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 taboo 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.

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.