........Here goes:


........When a pairing is defined as "Character A in love with Character B", it will be written as "A/B". This does not mean, however, that Character B loves Character A back. Whichever character comes first, before the '/' mark, is the one in love. To signify mutual feelings, if the characters both love each other, you would write it as either "A/B/A" or "B/A/B", which both essentially mean the same thing. Therefore, "Hiei/Kurama" means something entirely different from "Kurama/Hiei", whereas "Kurama/Hiei/Kurama" and "Hiei/Kurama/Hiei" are the same thing.
........For multiple pairings, such as a three-way love-fest, you would use A/B/C/B/A, showing that they all three love each other. You can have more than three in the circle, such as A/B/C/D/C/B/A, and so on and so forth. If, however, it's a love triangle in which A loves B and B loves C and C loves A, you would have to use several separate notations: A/B, B/C, C/A. This way you show that they're not all three in love, and who loves whom.
........ The other difference I want to clarify, since I know some readers have no idea that there even IS a difference, is that "yaoi" and "shonen-ai" are two different things, as are "yuri" and "shoujo-ai". Shonen-ai and shoujo-ai are used when referring to pure emotional feeling; yaoi and yuri signify physical and/or sexual interaction, which may or may not include emotion. Because of this, if a story is labeled "yaoi" and is NOT also labeled "shonen-ai", then no matter how the pairing is written, the characters DO NOT love each other. They are merely having sex or making out or what have you—nothing more. If there's both love and sex, then it will be labeled both yaoi and shonen-ai. And yes, that means that if it's not labeled "yaoi", "yuri" or "het", there is no sex. Period.
........ To make sure this is clear, I do NOT use order of operations to signify seme vs uke. That's in the fic itself.
........ In addition to yaoi/shonen-ai and yuri/shoujo-ai, I use the term "het" to refer to traditional (straight) relationships. It does not (to my knowledge) have two separate variations for love vs. sex like yaoi/shonen-ai and yuri/shoujo-ai do. Unfortunately, that means that the label "het" is rather ambiguous; I'm working on finding another term so I can differentiate. In the meantime, if something is labeled "het", an additional note in the summary will tell if the story includes sex of any kind.