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.

I'm going to make this an all in one promo thread for my stuff. My forum ad banners sometimes only see 24 hours of service, and I enjoy making them, so I'm going to start putting them here.

If only I could make them clickable links, or even format posts so they could have adjacent links...

::cough:: Not so subtle hint ::cough::

ETA: And it automatically blows up the images to fill the post width? ::facepalm & sigh:: Oh well...

Side Hustle Catbird Seat and Eat Something

Something I picked up about this:

The order is newest to oldest until you reply to a comment on your own work. It will then remain backwards so long as the most recent activity is your comment reply. As soon as someone else generates an activity item, it will go back to the expected order.

It also only affects the first page. Clicking to page 2 shows newest to oldest on that page.

"Becalmed" was from a meme where a woman is shown putting her hair up and the tagline is "When he says nothing can make him feel better."

"Coming in Third" started with the memory of one of my buddies pulling off the mother/daughter hat trick for real, and the line near the end where the MC says "Tell your mom I said hi."

"You Serious?" is another meme start where it says "When you let your BF fuck your bestie because she's been single for a long time and you know we all have needs" and a picture of three in a bed where the one girl is reading a book and holding hands with her friend while her BF rails her.

"A Sale of Two Titties" comes from the title, which comes from a Monty Python skit. A lot of mine arise from a giant file of wordplay/pun titles.

My latest, "Catbird Seat" starts with looking for an idea for the Facesitting category. I started doing searches for phrases related to sit, seat, etc. That one popped up, the concept of the no pets popped in my head, and I was off to the races. I had to tweak it because it originally started with Alexa as the property manager's daughter, and that put too much of an air of real power dynamics that I didn't like. In the final version she thinks she has all the power, but in reality she's got no leverage, and they go along with it because it turns them on.

Not here and little chance it will be, because it's Sci-Fi/Fantasy and 100k words long, but "One Whore's Town" is another title start. Let me take a peripheral character from another story and give her a starring role in a tale of two prostitutes in a turf war that gets out of hand fast.

Maybe cast a line with a general theme/basic plot and see if that attracts any bites. The collaboration could even start right here on the forum at first. In another place I post, that's how chain stories where authors take turns with chapters get started.

"Want to collaborate on something?" isn't nearly as enticing as something like "Want to collaborate on a story where..."

Toss out several ideas you've come up with that haven't completely jelled. We've all got them. Maybe one of yours will mesh up with someone else's.

It's been over a year, and I finally have new stuff in the pipeline, so I thought it would be a good time to establish a new baseline.

Famous Track 20k+

Her Cut to the Chase 27971 -> 29548

Selfie Stuck 26036 -> 28728

Good Will 25554 -> 26651

Three Alarm 25716 -> 26621

Kitty in the Cream 24592 ->25720

Hard Times 24203 -> 25332

Summer's Heat 23868 -> 25057

Sunny Daze 23075 -> 24527

Jerk 23427 ->24392

You Serious? 24387

Souvenir 22819 -> 24208

Taste the Rainbow 22254 ->23580

Double Booked 21505 ->22549

Pole Skills 22393

Vicki Cleans Up 20907 -> 22200

And I'll Get a Pole 20246 -> 21959

Heart-Shaped Box 20959 -> 21656

A Sale of Two Titties 20602 -> 21445

Got Me Pegged 21019

Divorcing My Vibe 19704 -> 20555

About to join the 20k club

Clean Up - Aisle Eight 19131 -> 19818

Son Stroke 19908

Beholding Dawn 19462

Her Flock 19337

Trade In 19261

Legendary Track ( 40k+ )

Nude Holly Day 89902 -> 97188

Dip in the Lake 63562 -> 66550

A Fine Substitute 60614 -> 64147

Mom's Second Chance 49577 -> 56492

Mom's Stocking Stuffer 49914

Like Riding a Bike 45980 -> 48475

Bet Your Bottom 47347

Double Dip 45519

Quite Neighborly 42546

Her Own Skin 41368

A couple of newer stories debut on the Famous Track list. One actually never saw the list, because "Overheard" came out and became my 21st Famous Story between tracks. One story graduated to the Famous Track. Four stories reached the 19k threshold, including a recent one.

I finally did a full search and established a criteria for the Legendary Track at 40k+, so several stories joined those ranks. Most of them would have actually qualified for a while, but I was just winging that section with fast moving stories previously.

A little jockeying for position in the Famous Track. "Her Cut to the Chase" is less than 500 away from my 22nd Famous Story. "Nude Holly Day" is less than 3k from becoming my second Legendary Story.

