Terms of use

By using Fictera, you accept these Terms and the content rules that are part of them, and you acknowledge having read the privacy policy. If you do not accept them, do not use the website.

Fictera is published by [TO BE COMPLETED: publisher’s name] (see the legal notice).

Accessing the website requires declaring that you are an adult. By confirming, you certify that this is true and that reading sexually explicit texts is legal where you are. Any false declaration is your sole responsibility. We delete any account we learn belongs to a minor.

Fictera may introduce a stricter age verification process if the law requires it.

Fictera lets you:

• read published stories freely, without an account;
• with an account, keep favourites, create reading lists, give “kudos” and sync your reading progress;
• with an account whose email address is verified, publish your own stories.

The service is free and contains no advertising. It is available in French and English. We may change it, suspend part of it for maintenance or discontinue it, giving reasonable notice where possible.

• An account is personal. You must provide a valid email address that belongs to you.
• You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for any use of your account. Tell us immediately if it is used without your permission.
• One account has one author profile (pen name). Your email address is never displayed.
• Creating an account to get around a suspension, a ban or a publishing quota is prohibited.

When you publish on Fictera, you alone are responsible for your texts and you warrant that:

• you wrote the text or hold all the rights needed to publish it (no reuse of someone else’s text without permission);
• the text complies with the law and the content rules, in particular the absolute prohibitions;
• the categories, tags and warnings you choose accurately describe the text;
• the artificial intelligence label, if you set one, is truthful.

You will hold Fictera harmless from any third-party claim relating to a text you published in breach of these commitments.

You keep ownership of your texts. So that we can display them, you grant the publisher of Fictera a non-exclusive, free, worldwide licence, limited to what the service needs, to:

• store, reproduce and format your texts in order to display them on the website;
• make them available to visitors and search engines, and produce previews (title, summary, pen name) in lists, search results and sharing cards;
• submit them to the moderation tools described in the content rules.

The licence lasts as long as the text is published. It ends when you unpublish or delete the text, subject to backup copies, which are erased in their normal rotation cycle, and to what we must keep to comply with a legal obligation or a request from an authority.

Fictera does not sell your texts, does not transfer them to anyone and does not use them to train artificial intelligence models.

Prohibited content is detailed in the content rules. In short: any sexual content involving minors (absolute prohibition), incest, bestiality and necrophilia, real people, non-consent that is untagged or presented as desirable, and more generally any illegal content.

It is also prohibited to:

• scrape the website’s content at scale by automated means without our agreement;
• artificially inflate reads or kudos, or create multiple accounts;
• circumvent the website’s technical measures (quotas, age gate, moderation);
• use Fictera for spam, advertising or to harass anyone;
• publish other people’s personal data.

Fictera does not monitor all content in advance, but uses the following means, described in the content rules:

• an automated analysis of each chapter when it is published, which may hold it for review;
• user reports: content reported by three different people, or once for suspected involvement of a minor, is hidden until a human review;
• a human review by the moderation team.

Depending on severity, we may hold content, remove it, or suspend or close an account. Our decisions are made diligently, objectively and proportionately. Anyone affected by a decision receives a statement of reasons (EU Digital Services Act, “DSA”, art. 17) stating the content concerned, the rule breached, whether the decision was automated and how to appeal.

You can appeal a decision by replying to the email you received or by writing to [TO BE COMPLETED: contact email address]. Appeals are reviewed by a person, not by automated means. You may also bring the matter before the competent courts.

Where content suggests that a criminal offence threatening someone’s life or safety has taken place or is likely to, we inform the authorities (DSA, art. 18). Child sexual abuse material is reported to the authorities and evidence is preserved for them.

You can delete your account at any time from your account page. If you have published stories, you choose between:

• deleting them: they disappear from the website and from readers’ lists, and their addresses show that they have been removed;
• keeping them online as “Anonymous”: they are detached from your account and attached to a shared profile with no link to you; their kudos and reads are kept.

Either way, your account data (email, favourites, lists, progress…) is genuinely erased, as described in the privacy policy.

We may close an account without notice for a serious breach of these Terms, in particular of the absolute prohibitions.

For the texts published by authors, Fictera is a hosting provider within the meaning of article 6 of the LCEN and article 6 of the DSA: it is not their author, does not check them before publication and is only liable for them if it fails to act promptly to remove them once aware of their illegal nature.

Stories are works of fiction: they do not express Fictera’s views and are neither advice nor encouragement. Warnings are provided by authors; they help you choose what to read but cannot guarantee that a text contains nothing you may find upsetting.

The service is provided as is. We do our best to keep it available and secure, without being able to guarantee that it will be free of interruptions or errors. Nothing in these Terms limits your statutory rights as a consumer.

We may change these Terms. The date of the last update is shown at the top of this page. Registered users are notified by email of any significant change at least 15 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use Fictera afterwards means you accept the new Terms; otherwise, you can delete your account.

These Terms are governed by French law. In case of a dispute, please contact us first so that we can look for an amicable solution. If you are a consumer, you may use a consumer mediator free of charge: [TO BE COMPLETED: name and contact details of the consumer mediator].

Failing an agreement, the dispute will be brought before the competent French courts. If you are a consumer living in another EU Member State, you keep the protection of the mandatory rules of your country and may bring proceedings before its courts.

These Terms exist in French and English; in case of discrepancy, the French version prevails.