CHYOA Guide

Welcome to the CHYOA Guide

CHYOA is a collaborative adult-fiction site where each chapter can lead to several possible continuations. Readers choose a path through a story, and authors can add new branches for future readers to discover.

This Guide is organized around what you want to do. Choose a section below rather than reading everything in order.

With thanks to gene.sis, RicoLouis, Murakami, majus, Mr.B., and Friedman for their contributions to the CHYOA Guide.

Read and explore

Start with Reading on CHYOA to learn how to:

• discover stories by activity, category, feature, or popularity;
• search for stories, chapters, and authors;
• follow branches and use the Story Map;
• save stories and chapters for later;
• like chapters, join discussions, and follow authors;
• play stories that use reader customization or Game Mode.

Most visible stories can be read without an account. Signing up adds personal features such as favorites, bookmarks, comments, following, notifications, and saved games.

Write and publish

Start with Writing and Publishing if you want to create a story or contribute a chapter. It explains story settings, chapter forms, review states, branches, formatting, polls, and the tools for managing your work.

Read the Rules before publishing. Authors are responsible for following them in story titles, descriptions, chapters, images, tags, comments, and other public material.

Build an interactive or game story

The Interactive and Game Stories section explains reader variables, game state, conditional paths, conditional text, random values, rolls, reveals, and actions. Begin with the overview before using the more advanced examples.

Manage your account or get help

The Account and Help section covers signing up, email confirmation, password recovery, settings, privacy, frequently asked questions, and community resources.

Use the Contact page when the Guide does not answer your question or when you need to report a problem that cannot be reported from the relevant chapter or user profile.

Rules and legal policies

Rules, safety guidance, and reporting options and legal policies have their own sections so they are easy to find. These pages take priority over examples or informal advice elsewhere in the Guide.

The interface may look slightly different on a phone or tablet, but the labels and actions described here are the same.