As usual, this is as much for my own records as anything, but I certainly won't discourage anyone from clicking the links and pushing them one read closer. It's been a while, so here are some plugs for the two that are closest.

Nude Holly Day: Alan's assistant Holly is good at her job, and he couldn't be happier to have helped her when she was just a desperate runaway. When he takes a long weekend at his favorite retreat at the nudist camp after finishing a major new campaign, a very unexpected surprise awaits him. ( Mature, older man and young woman )

Her Cut to the Chase: It started by accident, but once Kimberly caught the young stud who mows her lawn checking her out, it turned into a naughty little game of wearing provocative clothing to catch his eye. It was harmless fantasy fuel, but an overheard conversation at the county fair makes her wonder if it couldn't be more. A stop at the Bingo tent may be the key to more than one jackpot. ( Milf, older woman and young man )

It's a tough call here for connected stories that aren't chapters or long stories split into parts by necessity due to the 10k submission limit. The response to long and multi-part stories falls off precipitously, so linking complete, connected stories risks feeding into that readership bias and hurting the overall performance of the linked stories.

I decided to go ahead and link mine up, because they're all Sci-Fi&Fantasy, Monster Sex, or Supernatural. Those categories don't get much traffic anyway, and the bias isn't nearly as strong with that readership. The benefit of the readership being able to quickly locate the connected stories is worth it for those, IMO.

Outside of that, I'd be hesitant. The series linking isn't noted in most listings, and isn't overly prominent on the story page itself. If something had a timeline where reading the stories out of order could cause someone to be confused, I'd seriously consider it. If someone gets married or has a kid in the second story for example, people discovering the first story after that would be thrown off-balance for at least a while. Major changes like that warrant a series listing to me.

Full, unabbreviated statistics. Search functionality. Two massive issues I had that are now solved.

Text search of your story list is a little wonky. It doesn't seem to search the entire list, but rather only the page you're on. Being able to filter by other criteria makes it manageable. I can remember the categories, and that creates a small enough list to be a single page for the most part. I can find what I'm looking for and see what I want to see at a glance with an acceptable amount of effort.

Likewise, using the specific story option for stories to highlight on your profile doesn't give access to your full story list either. Not a deal breaker for me, but it would be nice if you could choose any three specific stories.

( I'm guessing both of those are something that's already slated for tweaking )

Combine that with the new leaderboards, and I'm feeling infinitely more comfortable with the state of things. Bonus points for the excellent new series functionality.

I do think the leaderboards for each category should be featured as a link "More Popular Stories" right next to the two popular stories on each category's page. I think they'll generate a lot more traffic when linked from there, rather than only from the bottom of the page menu.

Please, at least give us the ability to link an image in our forum signatures. I hate how everybody is neutering signatures nowadays, but I'll sigh and live with it if I can just post an image and have it be a clickable link to the story. That is the final major issue I have with the migration to 2.0

While the ability for authors to remove comments on their own may seem irrelevant or even repugnant to some, there are instances where not having to cut through red tape is extremely beneficial. An online romance gone sour, where you've revealed personal details that then get leaked in comments, for instance. If that happens at the wrong time of night, such comments could be available for hours after you noticed them when mod intervention was required. Hateful and racist comments. Attacks on other authors. Spam. There are all sorts of reasons why having the power to immediately erase a comment can be a good thing.

Fortunately, Lush has a culture that not only generates a high comment ratio, but also one that is overwhelmingly positive. That doesn't mean that bad eggs can't crop up. If it happens to you, you'll be thankful to have that instant ability to eradicate the offensive comment.

If someone deletes your comment, and you feel it was unwarranted, you have a simple solution. Don't read, vote, or comment on their work again. They don't value your opinion, so don't give it. If it's something they do regularly, they'll soon find themselves in non-interaction hell.

Well, at least the real view numbers are available somewhere. It's an incredible pain in the ass to have to click and scroll every single one to see them.

Whatever the templating excuse for truncating the numbers in our main list is, it's insufficient as far as I'm concerned. If necessary, give us a private list that shows ALL the raw numbers in one location so nobody else has to see that "bad design" except the author. That would be a step toward restoring list sorting capability anyway. The excellent new series code already has the base elements of that in place. If it's going to continue to be paginated, we need searchability and/or sortability by any statistic as well.

We need to be able to find a specific story and see the numbers in a reasonable amount of time.

