Has anyone else had this problem with Royal Road?

[Paul_Michaels]

You're talking about RR here, whose owner has once upon a time unilaterally removed all discrete rankings from the author dashboard (May https://www.royalroad.com/blog/55/feature-update-and-roll-back) (except #100-1) and shadowbanned sexual content fiction (June) without any discussion with authors. Of course, she did it because of the mental health of the authors or something along those lines, so her intentions were good.

While they did eventually roll back those changes due to backlash, I think it shows a clear sign as to how the owner views and will run the website for time to come.

I don't have a problem if they don't have sexual content. What I dislike is when you pretend to allow that type of content on your platform but you have some BS metric that says if you go over this percentile then you will be penalized. A rule that they don't tell you about upfront.

And to top it off even if I was to comply. How would I know that I'm actually doing what they are asking to get under the 15%? When I don't know how they measure their weird analytics.

Is it one of those things where if I add more chapters that have no sexual content, does that lower the percentile? Does deleting it lower the percentile? Is it the reader's flagging my content? If they're vague then I may be getting rid of content that isn't the issue and still in their dog house.

So, if they don't want our type of content then they need to be upfront about it so I know not to waste my time with them.

At the end of the day. I wanted to know if other authors had this problem. Turns out I'm not the only one. So "Hello, my name is Paul and RR has a problem with us. And I'm happy to join the club."

There are plenty of other platforms to put my work on and SH is just the superior platform for my work at the moment.

 

[ShipTeaser]

Yeah it's why I have rather toned down versions of my lewd chapters in Royal Road. Even though technically they'd be acceptable, I don't feel.comfortable with proper sex scenes in RR.

Here of course I go full smut evil,. no shame.

 

[expentio]

Meanwhile, I'm asking myself how I got through with not having a sexual content tag in any of my stories when in one my female protagonist was tied naked to a wall and forced kissed by a slime, and in the other, the protagonist started laying insect eggs.
Both on SH and RR. (Though the majority rest does without that stuff.)