This is my life

Interesting discussion.

I come from popslash, and when I learned the ways of that particular fandom, it was pretty normal practice to post new stories in one's LJ with little more than a cut tag to protect the innocent. I suppose some people would put up a header with rating, pairing, etc, but it wasn't universal. (I still mutter curses when required to put ratings on fics for rec communities, podfic etc.) I don't do ratings on my stories, which is, I realise, as much a wilful lack of advertising as anything else, but I figure that most readers are old enough to see a 15-rated movie, and that'll do for me.

Warnings, though... I decided a while back that I would warn for death or rape/noncon/dubcon. Not that any of these crops up very often, for I am a soft and fluffy writer, by and large. However, like someone else in comments here, I often use 'Choose not to warn' if there is an issue in the fic that isn't really an issue—a death that isn't real, for instance, that I don't want the reader to know in advance isn't real. Also, I'd rather have a 'Choose not to warn', ( I think of it as 'caveat lector') than a warning that's misleading.

I usually go for minimal spoilerage rather than maximum tagging. I wonder if this style of presentation is rather 'old school' now that we're more generally aware of the audience's potential vulnerabilities? It's quite possible that if I were writing in a fandom with any actual readers, I'd be more up to date on it all.