I've said it before, but no matter what scoring method is used, you'll always have a core of people who believe it's rigged against them. This choice is transparent, not mathematically complicated, and prevents downward manipulation. Such a fundamental change is never going to be ideal when work that has existed for years under different criteria is involved, but the solution offered for dealing with existing work is reasonable IMO.

As to contests, I don't believe the shortlisting was ever based entirely upon score. The one time I placed was ( as best I can determine from conversation at the time ) because very few people were on theme in a sponsored contest. My score and vote total were nothing to write home about from what I remember at the time, and I believe that was the reason for the complaints that started the conversation I'm talking about. If it was only score that determined the shortlist, I wouldn't have made it.

I've seen other stories place where the score wasn't in that upper echelon, but the story was most certainly deserving. I've never seen a winning story that didn't deserve to be there. My anecdotal observations indicate to me that solid stories had an opportunity to be considered regardless of the raw number of the score. Some probably slipped through the cracks due to large numbers of entries, but there was always opportunity for a well written story.

The new scoring method in fact removes the reason I stopped participating in contests. The more nuanced voting in contests hurt the long-term exposure of stories that didn't place, and there were too many top tier authors ( top tier in quality/talent, not followers ) participating regularly to leave any openings for anyone else. Thus participation was a net negative for me. The same story published outside the contest would score better, and thus gain exposure over the long term that outweighed the short term bump from contest highlighting. Absent the liked-it-but-didn't-love-it 4s that contest voting typically produced, there's no downward pressure on long term exposure from the new scoring method.

( Absent the by-category toplists, long term exposure potential has been seriously curtailed, but that's a different discussion )

The short version is that I think people are reading too much into the documented shortlisting process and unnecessarily worried that author followings will push everyone else out.

For all stories posted on site until the change, the current score will be added to

It's using the word score here that makes this unclear. It should be changed to vote total.

With that clarified, I'm ambivalent about the change in the scoring process. I'm more interested in whether we're going to regain real access to our views after the change, or whether we're going to continue being stuck with rounded off numbers. That's one of three things that's put me off posting any new work. The need to click through to each individual story page from an unsortable, unsearchable list to access our full statistics is frustrating enough, but not even having useful view numbers once you do is a deal breaker.

So a story with 100+ votes but only 38 likes has 60% of its original reader interaction just tossed in the fire.

::sigh::

It's been off ever since we could turn it off.

They really need to look into why it's coming up on the activity page, because that's a fight waiting to happen if the wrong person sees supposed matches.

Here we go again.

Not seeing it now, but I've never seen it before, either.

If that's some sort of bug, it needs fixing pronto. Even if it's just a display bug of some kind, that's a panic attack waiting to happen. Imagine someone's spouse/partner seeing that.

Side note: There wouldn't be anything in that section for me if we hadn't been forced to fill it out right after the switch, and there's no way to null out the age and distance ones that I can fathom.

Just looked at the activity page and came across this:

Checked to make sure, and I'm set to "Not Seeking"

So why are my details being promoted to 77 matches?

There are some small publishers out there who do all the ancillary work like cover art, IBSN, putting it on the market at Amazon, Apple, Smashwords, etc. If you're not interested in the money, I'm sure they'd be happy to take both cuts, and perhaps invest a little extra into cover art for subsequent outings if it proves lucrative for their brand. Since there's no money changing hands between you, they would be more likely ( and able ) to keep things close to the vest and not ask any unnecessary questions that could jeopardize your "day job" or out you to the wife before you're ready.

If nobody bites on an individual basis, it's another option to accomplish your goal of getting it out there and keeping yourself away from it.

As things are currently, you can't rearrange the listing of your stories on your profile. It's latest at the top, and that's it.

What you can do is use the much improved series management to link those stories together. Pick the first story in a series, edit it, and go to the bottom where the "series" box is. There, since it's a brand new series, type a name for the new series. You will then have an option to save it, and it will be applied to the story you're editing.

Note that some submissions seem to go straight through without hitting the moderation queue when adding a series is the only change you're making, and some don't. It's a good idea to add a moderator note that all you're changing is the series addition. If it doesn't hit the queue, you only waste a few keystrokes.

Once the series has been created, you will see it as an option on any other story you submit/edit. So you can go to the next story in the series, edit it, select the series from the drop-down, and it will automatically be assigned as the second story in the series.

If, for any reason, you need to shuffle the order of the stories in the series, you can do that on your series management page. https://www.lushstories.com/my-series This is where the new series management really shines. There's a lot I don't like about 2.0, but series management is a joy to use compared to what we had in 1.0, and much more versitile.

