Story verification times

Also, as an adjunct to what Jen said, sometimes resubs or subsequent chapters drop straight into the "Assigned to me" tab of the mod who handled it previously. Nobody has yet figured out why, because every time we try to find a cause, it behaves itself.

So, sometimes you might (re)submit a story and it'll be marked as assigned almost immediately. But maybe the mod doesn't log in for a few days because they're on vacation and then someone else spots it's locked without any movement a few days later and unlocks it. At that moment, it drops into the main queuea and you'll see the "awaiting moderation" message with the Recall link.

Little weird behaviours like that can contribute to the flip-flopping of a story status too. So, as Jen says, don't pay too much attention to the status because it may be this glitch at play too.

Okay that helps as well thank you😊

Unless you pay for the privelege of fast tracking, you may look at a new publication once a month. I am a non-member and have become increasingly frustrated with the wait time, as I have a lot of chapters to add to my existing work. I have been told that the moderators are all working free and in their own time and reviewing long submissions takes time. I get jealous when I see some of them publishing work every three days while I have to wait and wait and wait. So I have quit submitting any more stories on this site.

Quote by moasan

Unless you pay for the privelege of fast tracking, you may look at a new publication once a month. I am a non-member and have become increasingly frustrated with the wait time, as I have a lot of chapters to add to my existing work. I have been told that the moderators are all working free and in their own time and reviewing long submissions takes time. I get jealous when I see some of them publishing work every three days while I have to wait and wait and wait. So I have quit submitting any more stories on this site.

Boy! You’ve published three this month! Lol

Quote by moasan

Unless you pay for the privelege of fast tracking,

Your statement says it all. In life, not everything is free. I realised early on with Lush if I wanted my stories published quicker, then paying was best. Happy to do so. I can also have unlimited chats. The site survives through paid members and the faithful band of volunteers. Sad you feel this way. Good Luck.

The moaning around here makes a haunted house seem positively quiet by comparison. As the Shyexhibitionist says, the site needs money to operate so they give perks to paying members to help get that money. Pretty standard deal on a lot of sites. I've happily paid for years and finally went platinum to save myself the effort of renewing every year.

Quote by moasan
I get jealous when I see some of them publishing work every three days while I have to wait and wait and wait.

I could publish every 3 days too based on the approval time for my last story (again, I'm platinum). It's nothing about being a mod (love how you insinuate something scandalous is happening) and everything about being a gold or platinum member. And if they did get priority in the queue, so what? They are unpaid so why not give them something in return for the effort they put in. They are all excellent writers with a good history on the site so it's not like crap is getting a free pass or something.

Message from the haunted house. I am 67 and retired, living on a limited income in London. To pay a lot of money here would be difficult. At Literotica all submissions are free and I have published a few novellas of 60.000 words with no problems. So I'll go back there.

Quote by moasan

Message from the haunted house. I am 67 and retired, living on a limited income in London. To pay a lot of money here would be difficult. At Literotica all submissions are free and I have published a few novellas of 60.000 words with no problems. So I'll go back there.

Fair enough. I say go for what works for you. I find their interface clunky as hell myself but land there from time to time as a reader.

Quote by moasan

Message from the haunted house. I am 67 and retired, living on a limited income in London. To pay a lot of money here would be difficult. At Literotica all submissions are free and I have published a few novellas of 60.000 words with no problems. So I'll go back there.

If you aren't happy here, then you should definitely not stay. But let me share this thought with you:

As a story mod, when I have suggested to authors to split their longer stories into smaller parts, they have (for the most part) seen an uptick in views, likes, and comments. Why? The average reader does not have time to read 60,000 words in one sitting. They prefer stories in the 2K to 4K range (What's your preferred story length to read?)

The average mod does not have the time to review 60,000 words in one sitting, either. So, if we allowed stories of that length, it would take LONGER to get them published.

I don't know about you, but I publish stories here because I want people to read them and share their thoughts about them with me. I try to keep in mind that if I publish a longer story, it might see less attention.

