FAQ

When you register an account, you gain the ability to:

• Participate in the forum
• Comment on user profiles and submissions
• Submit your own stories and art
• Vote on submissions
• Add submissions to your bookmarks and favorites list
• Message other users privately
• Get notified whenever one of your favorite contributors adds new submissions.

We will only send you the activation email when you register. All other email notifications are disabled by default.

Absolutely not. We value your privacy.

Absolutely. The Lab claims no rights to your stories, art, forum posts, profile content, or comments. We will not sell or redistribute anything without an expressed, signed agreement with the author/artist.

We do regularly back up our database and save the backups for at least a month. These backups are not accessible to anyone but our technical personnel. Once the backups are deleted, they are gone. If you decide to delete your work, we strongly recommend that you change the submission to "hidden" instead or save a copy on your computer just in case you ever change your mind.

Favorites are just what they sound like: You're showing other users and the author/artist that you like that particular submission. In the future, we plan to add a feature that will allow the site to suggest submissions to you based on your favorites.

Bookmarks are a way for you to save a story that you want to read later. Other users won't be able to see your bookmarks, so this is entirely just a way for you to save a private list of stories for yourself.

There is no limit to the number of stories you can add to your favorites/bookmarks.

It's daily unique views, so a little bit of both. If a user reads a story three times in one day, it only counts as one view. But if he reads the story three times on three separate days, it counts as three views.

There is a 5 minute delay because those results are cached in order to reduce stress on our database. We'll reduce/remove this delay in the future once we've got enough data on average usage that we're confident the server can handle it.

The author probably deleted it or switched it to "hidden". You can try contacting him/her or asking on the forum, but as stated above, we honor our users' requests if they want to permanently delete their submissions.

We got hacked. The good news is that no stories, user accounts, or private messages were lost. The bad news is that the story votes/comments/faves/tags/etc are impossible to re-attach. As a security precaution, I've also required that all users have to reset their passwords in order to log into the new system. Please use the "Forgot Password?" link on the login page.

Yes, that's us. We're grateful for the help that TF-Media and Furvect provided us in the past, but we can afford to host the site ourselves now.

I'm not recruiting at the moment, but contact me privately (docbyron) if you'd be interested when a position is available. I'm only interested in active users who have a proven devotion to the community and who I feel are able to fairly enforce our rules.

Mods are able to:

• Lock and sticky forum threads
• Delete or merge tags that are duplicates, misspelled, or abusive.
• Delete comments that violate our content policy.
• Mute or ban users who violate our content policy.

Admins are able to:

• Everything a mod can do.
• Delete forum threads, forum posts, submissions, comments, user accounts.
• Modify forum categories.

You broke the rules. We only ban/mute users if there's an obvious violation. Please review our Content Policy.

Mutes are used to temporarily prevent users from commenting, posting in the forum, and submitting art/stories. They generally expire within 24 hours but the length can vary. We use this feature as a warning to users who are being abusive (ex: harrassing other users, starting flame wars in the forums, posting a high volume of incomplete submissions, etc).

Bans are permanent and only used in extreme violations. You deliberately were trying to be a dick, and now you're not our problem anymore.

If the submissions violate our content policy, we'll delete them and mute/ban the user. However, if there's no violation, we won't delete submissions just because some users dislike it. You can block the user by going to their profile and using the "block" button. This prevents the user from messaging you, and it also prevents any of this user's submissions from appearing in the Browse results.

Contact an admin (ex: docbyron). We'll figure out a way to verify that you're who you say you are. Please understand that if I can't suitably verify your identity, I can't merge your original account.

At the moment, no. If we ever have issues paying the bills, we'll set up a way to accept donations or offer some sort of exclusive fundraising content package.

At the moment, we don't plan to unless we need a little extra cash to pay for the site. If we do, it will be in a very limited and tasteful capacity. Contact docbyron if you're interested in exploring advertising options if we ever offer them.