of course. I'm sure Roger will have any content flag descriptions ironed out when he implements them.

And as for worrying about what to tag a story, my usual policy is to always err on the side of caution, personally.

I did lot of things wrong:

When I was putting this story together--things like the tone of the piece, the character voicings, not making full use of the Equestrian setting, things that can be fixed in revision. But I did a lot more things wrong in the way I presented it on the site, and those are things I can only apologize for.

I have no idea why I didn't put a warning note at the top of the story. I mean, I used a warning note in my story "Noblesse Oblige" at the beginning of the year--I even sent a section to Roger and asked if it was too much for the "T" rating. Here, maybe I thought that it was OK since the whole story is about Dash refusing to give in to her awful urges, but whatever I was thinking, I was wrong.

I'll wholeheartedly support any tagging system that helps readers have an idea of what they're getting into before they start a story. I just wish I'd thought to do that myself a week and a half ago.

Mike

6240464, 6240595

"Certainly" - Absolutely needs to be tagged. There's no question there.
"Probably" - I'll abstain from. I could easily see it go either way.
"Maybe" - Would be nice and respectful.

"Horror" - This needs to be a tag, but let me say why.

On a personal level, I can't psychologically cope with most forms of horror. Especially well-written horror by really good authors (of which there are many in the Writeoffs). If it was poorly written, I wouldn't be invested in the characters and it wouldn't have nearly as much of an emotional impact. Horror stuff sticks in my head for years (and no, I'm not exaggerating) afterward and literally comes to me in the middle of the night. It's purely a psychological thing and something I have no control over.

Sadly, the idea of "you can just stop reading" doesn't work for horror. Often, well-written horror doesn't reveal itself to be horror until one crucial moment. By then, it's too late and the damage has been done. Personally, I have to finish the story at that point in the hope of getting some amount of closure... and rarely does that actually heal the damage.

I could participate in Writeoffs but never vote/read for fear of coming across a horror story, but that just feels wrong to me and against the spirit of the event.

TL;DR: Everyone's got their triggers and some people take it way harder than others, not by choice, but because of their personality, experience, psychological makeup, etc. Having those tags (including horror) will allow more people to participate without worrying about coming across something that might mess them up for days, weeks, months or even years to come.

I agree with most of what has been said, mainly the use of the sex and gore flags as I think these are clear about the content of the stories. However, I must voice my opinion regarding horror.

I didn't participate in the round where The Archetypist was making the rounds, so I admit I don't know the exact contect of how things went down. Nevertheless, from reading the comments and the mentions in the Discord chat, I'm inclined to believe that the reaction was brought up not by the story being a horror story, but by the inclusion of body horror in the form of Twilight sewing her eyes shut, and that's where my concern lies.

Unlike the other flags, horror is not about content but about a genre. A genre which has multitude of subgenres. A story about atmospheric horror is ot the same as one about slasher horror, nor is a story about magical horror the same as a stoy about more realistic horror. Hell, a pure horror is still very different from a horror comedy, for example.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the issues with the Archtypist would've been solved had it been flagged with gore, even if the actual body horror parts were minimal. Going back to what I said about horror comedies, if I were to write a story similar in tone to Shaun of the Dead, I would certainly mark it as a having gore, but that movie used its heavy gore and horror elements to create jokes and funny situations, which someone who wants to avoid a pure horror story might actually enjoy.

This, of course, bleeds into the general complaint I've seen of why isolating horror and not other genres, say, tragedy, for example. A tragedy--at least correctly written one--deals with the downfall of a character due to their own hubris, and since nowadays this is commonly applied as ending with a character death, I could see it being fit for the gore or suicidal thoughts flags, but do you think it should have a flag of its own?

These are just my two cents, I don't think the horror flag is necessary, as long as the writer properly identifies the type of horror they want to write and properly flags objectionable content should they come up in the story.

6240464
So just to be clear here: when we say, e.g. "suicide" is a flag, what are the criteria for application? Clearly it covers the (potentially harmful) story in which someone kills themselves to solve a problem and it's implied to be a good thing. What about a story in which someone kills themselves and the story is quite clear about the tragedy and horror of it? What about a story in which someone tries to kill themselves but is stopped? What about a story in which suicide is a major plot point but never shown on screen? What about a story in which an offscreen suicide is offhandedly mentioned?

