(Last Revised 4/19/98) As a collector of erotic literature, you are hereby invited to join ASSTR, the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository. This site is open to readers worldwide for absolutely no charge for the sole purpose of sharing and distributing stories. As a collector, you most likely have many such wonderful works of art to contribute. It therefore would be greatly appreciated by the users of ASSTR and its administrators if you would contribute your material to the site. Because ASSTR is not based on any finances whatsoever, no compensation can be made for any contribution you would graciously make. However, if you accept this invitation, you will have your own personal directory on ASSTR, of which only you will have write access. This will provide several advantages for you. First, you will always have a backup of your collection, in the event that your hard drive crashes, your house gets robbed, etc. Your collection will always be available to you (and everyone else) and should you need it in an emergency, special arrangements can and will be made as soon as possible. Second, your readers will always have a reliable source in which they know they can get your works in full, without the hassles of trying to find all the parts of a multiple part post to the Usenet newsgroups. Third, because you post directly to the site, your transmissions are completely anonymous. At ASSTR, we respect your confidentiality and will never disclose any information to anyone regarding your relationship with ASSTR without your express and explicit prior consent. All logs are kept for less than a week, and no information will be disclosed from them before they are destroyed. And finally, you will not have to worry about the junk email lists you get put on when posting to the Usenet newsgroups. Your email address is kept confidential unless you choose to disclose it to your fans. The catch to all this? We'd like to think there isn't one. Perhaps you may be wondering how much all of this will cost you. The only price required is your time. While there is no charge for an account or for unlimited space, you must familiarize yourself with the FTP protocol. You'll need to get yourself an FTP client other than your web browser so you can upload files to the site in your directory. While doing this is technically all possible with Netscape v4.0, it is more trouble than it is worth - trust us. For example, making/removing directories and deleting files on FTP sites is not possible with Netscape. Logging in to an FTP site with a name and password is also a small chore. Our recommendation is either CuteFTP for Windows 3.x/'95/NT, available from www.cuteftp.com Instructions on how to download, install, and set up CuteFTP are available there, as well as basic guides to using FTP. If you're using a Macintosh, we recommend Fetch, available from www.tucows.com Whichever you have, we're more than happy to help you out. But before contacting us with a request for an account, PLEASE familiaze yourself with FTP. The good news is once you do, you'll see how easy it is. Also, because FTP is still very popular, you may just learn a useful skill you're likely to use in the future. If you don't think you can handle FTP, we first encourage you to rethink. If you do rethink and still don't think you can handle it, we'll set you up with an account and help you maintain it via email. Because this requires a great deal of time on our part (tranferring your works from email to the FTP site), we strongly discourage this. In the future, we hope to have better web capabilities so authors can maintain their accounts via Netscape with no need for additional software. We're also looking into the possibility of automated email administration. However, neither of these options will become a reality in the near future, so again we stress FTP is the preferred method. Upon your positive reply to this invitation, an account on the server will be created specifically for you. This account will be immune to the current two hundred user limit. This further stresses your ability to get a backup of your stories at any time. IMPORTANT NOTE: Request for creation of an account is an agreement with ASSTR that you will make every attempt to NOT at any time, for any reason, ever upload to ASSTR any copyrighted material or otherwise material to which you do not have permission to distribute. With your account, you will be able to create subdirectories in order to organize your collection. It is completely up to you how you decide to organize everything. Details and recommendations on how to optimally organize your collection will be sent to you upon your account generation. If you _do_ wish to have a collector account created, please read the author's readme in the /pub/Authors directory. This file contains instructions on how to apploy for an account as well as other useful information. Additionally, please indicate that you are requesting a "collector" account and NOT an "author" account. Thank you for your time and consideration of becoming a contributor. Sincerely, Rey del Sexo Administrator of ASSTR