Quote by Seeker4

I could publish every 3 days too based on the approval time for my last story (again, I'm platinum). It's nothing about being a mod (love how you insinuate something scandalous is happening) and everything about being a gold or platinum member. And if they did get priority in the queue, so what? They are unpaid so why not give them something in return for the effort they put in. They are all excellent writers with a good history on the site so it's not like crap is getting a free pass or something.

Thanks for your comment! Your support is appreciated! When the queue gets busy, sometimes the wait times are longer, even for Platinum and Gold members. But we do our best! 😊

Quote by techgoddess
Your support is appreciated!

I was there myself for a couple years and am staff on another site so I get it.😊

to techgoddess, I understand all of what you say, but I am prolific and get new story ideas every week. Consider that at this moment I have 40 5,000 word chapters all finished in draft form and am ready to start 5 new serials of 6 to 7 chapters each. At the rate of one submission every 3 weeks l will still be submitting the already finished chapters up until next spring. I'll be half a year older.

Domo Arigato.

Quote by moasan

to techgoddess, I understand all of what you say, but I am prolific and get new story ideas every week. Consider that at this moment I have 40 5,000 word chapters all finished in draft form and am ready to start 5 new serials of 6 to 7 chapters each. At the rate of one submission every 3 weeks l will still be submitting the already finished chapters up until next spring. I'll be half a year older.

You had stories published on October 6th, October 9th and October 24th. You had 3 published in September, 2 in August, 3 in July and 4 in June. Now I'm not that good at math, but that seems like a tad more than one in three weeks?

And what exactly is the problem with being half a year older, anyway?

I sometimes wonder what exactly mods review and if they really need to do more than assure that the site's decency stds. are met. If my grammar and proofreading are not reasonable, my stuff won't be liked. While I sometimes appreciate the editing advice, I am well beyond the age when I'm likely to become an expert grammarian.

It seems today that people have lost the trait of patience. Between YouTube, streaming platforms, and social media, you can get a quick hit of dope (amine) at the click of a button. If you don’t get it from one source, you can quickly close out and go to the next. It’s no longer restricted by age, either. Everyone from toddlers to 67+ year olds has fallen under this biological narcotic.

But the world doesn’t revolve around you or me, whether we paid for it or not.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish Lush could be a bit more efficient or expedient with releases. But after talking with a few mods on this particular forum post and through messages, I have no issue with how they operate this website. Lush has a growing audience. A mix of new readers and contributors, people submitting stories upon stories, and AI expediting the process of writing. All this contributes to a growing pool within the queue.

This site only has a handful of mods and admins. The mods? All volunteer work. I can only imagine the kind of stories they have to read (I’d be genuinely curious what the approve-to-deny ratio is). What do they get in return? A few perks. No money (I don’t think). And a shitload of bitching.

My suggestions (if you’re still with me):

• Find another hobby to spend time on while you wait.

• Find other websites to publish your work in the meantime.

• Open up a Patreon, Substack, or OF, and drop your content there — directing people from Lush to your content.

• Quit bitching and be thankful. They could just take your money and say, “Yeah, don’t worry, we’ll post your story soon…”

• Put the phone down and go for a walk.

• Read a book. My recommendation: The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.

• Jerk off… whatever it takes to ease that doped-up mind of yours.

• Develop self-discipline (a slightly longer commitment than the two-minute activity mentioned just above).

Alright… if I pissed you off, good. If I made you smile or laugh, good. If you’re indifferent, good.

As the great philosopher Ice Cube once said:

“Today was a good day.”

Evocative, Love it. Sheer honesty and common sense. Lush wants to keep standards high. If that's not for you, then move on. Patience is a virtue. I deliberately held back writing this month because of the backlog I read about. It will be published when/if. May well be returned, my use of commas a main stumbling point. I have a story in Drafts. I appreciate it won't see the light of day for ages. How the Moderators stay sane, is beyond me.

