Although I understand the issue, I completely disagree with the approach that destroyed so many author-specified labels. If there were some way to restore the tags, I would suggest how the goal could be accomplished without deleting so many and replacing them with meaningless ones. If the information is irretrievable, there's no point in discussing how it should have been done. I'll just weep in silence.

Tags are author-created content and should have been respected as such.

I fully support mods evaluating, fixing, or rejecting tags on stories that they are reviewing. They have the context to decide if they make sense. They approved all the tags on my stories when they were published.

Changing 72,000 published stories was risky and warranted more notice, discussion, and care. Correcting spelling or formatting inconsistencies may be harmless, but deleting adjectives or rephrasing tags without certainty of equivalence was a mistake. Whatever process generated the errors that I cited was flawed.

Almost 5,000 stories going back to 2006 now have the useless tag "sex". On a recent story of mine, the tags "escape room", "sex puzzles", and "sex positions" were removed. You probably know the gist of the story just from those tags. That information is now gone. Although I may be willing to spend the time to repair my stories, similar damage was done throughout the archive that won't be fixed.

I just noticed that many tags on my stories, both old and recent, have been changed or deleted. Although some of the changes are tolerable, others are not.

For example, the tag "incest fantasy mother/daughter" was put on a story without any incest or mother/daughter sex. My tag "mother and daughter" (perhaps subject to misinterpretation) was because the protagonist had sex (on different occasions) with both a woman and her mother.

In multiple stories, the tag "BBW" was changed to "BBW Big Black Woman". The standard interpretation of BBW is "Big Beautiful Woman" and I don't mention race in my stories.

My most recent story, which featured a rejected marriage proposal, had "marriage proposal" changed to "marriage" as well as "unhappy ending" shortened to "ending". My previous story had "sex puzzles" and "sex positions" deleted, replaced with the presumably always superfluous "sex".

Was there an announcement about a change to the tag scheme?

Should I go back and edit all the spurious tags and add back the important ones that were deleted?

Quote by RowanThorn

...

Now if someone wanted to build a chatbot to dirty talk you it would need to be fed loads of dirty talk to learn from. This means that it needs tens of thousands of pages of smut talk. And without specific filtering every part of that will be rolling around the robot brain, every niche kink or dark fantasy will be on the table as a response.

...

If only someone knew of a collection of over 72,000 curated stories with a wide variety of smutty words and scenarios to train a language model. 😉

No, not shazbot. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, and soon many more.

Didn't see any mentioned in forum posts, so wonder if this is the right place to ask.

Has anyone been able to have any NSFW discussions with any of them? So far, they refuse to answer or they change the subject if I get anywhere close to what they consider offensive. I don't know if there is a setting or a way to prove I'm old enough (say, by using a 45-year-old sitcom catchphrase).

I'm just looking for fun, not trying to win the next story competition.😉

Don't know, but saw this:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/7/23674621/western-digital-my-cloud-data-breach-local-access

Quote by Jen

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A new competition will be announced shortly.

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Considering the number of deaths recounted by the stories in the past two competitions, could the next one have a rule that everyone lives (more or less) happily ever after?

Quote by simplyjohn

... However the payment will be processed by PayPal which ever option you chose but if you opt to pay by card you dont need a PayPal account.

I used a credit card to renew my membership but said I didn't want to create a PayPal account. Nonetheless, PayPal saved my information and half-created an account for the email address I use for LushStories. Although it processed my payment, it then flagged the account and my credit card due to some perceived irregularity. In their parlance, the account is limited, which means it can neither be used nor deleted. PayPal provides no means to fix this situation.

They now periodically spam me about the useless account that I didn't want in the first place. I have already spent more time trying to undo or delete the account than should be necessary. I expect I will have trouble the next time I try to renew my membership and will have to work around it.

There is something atypical about how LushStories is using PayPal. I say this because I have not had this problem with other sites that use PayPal to process credit cards without having or creating an account.

Maybe it's just me, but I mention it in case others have the same issue.

Just how many orgasms did those authors depict? And, in this century, how many do their works inspire?

Why did you think it was necessary to capitalize "all"?

Quote by Jen
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Ps. No death during sex!

Reading through the entries, I'm surprised by how many deaths there are. I suppose there could be some parsing of "during sex" but some decedents are still damp and naked, The stories have lots of likes and positive comments, so many people don't mind, but I prefer a story where everyone gets out alive.

Perhaps the mods should require a tag that warns "somebody dies" so I don't end up with my growing interest in a story suddenly killed along with a character.

Just discovered something relating to this thread: Unlike old LS, cover images are no longer accessed from your media, so you do not need to upload them first. Uploading images to your media takes a long time for some reason.

But adding (uploading) a cover image to a story you're editing happens immediately.

LOL! My pics finally showed up in my media, but when I went to use one for the cover, there was no way to tell it to use one that I had uploaded. Instead, I had to upload it again, but it was instantly available! So for my purposes, I guess this queue stuff doesn't affect me. (In old LS, you selected a cover image from your uploads, so I assumed I needed to upload it first).

Sorry for the confusion, thanks for the help!

Quote by IMPURETHOUGHTS

You don't recall what you upload to be processed into your media folder? You have to know by now that users upload a ton of pics at once that it clogs up the uploads.

This is my first attempt to upload an image since LS 2.0 so I was not aware that a human would have to look at the image before I could see what it looks like on the site. If the upload dialog had made that clear, I wouldn't have uploaded trial versions of my cover image and wasted mods' time. I guess I need to change my story workflow so I can get the cover approved before I'm ready to submit the story.

What is this "processing"? Assuming it is something done by a computer, how can it possibly take more than seconds?

If you are saying humans moderate every image, the upload dialog should make that clear. Is there any way to preview what it will look like if it is approved? Is there any way to see what I've submitted but hasn't been approved?

Quote by kistinspencil

Keep in mind that the story image format has substantially changed in Lush2. It is now only portrait mode. Images are to be sized to 512 x 800 pixels, but will actually be rendered at half that on screen. They will also be compressed by about 85%, so a very simple, high contrast image is recommended. Even with that, they may show up quite blurry, making type hard to read unless large and bold.

I know. I lament those format changes but was going to try anyhow. The Profile Photos FAQ has similar language but says "something that you'd see in a newspaper"--do they mean The Times or The Post?😉

I don't want to be pedantic, but what does "photos depicting insertion" mean?

Is this cover from two years ago no longer allowed?

If it is allowed, is it because it doesn't "depict insertion" (although it certainly implies it)?

Or maybe because it isn't a photo of real people but a constructed image?

I'm considering doing something similar and don't want to spend the time if it's no longer acceptable.

If you're looking for some seasonal sexiness, remember the Horrorween competition of 2019.

https://www.lushstories.com/competitions/horrorween

As usual for a competition, there were many distinctive and excellent stories.

This was my entry https://www.lushstories.com/stories/supernatural/soul-mates-2.

I was puzzled the first few times this happened to me, but now know to look for it. Exactly as you describe, it doesn't always save the updates and I have to go back and try again.