a ton of the stories board is just topics from people looking for sth or advertising their paid stories on amazon etc... would be nice to separate those from people just genuinely posting stories on here. maybe a Professional Writing sub board for paid stuff and Story Requests for people asking for something would be good?

It's interesting that you've suggested this -- we're finally getting around to prefixes for stories and a few other sections. We're going to be requiring the use of prefixes (request, sample, etc.) as a rule. We need to get that section and a few others cleaned up in terms of titles, prefixes, formatting and moderation (section-specific moderator).

Here's an example of a thread with a prefix: https://preggophilia.com/request-looking...y--29197-t

On the forum page (https://preggophilia.com/stories-forum) an option to filter by prefix exists at the bottom and should help with this. If prefixes are used consistently, do you think this would be adequate @Spambasket?

yes, IF they are used consistently or even programmatically required in order to post a topic.