The only purpose I can see for it is long stories that do a lot of kink-hopping where containing said kinks in individual chapters isn't optimal/feasible. Even then, with the way readers consume content here, you're leaving a lot of readership on the table. You'd get more eyes and engagement by splitting a chapter with two wildly different kinks into two parts and posting them to appropriate categories, even if said chapters are extremely short.

If it's to be removed, there should be a significant transition period where authors can choose to move their works into appropriate categories themselves. Only after authors have been given at least a month to make the appropriate edits and category changes based upon their knowledge of the work should it be relegated to what will certainly be a deeply flawed process of a third party scattering the chapters.

Frankly, there should be a message sent to anyone who has submissions in the category warning them of the coming change as well, and/or a block should be assigned to the main landing pages announcing big changes. The forum is a poor location to announce significant changes. It has never been particularly active and has become less relevant as time has passed.

While I'm on that subject, if you want any level of actual feedback about changes, things like this thread should be pointed out on the main landing pages as well.

Quote by joe71

Wow, incredible to have that many stories in the Famous category, and now one Legendary. Fantastic work.

I have very, very far to go, with just two ... er, "half-famous?" stories above 15k, and two more now past 10k ("local celebrity," maybe?). Several more approaching 10k, including one at 9997 right now ... anyone wanna give Handy Men a nudge?

Quote by HornyBill

I only have one story in the "Famous" category.

Bill and Vicki

I waited a long time before I began writing on a regular basis, and I hope that more of my stories reach that level. (Alas, they have a long way to go.)

Most of them are around a decade old when they cross the line. I've had a couple that were lightning in a bottle from prior to the transition to Lush 2.0, but for most it's a combination of looooong periods of time and the higher view counts prior to 2.0.

They're almost all Milf stories as well. That's constantly on the popular category list on the front page for a reason.

My fantasy stuff might hit Famous in the year 2300. LOL

"Nude Holly Day" has just passed the 100k mark to become my 2nd Legendary story. 🍺 So now "Good Will" takes its place in my signature and on my profile page as the next closest submission to Famous status.

When the computer at the thrift shop catches a virus and goes down, Renee is blessed to have her neighbor's son Will dispatched to set things right again. As it so happens, the computer isn't the only thing going down when her handsome and hung young neighbor arrives.

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/milf/good-will

Indiana as well. Just as easy to get around as anything else with region restrictions. VPN and set your location to the nearest state that doesn't have a ban.

I'm only referring to stories that are genuinely multi-part where there are lots of things left unresolved at the end of each part until the final one ties a bow in the last dangling plot thread. If you're writing connected stories that each have a beginning, middle, and end, that's a completely different thing. Post away and let the feedback fuel you.

For most of mine in this pen name, the sex is the resolution of the "plot". There could be more that comes after, but the major tension is getting laid in the first place.

I was a little disappointed that the follow-up to Luna Launch fizzled, ( or rather that I felt it was going to take too many parts to get to the broader idea I had in mind. The second part actually got finished. It's just unpublished. ) but it doesn't bother me as a standalone. There's enough resolution that while readers may want more, but they don't need more. You'll never actually get to see him and her dad go fishing, but he got Luna's blessing to do it. Plot thread resolved.

There are a hundred dangling plot threads in Sisters of the Mists. That one bothers me.

Just a word of warning. No matter how much you're invested in a story and how well it's going, you never know when life is going to kick you in the coconuts somehow and grind you to a screeching halt. I've got a story elsewhere that I started posting in July of 2007. It's book 2 of what's my core fantasy series that most of the other high fantasy work branches out from. I had a tragedy in my life that's intimately connected to that story and the main character on the day Ch. 12 came out in Feb. 2008, and I've only managed to put out 8 chapters in the years since. It bothers me pretty much every time I log in to have it hanging out there.

If you can manage the discipline, don't post one word until you've penned "the end" on the final chapter. Some of my stuff doesn't come out until years after I originally start it because of that, but that's so much better for me than having an incomplete story hanging over my head in public. At least when it's still sitting on my hard drive, I'm the only person I'm disappointing.

Thanks 😊

Looking back at my old tracking, there's such a stark difference in the speed at which views accumulate now. The numbers I get now when I'm active are about what I used to get when I'd been absent for a year or so. Anything that wasn't already in the 20k+ range prior to the switch to 2.0 will probably never get to famous. Even the stuff that's there is going to take a decade. LOL

My suspicion is that they've improved the bot filtering. It's a good thing to have the number better represent human readers if that's the case, but it makes the old standards for famous and legendary wildly out of step with the current reality. It's all a mater of "are you on the top of a top stories list for a significant portion of a month and/or a medalist from the previous month?" now. If the answer is no, those views ain't going nowhere.

