Alt Sex Stories Text Repository
The Alt Sex Stories Text Repository (also spelled Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository, abbreviated ASSTR) is a large collection of sexual stories available at no charge on the Internet. Many of these stories were originally posted to the alt.sex.stories or alt.sex.stories.moderated newsgroups. However, authors who have posted to these newsgroups, or indeed any author of erotic stories at all, can apply for a free author account. Under this account, the author can upload stories (and essays and other content), which can be freely accessed over the Internet by anyone who chooses to do so.
The site currently hosts more than 175,000 works of all kinds of adult/erotic literature genres, including the genre of spanking stories. They use a Standard Header System (SHS), so the title, description, author's name, and story codes/keywords for the work will be in a standardized format, to ease searching and finding.
As of 2007 and 2008, the site's favicon shows a bare bottom. ASSTR is a project of Internet Free Literature Corporation, a 501(c)(3) United States non-profit organization.
Modes of access
Many of the files on the ASSTR are available via FTP transfer. This allows files to be directly copied to a receiving computer. Many other files are organized in websites, hosted on the ASSTR site. A contributing author can choose whether any particular story will be made available via FTP or placed on his or her personal ASSTR website, or both.
Content restrictions
The ASSTR is primarily a repository for text, not for images. Even the websites hosted by the ASSTR generally contain few or no images. Every author must affirm that all copyright holders have granted permisison to the ASSTR to host the content, and the ASSTR is generally strict in removing content when there is a claim of copyright infringment. No advertisments or commercial links of any sort are permitted in the ASSTR, and the site adminstrators are strict in removing any such content if someone uploads it.
FAQs
The "frequently asked questions" documents (FAQs) on the ASSTR offer advice to authors on how to write a good erotic story, how to format it for newsgroup posting, and how to use conventional codes for various kinds of content. They also contain advice to readers on how to search for particular kinds of stories, both in the ASSTR and in other story archives.
Reviews and other content
The ASSTR also contains a number of reviews of stories, several of them in long-running series by continuing reviewers. It also contains author profiles and various index and coding information to make finding stories easier for readers.
The ASSTR also offers volunteer proofreaders who assist authors in preparing their stories for posting, by mutual agreement between author and proofreader.
Spanking content in the ASSTR
The ASSTR is not primarily devoted to spanking stories, and the majority of the stories posted there do not include any spanking or BDSM content. However, a significant minority do. As of April 2006, a search on "spanking" matched over 1000 story files on the ASSTR, and 44 authors included the word "spanking" in their author profiles. Several of these authors are well known authors of spanking stories. Such spanking authors as Alex Birch, Case Wintermute, Don A. Landhill, Don Winslow, Haley Brimley, Mike Ward, Nialos Leaning, and Rollin Hand have author profiles and spanking stories on ASSTR.
Be warned that some other stories found on ASSTR which feature spanking may not be spanking stories in the normal sense but actually BDSM stories, including BDSM stories featuring minors - a genre that's not the average spanko's (or BDSM scener's) cup of tea, and illegal in some countries.
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