Is the flag suicide advocacy or suicide depiction? Why?

I can foresee one possibly unintended consequence of the idea: if people who dislike stories flagged X are able to opt out of voting on it, I suspect that on average it will result in higher ratings for flagged stories, because if they had voted they would have been more likely to vote it low on their slate. However, I don't think that by itself that's enough of a counterargument to cancel out the benefits of "people can opt out of reading content they find objectionable".

Another possibly unintended consequence: The existence of flags and opt-out may be taken as sanction for these categories rather than an expression that they are legitimate competitors which might upset/harm readers. I can see someone in the future saying, "Well, if you think child porn is reprehensible, opt out of the pedophilia flag rather than voting it down," and … I'm pretty sure that's not what we're going for here? I am open to stories which tackle the idea of pedophilia, but the approach is still going to be crucial to my reception of it.

I'd also suggest that instead of "porn" we just state "explicit depiction of sexual acts".

Re horror, maybe it's worth considering both flags and tags? I think the implication that horror and pedophilia are in the same class of harmful ideas is itself a bad statement, but I certainly see a use case for labeling both.

Here’s an idea: why not have the tags be spoilered so you know there might be something sketchy about the story you’re going to read but you don’t know what unless you specifically want to know what.

6240739
While that was truly horrific (and I still occasionally have nightmares of it), the psychological implications of the story disturbed me far more. But that's just me. I can't speak for others or anyone who had super-strong reactions to that story. Loss of self is far more terrifying to me.

You are right, the "Horror" genre tag is a difficult thing to classify. Just like "Dark" is. In the end, it's going to be up to the author. I think most authors know if the story they're writing would be considered "horror" by a vast majority of the readership (but that could be wishful thinking).

Well, fuck, I'm glad I didn't have time to read in the preliminary now.

That being said: pedophilia, rape, suicide, and gore I completely agree with.

Drugs and gambling, however, I do not. I do not believe these can be properly defined in the scope of a story. I will focus on gambling first. Do you add it if a character mentions having done so, proposes to do so, or actively gambles within the story; if it's depicted as good, bad, or just in general; if it's utilized as a way to flush out characters or as a dialogue crutch.... you get the idea.

Drugs, then. Has everyone forgotten the shit we did in Rising From the Ashes and the 420 jokes? No problems to be had there. But, more focused on the now, this one has many contextual problems as well. What if the protagonist is a police officer, actively fighting drug use... do you use it there? Clearly, use it when the protagonist uses drugs themselves, but what if it's a friend? What if drugs are used to "escape" from the world, or are they destroying lives? Is it used in a comedic sense, where (almost) everyone knows not to take it seriously, or is it a serious, life story? Tl;dr, no to both drugs and gambling.

Hate/discrimination. No. It also has many contextual issues. What is it discriminating against, is it about stopping it, or promoting it? Is it comedic, serious, or something else? It has too many possibilities. And, by the way, this would encompass a crap ton of stories that are ever written, because it's pretty impossible to write a story that does not do this in some way.

Death. Death is a natural part of life, get over it. At least, that's my view on it.

Sex. What counts? Sexual acts which are clearly banned by other rules, light kissing, something in between? It would be way too hard to define this, so leave it at pedophilia and rape.

And finally, horror. Yes. Just absolute yes. Now, I happen to enjoy a good horror story. But others, such as Novel-Idea, have serious psychological problems with horror. This would be a way for me, as a horror-enjoy-er, to find it, and others, like Novel, to avoid it. As for what classifies as horror? I'll point you to 6240739

6241204
A big part of the reason this is being implemented is because people didn’t feel comfortable bringing up things that bothered them until it reached a breaking point. In fact, what you’re saying about the Death tag is pretty much verbatim what people said when others expressed discontent over another story about pedophilia in the writeoff, that we’re all adults and should be able to handle such topics with grace.