Selfie Stuck finally crosses the threshold to become my 22nd Famous story. The next one in line needs a little over 1500 reads, and that's about twice as much as Selfie Stuck needed a year ago. LOL The views now are so low that these awards probably seem utterly unattainable to anyone who doesn't have stories that have been here for years.

Replacing Selfie Stuck and joining Nude Holly Day ( which is slowly creeping toward Legendary ) as a highlighted story on my profile is "You Serious?" His girlfriend wants him to bang her bestie in this naughty little tale. Give it a read and one more step toward Famous.

Quote by wxt55uk

Though I will give poetry a go to achieve my omnium badge (though it might just be a collection of words). 🙄

My personal opinion is that poetry is a completely different discipline from writing stories, and if this had been LushPoetry, I would never have been here. So I do sympathise with those who will not complete this badge because of its conclusion.

Suggestion to LS stakeholders, could there be a form of the omnium badge that doesn't include poetry?

Exactly. Poetry isn't remotely the same as prose. There's an actual prose category excluded because it gives people the heebie-jeebies, but a completely different form of writing is required. Makes no sense — especially in light of the unclear description it's had for years.

I calculate approximately a cold day in hell's chance of that changing, because there's not going to be an overwhelming outcry to exclude it like there was for IF when the category was reluctantly reinstated. It is what it is. Off the to-do list it goes.

I'm not going to put out something I'm not satisfied with just to fill a category. No poetry I write could meet my bare minimum standards — let alone something I'm proud to display. It usually takes me days to write a handful of rhyming couplet stanzas for a witchcraft spell in one of my fantasy stories, and those have zero meaning.

I was fooled all these years by the description saying "Published a story across all our categories". I assumed it meant story categories only. That really does need to be changed in some way to reflect the requirement for poetry to attain the badge.

Whelp, if poetry is necessary, I can stop wasting my time keeping track. Pity, because I was only a few story categories off, and had stories started for all of them.

I've at least found a workaround. If I Shift+Refresh, that at least works for the page I'm on. It at least makes browsing with Chrome possible, if somewhat frustrating.

Wouldn't dare trust it for something like submission where page changes and saving data is a requirement.

Another little tidbit. Every once in a blue moon when I come to the site via Chrome, the top banner loads. Whenever it does, everything works as expected. Every other time, it looks like this:

And that's when virtually nothing works. The online author section is also blank. The stats at the end of stories are blank. I can still use everything when editing my profile, but drop downs for top stories and authors don't function.

Seems as if certain scripts aren't loading for me 99% of the time. The fact that it does work ( as it did last night for a visit moving page to page for a few minutes without problems ) on rare occasions indicates it's not a blocked domain or some browser setting.

Thought I'd mention it as it might be information that could point to a certain script group or server housing them that's linked to the problem I'm experiencing in desktop Chrome.

A couple of months ago, I started experiencing an issue. When using Chrome or Edge on my desktop, clicking on my notification bell or message icon will not work unless I'm on the activity page. Clicking either does nothing while on any other page of the site. When on the activity page, I can view my notifications. Clicking the message icon results in a blank page, but at least it does something.

I discovered yesterday that I'm also unable to use the dropdown menus on the top author/story pages. They will change, but none of the selections take effect.

Adblock and popup block are disabled for the site. I double checked that even though that shouldn't be the issue since I can do things on the activity page.

Chrome is my normal browser, but upon testing, I discovered the same problems happen in Edge. Upon testing Firefox, everything works as expected. Everything also works just fine in Chrome on my phone.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Is there some new domain I need to whitelist? I suppose I could get used to defaulting to Firefox for Lush. I use it for one of my other pen names elsewhere anyway. If there's a fix, I'd much prefer that.

Her Cut to the Chase just passed 30K to become #21 in my famous story list Five months since the last update. As always, this is as much for my records as anything else.