It's also the exact sort of code that would be needed to rearrange the stories on our profile as we choose, so the heavy lifting is done for that feature. That gives me hope that we'll get it eventually.

If you want to see what a story that's linked looks like, here's one of mine. https://www.lushstories.com/stories/fantasy-sci-fi/facing-destiny-pt-1-of-2

Quote by naughtyannie

It's ironic really. I've been banging on for years about having a couple of badges for poems, roughly equivalent to the "Famous" and "Legendary" story badges but with lower "read" requirements, to reflect the lower numbers even the best ones get.

These could actually be achievable by a wider range of people, as well as promoting interest in a genre that Lush does better than most other erotic writing sites.

Have the powers-that-be shown any interest? Not a chance.

But propose something that's hardly anyone's ever going to get, and it's done.

Weird. 🙄

Got to agree. I don't write or even get poetry for the most part beyond rhyming couplets, but the amount of engagement a poem gets here in relation to stories ( especially flash and micros ) is orders of magnitude higher than it is on other erotica sites. That and the aforementioned flash/micros is something Lush does particularly well, and it could do with some prioritization.

Most of the other sites specialize in longer works, and have been around longer. Lush would do well to highlight one of the areas where it outshines them with poetry and short works to attract and retain the readers/writers/poets who prefer them.

Quote by KimmiBeGood

Quote by deviantsusie
I don’t get that either but then my activity seems stuck unless a friend comments on another friends activity.

I posted a micro to check out the new editor. Sadly when I cut and pasted from google docs, every return in google docs became a double return so had to manually delete one between every paragraph. Just as well it was a micro 🙄

And I’m not having a go at any developers or mods in posting this, just feeding back that there is a glitch. I was using chrome on a laptop if that helps. 💋♥️

Same. If I delete a line between every paragraph after I copy/paste from Docs, then submit, the spacing adjusts upon submitting to where the spacing looks good in published version. I don't see the proper spacing until after the Submit though. But I think my latest stories look good.

While I haven't tried the new submission form, I had to do special preparations for mine due to spacing issues on the 1.0 submission form as well.

Try a find for: ^p^p and replace it with ^p

The original document will look like utter garbage as a wall of text. ( Keep a readable master copy ) but it came out right once pasted and submitted. May be worth a try if you have the extra lines between paragraphs.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

Quote by RejectReality
It's about 70/30 queue/sail through for me.

I have an unfounded suspicion it might be to do with tidying up spaces at the end of the piece. Maybe on resub, if it trims the whitespace as a service (or something) that triggers the "eeek, the story body is different" and diverts it to the queue instead of passing straight through. But if your story has none at the end, it bypasses it.

A total guess so I might be way off.

Most of these have been through the re-sub process once before for the same reason when previous/next links were introduced under 1.0. If it was that, I think they would have already had anything trimmed the first go-around.

Quote by adele
As long as all you were doing was adding or correctiong the series information and not making any other changes, the stories went right through on Lush v1. I always added a note just in case, but the vast majority right through without moderator intervention. I hope that doesn't change.

It's about 70/30 queue/sail through for me. Seems to be no particular rhyme or reason why. Three chapters of a story will need approval, then the fourth goes through. First chapter requires approval, second goes through, final two require approval. Then a whole 4 part series will go through, and every part of a 10 chapter story will need approval.

That's the same experience I had under the old system as well, so the ease of use and instant re-sorting is still a huge + for me.

It's going to take forever to finish linking everything up though. I wait at least a couple of hours after one's been approved before trying again, and the next one usually goes in the queue as well. Every once in a while I might have a run of luck and change 2-3 without waiting, but it's rare. Last one was just approved 10 minutes ago, so maybe I'll drop another right before I go to bed.

Quote by LakeShoreLimited

Oh, I just saw the new series management page. It has a little icon next to the series name. Should it be the newest at the top or the oldest? I guess that is my call. Now, if they could only deal with that white space under the story problem.

First story in the series at the top, flowing to the final story at the bottom.  When you link up a new one, it will always move to the bottom.  You can then move it as necessary from series management to put it in the proper chronological place.  A nice improvement over what we had.

Now, if only someone could tell me why some existing stories/chapters go straight through without moderation, while others go into the queue, when I'm doing the exact same thing to all of them — adding the series designation, and nothing else.

As a matter of fact, I've actually edited the moderator section on a few of them that went through without moderation, while I didn't change that section ( it still had an old moderator note saying I'm linking them as chapters that serves the purpose ) on some, and those hit the queue.