Now I imagine a few of these tags won’t make the final cutoff, but what if they do? If you have no problems with the content flagged, it’s your prerogative to not block that content when it appears in the writeoff. This solution was designed as a consideration to people who have issues with content others may not find objectionable. Naturally there would be topics considered “lesser” than the ones everyone agrees should be flagged that other people have issue with, and I believe it’s in everyone’s interest to consider a different perspective than our own when thinking about the writeoff in general.

About the only things I would say should be omitted are graphic gore and sexually explicit material. As unsettling as I found Monsters to be, as tastelessly as I think it approached the subject matter...
I can't honestly condemn something it just for being transgressive.

Its themes have come up in writeoffs before; so long as they are handled with the appropriate gravity (Familiar 1.0, which I am specifically thinking of here, remains my favorite from the recent ponyfic rounds, and it also, incidentally, made mention of drug use, iirc), and don't incorporate explicit or gratuitous material, I have no problem with them being used as subject matter.

6241317
Disclosure, this is not meant to argue or be berating in any way. This is literally the way I write. I am, in fact, attempting an intelligent response about my thoughts and reasonings.
Yes, I see the need and use. But the problem lies within what counts as what, which is a subjective thing, and as such, I am unable to look at the Writeoff as a whole effectively. This may be something that only happens for me, but it still happens. I also fully expect the tags to change before they are implemented, and probably a bit more after. Anyway, I wanted to voice my thoughts on certain tags in their current, generalized forms.

And if they don't change and are implemented as is? I will probably never write for and enter a Writeoff for a long time. But that's my choice, and I refuse to make a fuss about it.

Also, as a side note, I am of the psychological abnormality of whom death does not bother. So my view of getting over it is rather skewed, and as such, it is impossible for me to be understanding when people don't. Hence why it is just my opinion.

6241638
That last part is entirely irrelevant to the conversation, for starters, because this isn’t about personal concerns but community concerns. Personally, I read much worse stuff in the approval queue than I ever did in the writeoff. But that doesn’t mean that I can disregard the experiences of other people because I don’t have an issue reading that sort of thing.

Secondly, yes, we’re probably in agreement that a good portion of these tags won’t make it to the writeoff proper. If they did, though, I’d trust the users of the writeoff, being rather intelligent, to figure out where the tags apply. I’d personally go by the rule of thumb that if you think it might apply, it probably applies. Overtagging would be much more preferable to undertagging in this scenario.

And yes, you’re perfectly within your right to voice your concerns with the tags as-is. As I said in an earlier comment, I fully expect Roger to have these tags fully defined partially based on the concerns people have raised in this thread. I do have to say that it would be a sad irony for you to leave over making the writeoff a more inclusive community experience, but, in the end, that’s your choice. I understand holding your ground on such matters.

6240464

drugs, gambling

You're probably headed in this direction already, but specifics can probably be along the lines of drug/gambling addiction/abuse glorification/experiensation.

A story that goes inside of the head of a rock bottom druggie who, despite everything, has enough receptors to still feel a kick, a point in the story that delves into that experience and how "uplifting" or "liberating" the experience in can probably receive that flag. Or any story where drugs, plot element or no, are being abused, and this improper usage is being aggrandized. Similar with gambling, the idea I think is to flag stories that would never make it to the Rehabilitation Center's bookshelf. If the drugs/gambling are important plot devices in a marginalized way (IE, drug bust leading to arrests) then I think they should be able to clear having the flag.

hate/discrimination, death, sex

I can empathize with sometimes feeling enough is enough of hate/discrimination absorption, but I think only if the discrimination/hate is a major theme or plays a major role should that be flagged. Sex se-speaks for itself, though to be clear I am of the mind that sex of any rating should be at least flagged. I would have to say that death would probably be better fitting under the broader category of "really sad" or "onion cutter", where the writer is intending to evoke incredibly strong feelings of sadness, depression, etc.

Those are my thoughts on this, to maybe help get some extra working descriptors down for the categories beyond line 1.

6240483
This comment has a lot of upvotes so I get the feeling that the purpose of the flags is being misunderstood.

Essentially, I'm seeing that people want to submit stuff that goes well beyond what should be considered "T". I'm also hearing that some people can't participate in reading/voting in the writeoff at all because of the risk they'll stumble upon something they can't handle.

