Open standards
Three standards, one vocabulary
SHOW classifies finished work. VEIL governs what an AI session may generate, and on whose authority. SCRIPTS rates the experience of reading it. All three are open, free to implement under CC BY-SA 4.0, created by Modern Media Mastery and held in trust by the non-profit r8rly.org.
SHOW — content classification
S · Spice · H · Heat · O · OMG · W · WTF
A four-axis rating for narrative and creative work: physical explicitness, emotional temperature, darkness of tone, and transgression. Every axis is independent, so a closed-door romance can run high on Heat and zero on Spice, and a rating is written inline as SHOW S3·H4·O2·W5. Version 2.1, July 2026.
VEIL — generative permission
S·H·O·W from SHOW + V · Violence · E · Explicit · I · Identity · L · Language
A signed, portable permission envelope declared before an AI-assisted session begins. It sets a ceiling the session must not exceed and an optional floor the work must not be sanitised below, across eight axes, issued at the verification tier a platform can substantiate.
Version 1.2 adds Tier G, the Guardian tier: a verified parent or legal guardian issues an envelope on behalf of a young person. The ceilings are locked to the child's age profile and can only be lowered, the session log is visible to the parent, and any engine honouring the envelope is bound to six non-negotiable obligations for minor sessions: no sexual content, crisis handling, no companion framing, no secrecy from the parent, logging, and disclosure that it is an AI. It is the parental-consent gate the age-wall debate keeps asking for, already written and free to adopt, and a parent can install it today on a home Open WebUI with the VEIL Guardian filter.
SCRIPTS — experience rating
S · Satisfaction · C · Characters · R · Resonance · I · Intrigue · P · Plot · T · Truth · S · Style
Where SHOW says what a work contains, SCRIPTS says what it was like to read. Seven axes a reader scores after finishing, kept separate from content classification so a dark book and a gentle one can both be rated on how well they did what they set out to do. Version 1.0, August 2026.
How they are held
Modern Media Mastery and LMDC created the standards. r8rly.org, a non-profit, is their custodian: it publishes the canonical text, holds the version history and keeps the standards free. r8rly.com is the independent platform that applies them and verifies ratings against them. The R8rly mark and the VEIL certification badge remain protected; everything else is yours to implement and extend under CC BY-SA 4.0, with attribution.