The future of CHYOA (or at least the funding)

Friedman

Friedman

Administrator
I think we need to talk about CHYOA's future funding.

Patreon deleted our CHYOA Patreon page two weeks ago. December is now the first month without your support. Thank you to all the patrons over the years! I have and always will appreciate it very much.

I've been looking for an alternative to Patreon for the past two weeks. I found an adult payment provider who sent me their analysis of the CHYOA site today. The good thing is that you can talk to the payment provider and they don't kick you out like a robot (i.e. they try to find a solution with us).

Apart from membership plans that we have had through Patreon so far, I would like to create a marketplace in the medium term from which authors can also benefit. I think it makes sense if we create incentives to write on the site. A thank you button to support authors would be a good first step.

The feedback from the adult payment provider is that we have content/three categories that are not allowed by Mastercard and Visa: Incest, Non-Consent and Mind Control. That's the problem. We also have to make sure that we have a working system, that these themes don't come up.

Don't get me wrong, I love CHYOA. And I don't want to change anything about the nature of CHYOA. I don't want to delete or censor anything. At heart, I'm a free speech advocate. And I've always promised that CHYOA will remain free. Nothing will change about that. Rather, my conclusion is that CHYOA does not get along with payment providers.

That is also the reason why I want to start this open discussion. I would like to find a solution how we can integrate a payment provider. I'm open to any suggestions.

My suggestion is to set up a separate website, basically clone CHYOA, run it under a different name and implement the rules (no incest, no non-consent and no mind control). CHYOA remains as it is now. Further developments benefit both sites.

This is a path that the payment provider has approved.

I don't know if that's the most sensible way, but that's why I'm starting this discussion. I hope for your feedback and what you think about it.

Thank you all!
 
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I suppose that's something like SubscribeStar?

It's a tricky business; I suppose advertising by itself doesn't cover it. And even if you eliminate the categories, there are still tags and themes which are going to be hard to police. You might have to implement a reporting feature so users can flag chapters with such content.

On the other hand, a fresh site might not be so bad - give users some more badges to go for, maybe?
 
Hi Friedman,

If they approved the idea of a separate site to be, more or less, the front face to bound payments to, then I can't really see any other better method.

Putting an alternative for comparison, though not a great one: you could hide the mentioned categories behind a wall (Register + Opt in Requirement). This isn't great because some stories may as well not exist with the restrictions. It may still not fly with the processor even then.
 
Zeebop said:
And even if you eliminate the categories, there are still tags and themes which are going to be hard to police. You might have to implement a reporting feature so users can flag chapters with such content.
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Yes, policing won't be easy. A bookstore, as a top-down approach, would certainly be easier to control.

elmer7780 said:
If they approved the idea of a separate site to be, more or less, the front face to bound payments to, then I can't really see any other better method.
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Yes, I asked if a clone of the site with the added rules and content from scratch would be acceptable. After all, running a second site that doesn't follow the rules could have been a problem. But that's okay. However, we won't be able to accept payments for CHYOA with a second site.
Yes, if you can make sure that the alternative website is:
- free from violations
- shielded from violations through means of inescapable monitoring.
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elmer7780 said:
Putting an alternative for comparison, though not a great one: you could hide the mentioned categories behind a wall (Register + Opt in Requirement). This isn't great because some stories may as well not exist with the restrictions. It may still not fly with the processor even then.
Click to expand...

I want to follow the rules. It would be worse to try to cheat and then get caught. Then they'll block us for sure.

Aside from that, they asked for content that is not accessible to free users. And if so, I have to provide credentials so that this content can be reviewed.
 
Here are the rules that the payment provider sent me.

The second PDF contains terms that violate the rules.

Please find my comments below:
- The categories Incest, Non-Consent and Mind Control will not be accepted.
- The website is full of violating terms and contents. I am attaching the list of violating terms for your reference. I am sure you'll find way too many hits, so I think it's the case for you to consider whether you are willing to remove all the prohibited stuff and to instate a tight monitoring process to avoid those terms to pop up again.
Unfortunately, the credit card schemes have become more and more restrictive, and the fact that this is fiction will not be taken into account (as also media are reenacted and get penalised the same way).
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Attachments

Zeebop said:
Shit. The violating terms is...way, way more restrictive than I thought. Strict enforcement on that would basically involve running a word search on every term for each chapter submitted.
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Yes, the question arises whether my proposal to clone the website is really feasible. Especially in terms of enforcement.

Alternatively, I can imagine releasing a kind of adult version of Kindle Vella (with episodic and interactive stories). That would be more of a bookstore approach, but you could control the content better.
 
