Neighbours or hotel guests, all of it is hot to overhear.

I haven't killed in ages.

Quote by dronette56

Add Author's Notes to things that will trigger a review.

Is that a request, or are you saying it does currently trigger a trip to the mod queue?

Should be fixed now. Thank you for the report.

I wondered why it had been quiet in there recently. It does the same for me.

Good catch, thank you. I'll get it reported.

Glad you like the place so far. Always lovely to read that someone enjoys the stories, thank you.

Awesome picks. Congrats to all the winners. A fun challenge producing some spooky tales from a talented bunch. Fab to see so many people entering. I really enjoyed reading them.

Thanks to Kimmi as always for her tireless encouragement and generosity. And to the mystery judge, and prize donors too. A worthy set of new saints for All Saints Day.

Cum Midnight

“Trick or treat!”

“Depends what's under those mummy bandages.”

The blonde giggles. “Nothing.”

I invite my gifts inside and unwrap them. Soft skin. Softer pussies, exploring with fingers; tongue; teeth; cock. A debauched symphony of shadows dance from flickering candlelight onto velvet-veiled walls.

All night, gasps and cries bounce off the ceiling mirror reflecting one fewer body than on the bed.

Come midnight, my fangs claim two more virgin souls.

Landmarks around Falkirk. The Kelpies. The Forth Bridge. The Falkirk Wheel.

Next stop in the next city: Jen's house 🤭

Quote by wxt55uk
is there a readily available list of band words that writers (and moderators) can refer to?

Nope. Can't easily publish them (and keep them updated) without them being indexed.

Edit: but the terms of service or AUP probably list some or all of the scenarios and/or words, because then they're in one place and less likely to be associated with story content. Can't remember if they're mentioned there or in a sticky forum post somewhere.

Either way, it's fairly common sense to avoid stuff involving animals, non-consent and hate speech/racial slurs regardless of (often historical) context.

Quote by Piquet
Yeah, there's more than one. It's all to make the site compliant with various US state laws, allowing those people living in those states to participate without issue.

Also because search engines hoover up anything that is published, regardless of context, and spit results back to people who search for those words (usually in combination with other sex terms that we do want to be indexed). Since we don't want to be associated with such content, banning the words is the best way to achieve that goal.

Quote by Ensorceled

Hey, wait. This comp doesn't close until Nov 17!?!? I may have time to pound one out after all.

But enough about what you do when the office door is closed... 😁

Quote by Just_A_Guy_You_Know
many publishers frown on dual submissions or 'double-dipping.' It's essentially self-plagiarism. All content should be 'exclusive.'

We don't mind it here. If someone wants to republish their own content from this site elsewhere, or vice versa, that's cool as long as they're definitely the same person (cloning someone else's stuff is not cool and will get a member banned).

The only exception are competition entries. They must be exclusive to this site, and be new submissions. After the results are published, authors are free to post them elsewhere but we retain the rights for 12 months to keep the winning entries on the competitions page.

Quote by Domme_Zoe
Cassy's point is not of circumventing but helping others to see the advantages of a paid membership

While your intentions may be honourable, not everyone's are, sadly. It was widely (ab)used.

Whether the underlying cause of many members exploiting this bug is because of the very low daily message limit is unclear. Some might argue a slightly higher limit for non-subscribers would reduce the need for people to find ways round it.

I suspect, however, given a few extra inches, some will still try and take the mile. Balancing things is a business decision.

Quote by Piquet
This time I've gone for sci-fi

And jolly good it is too.

Quote by Piquet
My love/hate, mostly hate relationship with Grammarly continues

ghostly voice uninstall it... uninstaaalll iiitttttt...

Quote by Seeker4

I think the comp entry and the rewriting old stories are separate items. At least that's how I read it.

Ah okay. I thought maybe they were connected.

There's no rule against rewrites but since it doesn't notify followers of the resubmission and retains its original publication date, you may wish to find a way to inform people who have read it that it's been revamped.

Quote by john456berry
I don't really want to end up with basically duplicate stories, or to have to remove the old versions

Competition entries have to be new pieces, not rewrites of existing published content.

Quote by JourneyYoung
This is making me think of whether there is any "proper" forum area here for one to just kind of muse about the stories you are currently writing

"Ask the author" might work, e.g. What Are You Working On?

Quote by sprite
completely scrubbed my story 5k words in. it wasn't working for me. started over.

Been there. Done that. I know how it feels to come out the other side with something better. Believe me, with your talent you don't need prayers.

Quote by Piquet
What am I doing wrong?

Using Grammarly. 🤭

An author of your calibre shouldn't need it.

Absolutely. Novels was invented when the site was first created. Before we could link chapters together.

I get that a series isn't the same as a novel but we have good reason for the 10k limit.

Firstly, the volunteer moderators won't necessarily have time to read 150000 words.

Secondly, page speed, although less of an issue with larger bandwidths available, is still a concern on mobile devices and those out and about or in poor coverage areas.