Quote by Johnnycumlately

I sometimes wonder what exactly mods review and if they really need to do more than assure that the site's decency stds. are met. If my grammar and proofreading are not reasonable, my stuff won't be liked. While I sometimes appreciate the editing advice, I am well beyond the age when I'm likely to become an expert grammarian.

Nobody expects authors here to be expert grammarians. If we didn't ask authors to make a reasonable effort with grammar and proofreading, it would make it difficult for us as mods to read and understand what is going on in the stories.

As a reader, if a story is riddled with punctuation errors, contains missed or misspelled words, or lacks clarity about who is speaking, etc., I'm not going to bother continuing to read it. I don't mind a few mistakes here and there, but when the errors start to affect my understanding and enjoyment of the story, I'll look for a different one.

As a writer, I want people to read and enjoy my stories, not skip over them.

Lush Stories has higher standards than some other sites, but with the modern tools of free, online grammar checkers, they aren't unreasonable.

Quote by Evocative
I’d be genuinely curious what the approve-to-deny ratio is

About 60%, or thereabouts. Seems to be gradually dropping, sadly, with the AI slop that's being dumped on us, and it's slowing everything down.

Rejections take more time than passing a well-written story. Worse, many of the people who pretend they can write by prompting AI to do it for them, don't even read the rejection note that the moderator spent time crafting, nor care how long it took them to read. Why would they, when it took minimum effort to create the content? Easy come, easy go. They simply delete the story, generate a new pile of soulless generic garbage and resubmit it 10 minutes later. Many times, these people are so fucking lazy they also leave the AI prompts in the story itself! It honestly defies belief.

I can only assume it's a by-product of look at meee, I'm the centre of the universe. Look at me NOW.

Thankfully, the only brains harmed in the process are the people who don't use them fully for creative purposes.

Quote by moasan

to techgoddess, I understand all of what you say, but I am prolific and get new story ideas every week. Consider that at this moment I have 40 5,000 word chapters all finished in draft form and am ready to start 5 new serials of 6 to 7 chapters each. At the rate of one submission every 3 weeks l will still be submitting the already finished chapters up until next spring. I'll be half a year older.

I'm assuming you want people to read what you've taken the time to write. If I could offer you some advice, you need to give your readers time to actually read and enjoy your stories. This will improve your number of views, likes, and comments.

As for your rate of submission, I'm confused as to what you mean by one submission every 3 weeks. Looking back over this year, you have averaged 3-4 stories per month. That's roughly 1 story per week.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

About 60%, or thereabouts. Seems to be gradually dropping, sadly, with the AI slop that's being dumped on us, and it's slowing everything down.

I find this really scary. I dont really understand AI. As advised my the Mods I check my story before submission using Grammarly. I only accept punctuation and spelling corrections. The rest I ignore, most suggestions are rubbish and alter the thought. If it is not your work, can some one possibly explain any gratification or satisfaction in getting a story published?? How on earth can you tell what is humanly penned?

Perhaps Im being dim, I usually am. What I meant was, I dont understand AI writing complete stories. I get the purpose as a correction tool.

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

About 60%, or thereabouts. Seems to be gradually dropping, sadly, with the AI slop that's being dumped on us, and it's slowing everything down.

That is interesting. Thank you, WW, for letting us all know. 😊

Has there been any progress on using software (AI) to weed out AI-generated stories?

Might there be a possibility of having more than 29 story moderators in the future?

Obviously, I don't know why. However, the number of moderators never seems to exceed this number. Is there a reason for this? Software licensing? A practical one?

Ok. Thanks MissVixen. I just don't see the point, but obviously that's not the case for everybody.

Quote by Shyexhibitionist
If it is not your work, can some one possibly explain any gratification or satisfaction in getting a story published??

Nope. Beats me.

How on earth can you tell what is humanly penned?

We can't. Not with any degree of accuracy. You could prompt an AI engine "write a 3000-word story about a priest and a nun, suitable for lushstories.com, written in the style of wannabewordsmith" and it would comb my work, instantly learn how I write and copy it to the point it'd probably be almost indistinguishable from my story published today on that subject. Or you could prompt it to steal my story and rewrite it in the style of [insert author name] and it would do it.