I'm wondering if creating a front facing page that caters to purely Choose Your Own Adventure stories that are PG or just Mature would work with the CHYOA page pointing to that to give support. The PG page won't have to link back to CHYOA so there would be no connection except for the added benefits that are applied to the CHYOA site. The back end would be more administrative work but the payment provider wouldn't see any of that.

BTW, I'll be using those violating terms as a thesaural reference.
 
elmer7780 said:
In terms of server costs, do you mean that payments can only be associated to the second site? I guess additionally, does the second site have to exist on a separate instance?
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How we use the money is up to us. We can cover CHYOA's server costs in the background.

But we can't accept payments for CHYOA and then issue rewards for CHYOA.

The second site must run under a different domain, but can run on the same server.

Artican said:
I'm wondering if creating a front facing page that caters to purely Choose Your Own Adventure stories that are PG or just Mature would work with the CHYOA page pointing to that to give support. The PG page won't have to link back to CHYOA so there would be no connection except for the added benefits that are applied to the CHYOA site. The back end would be more administrative work but the payment provider wouldn't see any of that.

BTW, I'll be using those violating terms as a thesaural reference.
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The link would probably work, but the rewards wouldn't. Then we would accept payments for CHYOA.
 
If you don't link anything to their site, they can't exactly say you're giving out questionable content, but I get that it can be a bit shady, giving out benefits for a second site while only reporting on the first one.

Have you looked at Onlyfans as an option? I don't think you even have to post anything there, just have the subscription page up.
 
Artican said:
Have you looked at Onlyfans as an option? I don't think you even have to post anything there, just have the subscription page up.
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Interesting suggestion. ;)

As a last bastion, there are cryptocurrencies. However, my impression so far has been that these are not widely used among our users (but I could be wrong). Another issue is that cryptocurrencies only allow one-time payments, but that would probably work.
 
Having no knowledge of this, would it be feasible to offer subscriptions directly on the website? Or would you run into the same issue with MC/Visa? I'm not totally clear what benefit Patreon or any substitute offered since the content is not hosted there, nor were you advertising there really.

FWIW, Kink.com rather openly hosts simulated non-con and incest content. Who do they use?
 
Dissonant Soundtrack said:
Having no knowledge of this, would it be feasible to offer subscriptions directly on the website? Or would you run into the same issue with MC/Visa? I'm not totally clear what benefit Patreon or any substitute offered since the content is not hosted there, nor were you advertising there really.
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Thanks! I wanted to do that. I even programmed/implemented the full integration with the payment provider earlier this week. However, unfortunately it makes no difference as the payments are site related.
 
Hey Friedman! I don't think I have any solutions that haven't already been mentioned in the thread, but I just wanna say that if a second website does end up happening, then having some way to port stories over would be very very cool. As someone with a very large game-mode story, moving stuff by hand would be very difficult because of all of the variables at the bottom of the edit pages that can't be copy+pasted. Plus just the size would make it really time consuming. But of course, having to review every single ported story would also be super difficult for you and the mods compared to starting from scratch, so I'm not sure if this would be possible.

Also those prohibited terms are a little scary hahaha, my stuff is all pretty tame but having stuff like "humiliation" and "pistol" on there seems super harsh. I hope you're able to find a solution! I super appreciate this website and all of the work that goes into it.
 
Almax said:
Also those prohibited terms are a little scary hahaha, my stuff is all pretty tame but having stuff like "humiliation" and "pistol" on there seems super harsh. I hope you're able to find a solution! I super appreciate this website and all of the work that goes into it.
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A bunch of those i can at least understand why they would go in that direction because some of them can be used suggestively to try and get around rulebreaking implications (that doesn't make it right. I too very much dislike censorship). however, MasterCard having "acts with non-human creatures (aliens, mythological creatures, etc.)" under bestiality in their content guidelines makes my head spin.

Hope you've never thought about kissing an elf or <insert various mass effect races> with that game that you purchased with your MasterCard. o_O
 
Honestly, those rules pretty much unenforceable. Take the word "rape", for example:
rape
rаpe
rapе
rаpе

Can you spoit the difference between these four words?
The first one uses 4 latin letters
The second one uses a cyrillic а
The third one uses a cyrillic е
The last one uses a cyrillic а and a cyrillic е
Now add spaces and other symbols, for example:
r a p e
r@pe
etc.

A simple search won't find all of those. Then there's using other words as cover-up, for example writing "grape" instead of "rape": "He graped her." So each instance needs to be manually checked by a human, and considering the volume of stories... good luck with that.


@Friedman Have you checked Subscribe Star (specifically subscribestar.adult)? What are their rules?
 
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