The loosening of the content guidelines to "no porn etc." is for the former group.

The flags are for the latter group. They're not for you.

So saying that you're only okay with the first tier of flags feels to me like the point is being missed.

It may be the case that the writeoff is simply an unsuitable place for people in the latter group, and that we should just have no flags at all. I can accept that as an argument. (The cost of having flags may be higher than the payoff of greater inclusiveness.)

But if we are having flags, then the flags are going to be decided by the people who are actually going to use them.

There's no cost to the writer in flagging their story. It'll only stop the probably 5% or so of readers who avoid those particulars flag from reading it. I imagine most users will hide flag messages entirely, so there's not even a huge spoiler factor. Any concern along the lines of "I don't want there to be a horror flag because then I have to flag my horror story," is over-wrought, I think.

6241764
I do think a distinction does matter there.

Taking Death - You have CiG's The Remainders of the Day, which ultimately is all about Death as a concept, yet at the same time it's not really something I can see as a traumatizing take on it.

Whereas a story that's about somepony getting shot and murdered and the aftermath on their family? That I can see as being much more brutal.

Honestly, I feel like there should be some leeway on some of these flags, that what it really comes down to is 'Is this material included in a way that might upset people?'. Like, taking 'Rising From the Ashes' where we had a boatload of stories about weed humor, I don't think that merits an automatic 'Drugs' flag in a way a story about hardcore Pony Heroin addiction would.

The 'Certainly' flags are different in that there's really no dodging the intensity of those; suicide is the closest you can get there to having it be an element that is danced around, but even then it's pretty much always serious subject matter, whereas ponies getting high is nowhere in the same category.

So I guess for some of the likelies/maybes I'd feel like there could be a, I dunno, 'Use judgement if this is applicable, and if the community thinks you should have tagged and didn't, some kind of warning?'

6241764
I think there's probably a little bit of concern on the part of writers who don't need the flags and are going to keep them hidden -- because they don't need them, it's not intuitive which situations call for them. They can make an educated guess, but there are going to be times where they guess wrong, and they either needlessly lose potential readers or trigger readers accidentally. 6241813 touches on this a bit: some of the potential flags may or may not be context-sensitive; strong guidelines, perhaps written by those who do need the flags, should exist.

6241677
That last part was relevant as you used what I said about death in your response. Now, I will not disregard other people's concerns, they are just as valid, if not more so, than mine... but I, personally, have problems looking at the community instead of individuals. I, therefore, voice myself as an individual, so other people can assemble the whole.

I am going to clarify a little bit. I will not leave the Writeoff. I will simply stop writing for it. I will still be there for the art rounds, as I really enjoy those, and I will still jump in to review things on a case-by-case basis.

After more discussion in Discord, I've come to think my original conception the flags as flawed. If they're defined by people who say they need them, then there's no justifiable reason not to include any particular flag, so the floodgates would be open and it'd get ugly.

Cassius said it should be:

Flags are for users to avoid content we determine subjectively to be highly inflammatory.

This would be rape, pedo, and gore. Maybe suicide. Maybe sex. Speaking of:

6240755

I'd also suggest that instead of "porn" we just state "explicit depiction of sexual acts".

Are there "explicit depictions of sexual acts" that aren't porn that we want to permit? I don't just mean artsy sex or comedic sex, but also anything that is less about being arousing and more about being... real. Is there are reason not to be more permissive on this axis, while also having a "sex" flag since it's a highly inflammatory subject? The main reason I can think of is that it's harder to enforce / draw the line.

6242087
The reason I say "explicit depictions of sexual acts" rather than porn is that the former is closer to "sex that would earn an M rating on FIMFiction", whereas porn is a smaller subset of that with exceptions removed like the ones you talk about.

Is there a case to allow those? Maybe. Sure. I'd probably even write some myself. But "explicit depictions of sexual acts" is closer to what we currently ban, and doesn't involve complicating this discussion with where to draw yet another line-about-to-move.

6242379
All right. We can leave that for later discussion.

For now, will settle on the following test run:

- Flags for pedo, rape, gore, suicide, and horror
- Remove "grotesque content" from content restriction