Famous Track 20k+

Selfie Stuck 26036 -> 28728 -> 29136

Good Will 25554 -> 26651 -> 26915

Three Alarm 25716 -> 26621 -> 26812

You Serious? 24387 -> 26184

Kitty in the Cream 24592 ->25720 -> 26003

Hard Times 24203 -> 25332 -> 25649

Summer's Heat 23868 -> 25057 -> 25326

Sunny Daze 23075 -> 24527 -> 24870

Jerk 23427 ->24392 -> 24773

Souvenir 22819 -> 24208 -> 24498

Taste the Rainbow 22254 ->23580 -> 23863

Pole Skills 22393 -> 23832

Double Booked 21505 ->22549 -> 22808

Got Me Pegged 21019 -> 23550

Vicki Cleans Up 20907 -> 22200 -> 22520

And I'll Get a Pole 20246 -> 21959 -> 22193

Heart-Shaped Box 20959 -> 21656 -> 21810

A Sale of Two Titties 20602 -> 21445 -> 21646

Son Stroke 19908 -> 21119

Divorcing My Vibe 19704 -> 20555 _> 20784

About to join the 20k club

Clean Up - Aisle Eight 19131 -> 19818 -> 19990

Her Flock 19337 -> 19701

Trade In 19261 -> 19693

Beholding Dawn 19462 -> 19685

Pick Up the Spare 19099

Legendary Track ( 40k+ )

Nude Holly Day 89902 -> 97188 -> 98828

Dip in the Lake 63562 -> 66550 -> 67423

A Fine Substitute 60614 -> 64147

Mom's Stocking Stuffer 49914 -> 57589

Mom's Second Chance 49577 -> 56492

Bet Your Bottom 47347 -> 49044

Like Riding a Bike 45980 -> 48475

Double Dip 45519 -> 46848

Quite Neighborly 42546 -> 43212

Her Own Skin 41368 -> 42174

"You Serious" took a big hop in the rankings because it's in decent position on the threesome toplist. "Pole Skills" did a leapfrog because it's decently positioned on the Milf list. "Got Me Pegged" hopped a couple of places because it's well placed in the strap-on list. ( Noticing a pattern here? ) "Son Stroke" just got a little extra juice from being to leapfrog.

"Her Flock" jumped two places, but still hasn't graduated to the 20k club. "Pick Up the Spare" made it into the 19k club.

No change in the Legendary rankings, but "Nude Holly Day" is down to less than 200 views away.

Thankfully, searching by title has improved greatly, and I was easily able to put the next famous candidate "Selfie Stuck" in a highlight position on my profile. Synopsis: When his hot young student manages to get hold of his phone number and sends him nude selfies, she puts herself in a position to blackmail him, so he's truly stuck — and fucked.

Alrighty then. Problem solved. Adding an additional 50 pixels of width to my template is hardly an issue. Still looks a little muddy, but nowhere near as bad as when it's being stretched in both dimensions.

While we're on the subject of image presentation, why are signature images being resized larger than the originals and out of proportion, causing the images to look muddy? Reducing the displayed size I can understand, but what reason is there for making them larger?

Actual image from my server vs. the way it's displayed in my sig below:

It's the same as every other forum on the internet. If you revive an old thread because it's pertinent to your question, people complain about thread necromancy. If you start a new topic, people complain about rehashing the same question over and over again.

The ability to ignore it if they have nothing other than that to contribute seems to be beyond many folks.

Maybe should have skipped the bible in that list. It may not be in all of them, but nearly every KJ version that I've seen has several declarations in all caps. The I AM verse is the first one that pops into mind. Not the only traditionally published work I've seen where bold/all caps is used to denote the voice of a deity either.

Doesn't really apply to the complaint at hand, but...

Nominations for the 2022 Clitorides are open. As usual, the area where Lush excels — shorter work — is underrepresented with nominations. Flash and poetry are always lacking in nominations, and Lush has no shortage of fine ones here that deserve wider recognition. ( as well as plenty in other categories )

So head on over and make your nominations.

https://clitoridesawards.org/nominate.php

Possible to choose to a certain extent. I managed to find a word combination that brought up Nude Holly Day, but no luck conjuring up Her Cut to the Chase no matter what words I use to search for it. Specific story search is unbelievably wonky.

It's a step forward though. Have to take what small boons you can sometimes.

Luck on your quest. No time to read at the moment, but I gave you another tick each. The bottom seems to have fallen out of view accumulation. I suspect someone updated the bot/spider filter about July of last year by the way things look. Good that more humans are represented by the numbers if that's the case, but it sure makes these milestones take a while.

