How did you find CHYOA and would you change anything about it?

Just curious how all of you came across the platform and what makes you stay, or what you would change about it. I've found it to be useful but also lacking in some key areas, so just interested in what everyone else has to say!

 

I recruited by CHYOA users in the future who sent me back in time to prevent WWIII.

 

I don't remember how I first ran across CHYOA. It was years ago, my memories don't go back that far.

My #1 wish is that tags were better curated.

 

I had originally been looking for forums for authors, then came across this place and only afterwards realised which platform it belonged to.

 

I was co-writing an erotic video game with a writer named Magma, who posted here and linked me to it.

 

I wish that I could eliminate based on tags. Under no circumstances do I want to see certain tags…

 

There's a suggestion forum that I've contributed to, but I suppose my #1 thing would be to more easily find an individual user's contributions to some of those massive stories. The story map makes it nigh-impossible to find. I have to bookmark some of my own chapters just to see them again.

 

Preselected standardized tags would be amazing.

 

Long before there was an endless supply of streaming video, I used to explore the old internet's repository of sex fiction (anyone else here old enough to remember things like alt.sex.stories?). There are a few pieces that I've always remembered fondly, and every so often I'd go looking for them, get a little rush of nostalgia. Found this site at some point and thought, hey, that's kind of cool. Got invested in a few stories for a while ... and then after a few years of just reading and lurking, I tried writing.

I hate tagging my stories. I've written hundreds of chapters (mostly part of one big story of mine), and I did a bunch of kind of generic tags for the intro and haven't done anything else. I wish tagging was easier. I sort of want to go back through my hundreds of chapters and tag accordingly ... and then I sort of want to not do that at all because it sounds incredibly tedious.

But more than tags, I wish there were convenient means of rearranging chapters. There are too many times when I realize I've left out something I wanted to incorporate, and I either have to awkwardly expand chapters much longer than they should be ... or copy-and-paste chapter after chapter just to create new threads and trees to accommodate those changes. (Also, copy-and-paste loses things like italics and horizontal rules, which is just an added annoyance.)

I don't mean to gripe. I like the site. I'm enjoying the creative outlet. I'm just answering the prompt above.

 

I just love reading erotic stories, so I visited the old chyoa a lot. When they launched the new design I was a big fan and thought to myself „why not try to bring your dirty thoughts to paper yourself?“

7 years later and I’m still on here atleast once a week. This place is just so chill.

 

I'd just finished reading something on Literotica and decided to check out the links page. CHYOA was there and I thought it sounded cool. Now I spend far more time here than there.

I'd love a way to exclude stories with certain tags/topics. I respect the fact lots of folks are into stuff I'm not but it'd be a lot easier to find stories that interest me if I could

 

100% this. I’d love a function to filter out certain words or even better search for certain words used specifically.

 

I think I first stumbled onto Literotica in 2002 or so and then found the original CHYOO and eventually migrated here when CHYOA was made.

But while I have been here for a long time, I only have a few threads and one abandoned story to my name so far...

I feel like the story search options could be better, but I am no programmer or designer so don't ask me how to improve them. I would like to see a more active community in commenting and discussing stories and chapters though, but that's not a change to the website, more of a change to the users.

 

I looked around for Choose Your Own Adventure porno stories, since it seemed like such an obviously good idea.
Then one week I had a mean fever and was kind of out of it, so decided to join so I could contribute to Blowjob Universe.

I feel like the site's about as good as one might hope, though I do wish there weren't quite so many "You can change the laws of the universe" /
"you can just fuck anyone stress-free" stories (although I guess I did start out on one of those...).

I also kind of wish there was a way to know more about a story when searching for something new.
Plus, the category system is really not very useful. I mean, the overlap between "Group Sex" and "swingers" is colossal, "Erotic Couplings" covers basically
everything and any "incest" story is probably going to also fall into either "teen" or "MILF".

 

Yeah, I also wish there was a more active culture of commenting on stories. Though I can understand why.
Like, if you're in the middle of reading a story, you're not in the mood for some literary criticism, and when you're done, you're not going to be super keen to post
things along the lines of "Nice chapter broski, I like the way you described the squirt. I gotta say that was one of the better nuts I have bust this week Hooo-wee!"

 

Comments tend to beget more comments, so be the change you want to see

 

Make the UI and formatting more moddable. I hate how the question appears over that title in the chapter heading. Stuff like that.

 

I can't remember how I found the site, but it immediately appealed to me. Loved those Fighting Fantasy books back in the not-so-distant day.
I would suggest some sort of hierarchy for tags in a story. Right now, I search for say, "MILF", and I'm going to get every story where in even just one branch some author tagged his chapter "MILF". It would be nice to be able to give a story a set of primary tags, which make the story turn up in search results. That means if you want to find a story whose initial focus is on "MILF" content then the search will bring up those types of stories. You could then have a system in the search engine where you choose between "primary tags" and let's say "branch tags" so that you could instantly find locations in larger stories where certain tags are showing up.
I'm a noob so I know nothing (I am from Barcelona) about how feasible this suggestion is.

 

I wonder if "story tags" could be amalgams of "chapter tags." What I mean is ... if there's a 100-chapter story, and 50 of the chapters are tagged with "MILF," then that story would get a story tag of "MILF (50)." Then if only two of the chapters were tagged with "zombie sex," it would only get a story tag of "zombie sex (2)" ... once there's some kind of system in place that attaches value to a tag, it should be easy to sort and deliver search results that reflect those values.

 

I don't think anybody is going to bother tagging each chapter separately unless it adds anything new.
I have an entire thread that is entirely, purely and unambiguously MILF-themed, and I only added
the MILF tag once, right when I started the thread.