And thirdly, a wall of text - even if it's broken up with formatting (which we don't offer much availability) into "chapters" isn't very helpful, especially if a reader wants to come back to a piece later. They have to scroll and scroll and scroll to reach the part they were at. That could of course be mitigated to some degree by an automatic ToC if they happened to be at a suitable chapter break, but if they were mid-chapter it's not going to help much. This is not a kindle experience.

Also, if one part had some sort of familial relationship, the entire piece would need to be moved to that category. And people can hide that category from their stories list so they'd never find it.

We used to put tags at the top of the story but since they're shown in the list, you know what you're getting before you click through sonthe actual tags are relegated to the bottom when viewing the story itself. Less to skip over.

Edit: site search and tag browsing are an ongoing annoyance. Hopefully will be fixed one day.

Top 3 physical features:

1. Those curved creases under the bum where it joins the thighs. Hell yes.

2. Long hair.

3. A natural look with natural padding (the less make-up, false nails, plastic boobs, enhanced lips, eyelash extensions, fake tan, etc, etc the better).

Curves make the world go round.

Yeah, Georgia's right. I'm not sure how the site can guard against typos! Every messaging service that auto-inserts links on things it thinks you meant to be one, is going to behave similarly. Granted, it might not add the 'https' to the text too, so maybe that bit needs looking at. The dev team have been made aware of it.

But the general principle behind this behaviour is if you type two words connected by a dot and no spaces, it's going to assume you mean a web link.

(Edit: remember that famous one where a mother sent a text message to her daughter and ended it with "love mom.xxx" and it auto-linked to a porn site 😂)

Quote by sprite

unshot him and then rewrote about half the story. lol

Ah, the beauty of being in control of someone's destiny...

Edit: Apologies that whoever uploaded it doesn't appear to know how to encode video that stays in sync with the audio 🤬🤬

Depends. Something is better than nothing. Vs nothing at all. Vs site performance. Vs who gives a fuck if it's not up-to-the-minute accurate. Pick your poison.

Thanks. This is consistent with my guess that it uses the log table to determine last online time.

It depends how each person in your scenarios "goes offline" or "goes online". Did they leave the Lush tab open, close the browser, use the Remember Me checkbox? Did their VPN cycle IP in the meantime?

It's not clear in the first two. But...

Scenario 3: no reauthentication means it's a REM (remembered, cookie) login, so no change in state. Therefore the time is counted from the last time they presented login details. So each day, the last online time will increment by one.

Scenario 4: no account, therefore no login event tied to them, so no way of knowing when they last logged in.

Also, different browsers use different mechanisms to deal with cookies and sessions and re-presenting credentials. Firefox treats an incognito session singularly. You are free to open new tabs to the same site and it'll share credentials. Safari (and maybe others) treat each tab in a private session as a silo and each tab needs reauthentication.

Think about how any web-based real-time system knows someone is "online". How does it know, when HTTP is, by design, stateless.

I'm typing this reply in a single browser tab in a textarea. I've been typing it for ten minutes or so. I haven't interacted with any of the other Lush tabs I have open. So, as far as the site thinks, I was "last seen online" ten minutes ago. If the site decides that five minutes of "inactivity" constitutes me "going offline" then it may have removed my online status indicator, even though I'm "using" the site.

As soon as I hit Submit, my stored credentials will be resent to the server along with my post. Lush might then update my status, or it might not. If it is programmed to consider 15 minutes of idle time as the period after which I am "offline" then as far as my status is concerned, I'm still active right now.

The point is, determining online status is fraught with nuances and the vagaries of HTTP statelessness. How a site chooses to harness the information and present it may not gel with what you or I deem "logical". But the bottom line is that the more messages and dialogue that goes back and forth between browser and server, and the more interaction with the database goes on, the slower the site is for everyone.

Thus, sometimes, developers use cached information such as "last time we saw login credentials for this user" as a baseline so as not to bog the database down with injecting up-to-the-minute log data for every page served to a user, and have endless packets of data flying around for very little real-world gain compared to keeping site performance reasonable.

Quote by sprite

2700 words in and i just shot my main character.

Ooh, a whodunnit-dunnit.

It's nothing to do with membership level. If you choose to hide your online status, I think it will always show as something like "90 days ago" or "3 months ago" or similar. Or maybe "2 hours ago". Not sure.

The issue you're seeing is more likely to do with session logins. Best guess is that the "last online" is taken from the login/logout log entries rather than a realtime query (which would bog the site down with thousands of people online at once).

People who use the 'remember me' checkbox or who leave their Lush session logged in on a browser tab will not generate a "login" event every time they visit the site. So the Last Online Time is really "Last time the user logged in by entering their password or their session timed out and they were forced to re-authenticate". But that's a bit long to display on the screen 😁

There's a slim chance the system takes the IP address into account, so users who hop from IP to IP (on a VPN for example) might show different online times depending on the last time they logged in via the same IP as they're using now. But I highly doubt that's the case. It's more likely the login session time.

Wow, first entry already, and I haven't even had what can be classed as half an idea yet. I'd better get my skates on.