Not a huge deal, but notifications seem to be lagging. I'll have something new on my interactions page, but no notification. Then I'll come back some time later, and the notification will finally show up. Can't remember whether the one from two hours ago showed up ( I don't believe it did ) but I had one 4 minutes ago that still hasn't hit the notification bell.

Like I said, not a huge deal, but I thought I'd bring it up in case something needs a reboot.

Looking at the displayed one here on the forum vs. the raw banner for SitRD demonstrates the troublesome distortion uploaded images face. ETA: Just tried uploading an alternate banner that approximated as best I could the size it's blowing the banners up to, and it still distorts them. Downsizing overly large images I can understand. Why on earth 2.0 blows up smaller images — making them look terrible — makes no sense to me.

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/milf/stuffed-basted

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/mature/curl-figure

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/taboo/step-in-the-right-direction

Quote by BadDog9

When I add a cover image, I can't submit the story. If I remove the image it submits just fine. I have double checked the size and even made it smaller. Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

By "Can't Submit" do you mean that after you click the submit button, it just sits with the progress spinner and never progresses to the preview screen? If that's the case and you have slow internet, you might wait a little longer, because it takes a while for a story with an attached image to upload even on reasonably quick internet speeds.

:: sigh :: Just lost a post due to the logout bug.

It depends upon how old the stories are. Just before the Incest category was suddenly removed and the Freemium model was introduced, there was significantly more daily traffic as tracked by web analytics sites. There were a lot of anonymous and free account holder eyes on stories, causing the views on all existing stories to be a lot higher than the rest of the numbers would indicate.

The drop in traffic after those two mentioned events was rather precipitous. The loss of votes from free account holders bailing wasn't exactly a drop in the bucket either.

So those older stories are heavily skewed. No doubt the additional real traffic brought a lot of bots with it as well. The bigger you get, the more spiders you have crawling all over you. Like you, I think having a number that better represents actual humans is good, ( assuming that's what it is ) but it certainly requires a mental adjustment of expectations.

Quote by CarltonStJames

It'll be the year 2100 before any of my stories reach famous status 😆, but I do love the vote of confidence!

Something can take off unexpectedly and just rocket up there, and it usually pulls a few others higher with it.

Although, looking back through the archives, it seems as if views sitewide fell off a cliff since around July of this year. I know the ratio on my last several releases has not looked right at all. 100+ votes, but not even 5k views? Do your views seem to be out of whack?

The sudden, steep decline makes me wonder if they've perhaps updated some bot/spider filtering of that number, because only the views seem off. That would be good in a way, as it would better reflect actual people reading. Makes Famous and Legendary hopes stretch off far into the future, though.

Then again, if that's what happened, it won't last long. The bot creators are more prolific than any of us could ever dream of being, and no filter list can keep up with them. The numbers will steadily creep up as a fresh wave of internet spiders invade.

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/quickie-sex/getting-her-sausage

https://www.lushstories.com/stories/quickie-sex/all-full

ETA: Well, they're centered, but at least they're not distorted. Progress. LOL

Now, let us see if I've figured out some things while adding the two newest banners.

Obviously not. There are external images above, but I tried the highlight and paste trick to make them clickable images, and nothing showed up. Can't add media in an edit, so I'll have to try again to see if I can at least display the banners.

Quote by IMPURETHOUGHTS

I have no idea but I use Samsung Internet Browser through Samsung Tablet. And linking images from pvt tumblr blog to forum instead of uploading said image to lush media file--the image won't get distorted.

That certainly helps. The albums take up such high prominence real estate that my eyes were glossing over the tabs at the top. I have the option to host my own images, so I'll certainly be taking advantage of that where necessary to eliminate distortion once I figure out exactly what options I have.

The design of the interface clashes severely with my expectations. I expect a drag to insert, or to click for an insertion menu on the attached image from my experience in similar environments.

The way Lush displays things like images from galleries now has forced me to upload my bigger cover images, because the more compact size I was using looks terrible — faded and distorted.

I'll quit rambling. You've put me on the right path, and I'll see how far I can get down it without getting lost. LOL

Quote by IMPURETHOUGHTS

In saying that, this pic was removed from my covers(its playing peek-a-boo)

Why? Idk lol not like I can access cover pics.

And this was the image that I uploaded to public media folder.

After this post, imma stay away from the help/lush has issues threads.

Pardon the tangent, but how on earth do you control placement of your attached images? The forum interface is about as opaque and unintuitive as anything I've ever come across.