Change / edit published story (cover, one liner, title, body text, tags)

Hello 👋

Do I understand it correctly that in order to change a published story’s cover (or edit any text, tags, etc., I guess), the story will be unpublished, re-reviewed, and published again? Is there any way to avoid the story getting unpublished while cover (or other changes) gets reviewed?

If not, is this review process the same as for submitting a completely new story? Does it take comparatively as long? Does the story retain its original publication date (presumably it does)?

Thanks for your help,

Declan

Please see this thread:

https://www.lushstories.com/forum/lush-help-desk/adding-cover-photo-to-story

Thank you, I did see that, but it doesn’t answer all my questions, and I wanted to confirm there is no other way of editing a story without unpublishing the entire thing.

As an aside, if this is how it works, it’s a lousy product experience. It certainly discourages authors from fixing mistakes missed in review, or adding a better tag, etc. Though I appreciate that more update drafts may increase the burden on reviewers. But as a contributor, I don’t want my story to be unpublished for a couple of days because I created a better cover.

If you change any of the following entities in a published story it will then require resubmitting for verification:

• Cover image

• One liner

• Body

• Title.

Thanks John, that’s good to know.

Do you know whether a resubmitted story appears as new (jumping to the top of author’s profile) after it’s republished, or does the story retain its original order of appearance? Also does the story reappear on Lush’s New Erotic Stories list?

Quote by DeclanH

Thanks John, that’s good to know.

Do you know whether a resubmitted story appears as new (jumping to the top of author’s profile) after it’s republished, or does the story retain its original order of appearance? Also does the story reappear on Lush’s New Erotic Stories list?

Hi Declan, it stays where it was originally published. It doesnt go to the top of your list or back on the front page

Thank you for the confirmation Susie. That makes sense.

Quote by DeclanH
does the story reappear on Lush’s New Erotic Stories list?

No, otherwise everyone would regularly "fix" things in their story to keep it in the list!

it’s a lousy product experience. It certainly discourages authors from fixing mistakes missed in review, or adding a better tag, etc... I don’t want my story to be unpublished for a couple of days because I created a better cover.

Valid points but there are a few things to note:

1. While the story does go back into the queue with the other stories, resubs are fairly easy to spot, so sometimes moderators skim the queue to find any stories that are quick to process. For this reason, as stated above...

2. ... if you add a Moderator Note that you've just changed the cover pic (or whatever you did), we'll know to focus on that. Moderator's have a View Changes button that will highlight any alterations made to the body text so if anyone says "I only changed the cover pic, guv" and tries to also sneak some text changes in to violate our terms (for example) we'll spot it. And we take a dim view of such behaviour and will cross that person off our Christmas list 🤪

3. Adding/editing tags shouldn't cause a resubmission. But please be mindful of choosing appropriate tags and don't create new ones unless absolutely necessary because it diliatee the tag pool and makes them less useful for readers to find stuff that interests them.

4. The reason we have the resub process is to avoid people having a story published and then going back afterwards to add/edit stuff that we may have asked them to remove, or that would otherwise contravene our site operational terms.

Hope that makes sense.

Thank you, WannabeWordsmith. This is excellent information and I appreciate your detailed response very much.

I had assumed/hoped that resubmissions would not feature on front page again or jump to the top of author's profile, but I wasn't sure, so good to have that confirmed.

Some thoughts below, nothing that warrants a reply.

1. That answers my question about the comparative length, thank you.

2. I was curious about the tools moderators had at their disposal when thinking about the time it might take to re-review and whether it takes longer than an initial review. Good to know. Thanks for the tip to use Moderator Note. Amazing that people would be so sneaky!

3. Good to know tags are not included in resubmission workflow. John was good to point this out too. I take your point about choosing tags carefully and not creating new ones willy-nilly. My thoughts about why one might want to edit tags: there is a limit of 10 tags per story and there are a lot of tags that are rough duplicates (similar enough that they may describe content sufficiently), and I guess over time an author may learn which tags readers respond to better than others. But given that users cannot browse/search stories by tags (or can you?) maybe optimising tags isn't really that useful.

4. Absolutely makes sense to have a process to review updated work. Would the Wild West without it. However, I think the process can be improved to offer a better product experience for readers and writers: that is for a published story to remain published while a single candidate version (with all the changes the author would like to make) is submitted for review. The candidate will then supersede the published version upon approval.

Thanks again for a great response.

Declan

Browsing by tag is (sort of) possible by clicking on one, but it's not very good at present. I'd love it to be beefed up so you could search by multiple tags. One day...

As for keeping the current story copy on-site while the other is in review, that's an excellent suggestion. Not sure if it's technically possible with the way it's set up right now (one story URL endpoint for all site users) but I can ask the question.

I have asked the dev team if it's possible to flag to mods the stories that are already published and are resubbed with only a few minor changes in them. That way we could skim the queue and knock them back on the site faster. Will see what happens.

Having good search option for tags sounds like a great idea. I’d use it.

As for ‘keeping the current story copy on-site while the other is in review’, from a dev perspective, it feels like all the functionality for this is essentially already in place and the feature would not require a massive engineering effort to build. But of course, that’s easy to say as an outsider, and may not be so simple in practice. Here’s hoping.