As you might be aware, Hugh, the previous owner, and programmer of GaySpiralStories had some strict rules regarding the age of the characters, brand name characters (superheroes, Disney, animé etc.) and real life persons. I totally understand why he’s put these rules into effect, he had very good reasons for them. For various reasons which are not the point of this thread, I made a different decision to be more liberal and removed these rules.
So now I get contacted by guys who miss stories from the old NCMC time which Hugh deleted because they were violating these rules.
Technically, those stories are still all in our system and I could revive them with a single click. But I usually say that it’s up to the original author of those stories if they want to reactivate them. Unfortunately, most of them can’t be reached, as nobody know their email address (many of the old stories were posted without any email address at all).
I wonder, what’s your take on this? In theory, those authors all agreed that their stories are published on NCMC. And when the NCMC database was imported into the original GSS, none of them agreed to that, but it was considered to be ok anyway.
Is there any good reason not to undelete those stories?
Well, one reason would be how to identity them. Because some of the stories might be deleted for a different reason, like their author requested it or there’s another violation of a rule still in effect.
Could I suggest that you start with the stories belonging to authors that you can reach out to and get their permission to undelete? Don’t know what percentage of the archive that would be or how much work it would involve.
With regard to those where no contact is possible I think it’s tricky if you don’t know whether the story were deleted at an author’s request. There also might be some authors out there who don’t want their names suddenly reappearing on a different site after a gap.
Also are you going to check that the stories match up to your rules, especially given the recent discussion around underage characters?
Somewhat related, my old account was T.K.Summer (Stories by T.K.Summer - Gay Spiral Stories) not sure if any of my stories were deleted but how do I regain access to that account?
That’s easy - just write me a an email or PM with the email you’ve used for those stories (I can help you with a hint if you’re not sure about it), and I’ll assign those stories to your current account.
You can then reuse T.K. Summer again and decide to change the author name for all stories to that or to the new name (just edit them). Whatever you prefer.
I agree with BikeSubIrl’s post. As much as I think it’d be great to have all the stories back, I’d be concerned about pissing off authors who had asked for one or more of their stories to be deleted. By the same token, you might be exposing them to legal consequences (whether it’s age, copyright, or whatever else) that they thought they were safe from now that their stories were deleted. I’m sure the vast majority of them aren’t concerned about that if they posted the story in the first place, but I’ve certainly changed my mind on these sorts of issues over the years, so others may have as well.
I think your best bet is to reach out to as many as you can, and maybe just put the word out (a banner on the main site and maybe a post in Discord) that you’d like to recover people’s old stories, and that authors of old stories should get in touch with you if they’re interested.
I can try and go back over my emails and see if I can make a list of authors who requested their stories be removed. I’ll see if I can do that tomorrow or Sunday. Have to filter out all of the notification emails in order to find them.
I actually do miss some of those stories (superheroes, recognizable celebrities), but they weren’t a lot of them. I think its great they are still available - as sites like Archive of our Own stories use superhero/celebrity likeness and names.
Of course its nicer to ask the original authors where possible as some may be unreachable after some time
Hi everybody! This is my first time in the forum. In my opinion, would be great if those stories return. I think there should not be any problems with the writers, (after all, they post them here by their own will and everybody use a nickname), but in order to avoid some kind of problem with the content, the stories that involve characters with copyright or celebrities could be included on the safe mode. In that way, the readers would be only adults that understand the fictional nature of those works. Also, if someone want his or her story to be deleted, they could simply ask for it (if they are able to prove they wrote the story, of course. What do you think of that idea?
I only recently found GSS could you tell me what NCMC stood for?
Regarding the undeleted stories where author is unreachable or which are potentially contentious, they could be kept out of the main collection in a mirror subdomain eg deleted.gayspiralstories.com that is not indexed by web search engines and only registered users can view. They could be reviewed by this community. If no objections and they are popular stories then after a year they move to main site. Strip original author info and if the original author knows the info they can have the story removed if that is what they want.
The NCMC is the predecessor site which was closed a couple of years ago. Hugh, who started GSS in the first place, could import the old story database from NCMC.
I think its great they are still available - as sites like Archive of our Own stories use superhero/celebrity likeness and names.