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".
[citation needed] During the twenty years in which it was active, the moderated newsgroup (ASSM) has always operated by cross-posting all approved stories to alt.sex.stories, and was not simply a filtered version of the unmoderated group.
Day-to-day operations and general direction of ASSM were overseen by the Alt.Sex.Stories Text Repository (ASSTR), which coordinated a group of volunteers to moderate the newsgroup using a web-based voting system.
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.
The asstr.org website was last updated in 2017[3][4] and is no longer stable, having dropped completely offline in July 2022 only to reappear (with no new content) in 2023.