Alt.sex.stories

alt.sex.stories is a Usenet newsgroup for erotic stories created on May 7, 1992, by Tim Pierce as an alternative to pre-existing alt erotica newsgroups. The group was initially unmoderated, a feature that was not shared by some of the other Usenet or altnet newsgroups. This feature allowed for greater user freedom.
Site history.
alt.sex.stories.moderated.
In early 1997 a moderated version of alt.sex.stories was created due to an increasing number of posts by "various pay services, scam artists, and bots". This moderated newsgroup (ASSM) has always operated by cross-posting all approved stories to alt.sex.stories, and is not simply a filtered version of the unmoderated group, rather, all stories posted to ASSM were specifically submitted there.
Currently the day-to-day operations and general direction of ASSM is overseen by the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository (ASSTR), which coordinates a group of volunteers to moderate the newsgroup using a web-based voting system. ASSTR also hosts an archive of the newsgroup, and a mirror of the Nifty Erotic Stories Archive (gay). ASSM is one of the few remaining active groups in the alt.sex.* hierarchy.
Due to competition from web-based erotica sites and communities, the volume of stories posted to ASSM (and thus to alt.sex.stories) had dropped considerably by 2006, although the group is still actively moderated.
Notable authors.
Alt.sex.stories is notable for assisting in the launch of several notable authors of erotica such as Elf Sternberg and Mary Anne Mohanraj.
Story codes.
Because of the large volume of stories posted, a set of codes to describe the story content was developed. Writers were encouraged to include these story codes in the title of their stories.