Asstr.org

Alt.sex.stories text repository, most often known by its acronym asstr.org, is a huge, largely unorganized collection of erotic stories, 450,000 as of 2015.

Usenet

"Alt.sex.stories" was an identifier (address) in a very early form of the Internet, perhaps the earliest: Usenet groups, currently owned by Google Groups. Without a central server, messages posted by any user were automatically sent to any user who wanted to receive them, and who started up his Usenet reader program (now typically handled within a browser). Postings were categorized into groups. Usenet is moribund though it still survives, and has around 500,000 postings a day, a large number of which are spam (advertisements). Usenet was created when all computers on the network were trusted: no authentication needed; everyone is who he says he is (and at first, they were all "he's"). This has made it unsuited for an environment with malicious hackers and criminals of all sorts.

There is no central site that archives everything on Usenet; that would be prohibitive. Partial access is offered by some commercial sites. Access to text-based postings, without the more-expensive-to-store binary files (pictures, videos, music), is offered free by Google Groups.

In the 1990's to 2000's Usenet was a vehicle for distribution of child pornography; "pedo." was a top-level domain. (In Usenet, top-level domains, like "sci." and "alt.", came first.) Due to the same trusting environment Usenet assumed, it was impossible to automate the exclusion of child pornography.

The child pornography led several big Internet Service Providers, willingly or unwillingly (after protests), to ban access to Usenet altogether. (Though the database that constitutes Usenet is sent via the Internet, each Internet Service Provider must (redundantly) host it, although now there are businesses which host and provide access to Usenet by subscription. It is thus an expensive service to provide, especially with digital audio, picture, and video files, which did not exist in the early Usenet.)

Originally, there were no moderators on Usenet. Because of spam, though moderating has other benefits, the ability for a group, like alt.sex.stories, to have a moderator was coded into Usenet in the 1990s (?) As of 2015, most of the unmoderated groups are and have been for a long time useless collections of spam. Alt.sex.stories has been replaced by alt.sex.stories.moderated.

The nature of asstr.org

Asstr posts every story that has ever appeared on alt.sex.stories.moderated, although it also accepts stories directly. The only requirement is that the story