But in both cases, while it would be grammatically perfect and a carbon copy of my writing style, the storyline would be dull, repetitive and derivative, with the only redeeming feature being the stylistic flourishes that LLMs inject to make things pretend to have that wow factor.

Such stories are hyper-real, mega-polished, Hollywood stylistic glamourballs that are jaw-droppingly pretty. But they try sooo hard to be this pinnacle of perfectionism, the overall effect is like having a conversation with that annoying twat at a party who talks about how successful he is all night. By the end of it, you're utterly exhausted. Yes, floored by all the amazing things he's done and jealous as all hell, but you still want someone to let a leopard into the room to savage him so you can escape to talk to the barman who is real and makes you genuinely laugh.

Quote by wxt55uk
Has there been any progress on using software (AI) to weed out AI-generated stories?

No, and there never will be. Why would a machine rat on a machine?

This thread is veering way off topic and It's been said elsewhere. I've fed my stories to AI checkers and they've said they're machine-generated. They're not. I've fed wholly-generated AI stories to AI checkers and they reported they're human written. And I've fed them other AI stories and they've reported they're AI-generated, and by the way, would I like the checker to make it sound more human for me?

All they do is slurp up what is given to "check" and add it to the pool of crap they regurgitate.

So, no.

Oops sorry. I've contributed to this thread veering off the topic. My mind tends to do that !

Quote by Shyexhibitionist
How on earth can you tell what is humanly penned?

I don't want to tip my hand with a full explanation, but I can recognize most AI stories, most of the time, just by reading a few sentences. Some people go to some lengths to edit and cover up the obvious AI tells, but they can't hide the underlying... mechanics... of an AI-crafted story. Once you learn to recognize the 'scaffolding' of an AI story, they become easy to spot - and hard to hide.

Most people don't bother trying to hide it, and it's super obvious. The ones that try to hide it, can't really. At best, they leave me wondering if it's an AI story that's been heavily edited by a human, or a human-written story that's been polished/edited by AI. No matter which is true, I can still see AI fingerprints all over the place.

Reassuring that humans can still out wit machines! Keep up the good work !

I listen to many sci-fi stories created by AI on YouTube and it's obvious just through the use of certain repetitive phrases that they were written by a computer. And, they are often highly derivative and monotonous.

Computers are fine for a level of editing but even then it's grammatical suggestions are complete crap unless you are writing a business report.

It was bad enough when the mods had to deal with writers who were trying to slip inappropriate content into a story. I hate to have to go through and try to filter out everything that might’ve been written by a machine.

My hats off to the team. I don’t think I’d wanna do that job today. That was a problem no one ever thought about when last I was an active member

Quote by WannabeWordsmith

About 60%, or thereabouts. Seems to be gradually dropping, sadly, with the AI slop that's being dumped on us, and it's slowing everything down.

Rejections take more time than passing a well-written story. Worse, many of the people who pretend they can write by prompting AI to do it for them, don't even read the rejection note that the moderator spent time crafting, nor care how long it took them to read. Why would they, when it took minimum effort to create the content? Easy come, easy go. They simply delete the story, generate a new pile of soulless generic garbage and resubmit it 10 minutes later. Many times, these people are so fucking lazy they also leave the AI prompts in the story itself! It honestly defies belief.

I can only assume it's a by-product of look at meee, I'm the centre of the universe. Look at me NOW.

Thankfully, the only brains harmed in the process are the people who don't use them fully for creative purposes.

It truly does defy belief. It was bad enough dealing with writers who refused to put in basic effort. I saw a lot if that, those that were only interested in seeing their name on the front page and thought views, positive comments and even awards were their due simply because they hit submit.

But now these same kinds of people can flood the Que with AI crap they can generate in seconds (I assume it's that fast)

Franky I think the site should treat that with the same direct responce one gets from other flagrant violations of the submission guidelines. Warning, suspension and ban