Baffling.

Not that this is new.  It happened when I was linking chapters under the old system as well.

I'm trying to wait at least a few hours after one goes into the queue and the minor change gets approved.  I have to click the new ( author ) series button once I submit each change to see if it went through or got stuck in the queue, because there's no difference in the prompt.  Thankfully, there's a "in review" notation on those that hit the queue within the series management, so I don't have to dig back through my story list to check.

Someone said it works in Mozilla ( Firefox ) but I haven't tested it yet.  It's worth a go if that's not what you're already using, and if you're willing to go to the trouble of a second browser.  I already use three to keep my different pen names logged in elsewhere, so it's no biggie for me, assuming it does work.

Okay, I've got another one.  The series editing is wonderful.  It's also exactly the code that would allow us to order our story page as we wish, so the heavy lifting on that is already complete.  It's just a matter of implementing it.  Still need the ability to edit existing stories to make them a series, and a button on the story page similar to the "unpublished" button would be nice for quicker access to series editing, but what's there is easy to use and works like a charm.  My existing series are all back in the proper order in a scant couple of minutes.

ETA: Okay, figured out how to create new series.  Didn't realize you could just start typing.  Since adding a series is requiring moderator approval, I guess I'll have to go slow.  Don't want to overload the queue, and there's a lot to link up.

Okay, I've got one.

The full numerical breakdown of the bar graph is an improvement over the original, and I like it.

I will say that if pasting with formatting intact isn't an option, allowing us to use BBcode and have it interpreted into the correct HTML formatting for the final posting would also be acceptable.  I can at least prepare my documents in advance with find/replace to do that.  Doing it with the GUI is what I find too tedious and prone to omission.

Paste with formatting intact, detailed stats, popular lists by category, and the ability to quickly locate one of our own stories via search or removal of the pagination are the deal-breakers for me. The rest is irritating or sucking the joy out of the site for me, but those are what make the effort vs. reward calculation fail to balance.

Paste with formatting is #1 because I would be willing to add cross-venue work if I had that. The rest are discouraging me from writing the short Lush exclusives that don't perform particularly well anywhere else.  I simply don't see them reaching performance levels here that make it worth the effort as things are.

Quote by adele

I realize that it is probably an exercise in futility, but when we are told that very few complaints have been received (this despite the fact that the thread to report bugs was locked because there were too many complaints about missing features) and that some of the features won't be done because the developers say THEIR users didn't like them when they were polled or that 75% of THEIR users access the site on a phone, I just felt we needed to let them see in an open forum if they are right or wrong.

Quote by adele

  1.   Are you an author?

Yes

  2.   Do you primarily use the chat rooms, forums, neither or both.

Forums  

3.   What is the main device you access Lush with? phone/tablet, lappy or PC

PC

  4.   On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the happiest) how happy are you with the chatroom changes?

 Don't care.  Don't use. 

5.   On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the forum changes?

2  Jump to last post links are nice.  Separation between posts is terrible.  Signatures are bare bones. 

 6.   As an author, on a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the story changes?

0 Don't like the new presentation of stories, especially those with top images.

  7.   On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the general overall design changes?

0 Author features barely exist, and what's there is buggy.

  8.   Which chatroom features do you miss the most? (ex. mention vs just selecting a name, whisper,  "landing" directly into a room, room size, etc)

Don't care.  Don't use.

  9.  Which forum features do you miss the most? (ex. new format, harder to post pics, forum signature, etc.)

Signatures.  Designing my story banners is one of the things that gives me joy.  Being able to use images from galleries other than the main one in the forum.  Being able to preview before submitting a post.

10.  As an author, which story features do you miss the most? (ex. detail vs rounding stats, ability to sort, tags at end of story instead of top, etc.)

Detailed stats.  Pasting with formatting intact.  Popular lists.  Read lists.  Landscape top images.  Sorting our story lists.  Being able to find anything in our story lists ( Need search if it's going to remain paginated ).  Prominence of story badges such as RR, Famous, and Legendary.  The # of stories on the new story page.  Notification when a vote is cast.

11.  Which general features do you miss the most? (ex. black boxes, ability to customize profiles, ability to sort friends, have friends all show on 1 page, settings don't hold, becoming part of a dating site, etc.)

Ability to search by name.  Author listings sortable by # of stories ( ideally, sortable by all stat columns ) 

12. Any other comments you would like to add or if there is anything you are particularly happy with on the new site.