Quote by LordCephius

Have you noticed more readers finding these competition entries? My story has three times more views than most of my comp entries! Maybe it's the 'mainstream' category I chose.

Competitions get a fairly high number of reads because entrants tend to read each other's for support. But yes the category can make quite a difference to reader volume, depending on how many are watching it.

I find it interesting that, besides the people who follow me, how different account names crop up on the Likes list when I venture into a new category. It's like some people gravitate towards one thing they particularly enjoy and don't stray much. So, as authors, something you may be proud of gets relatively low views if it's in a non-mainstream category. Such is the nature of Lush.

I was really struggling to come up with a cover pic for my latest story I posted above. I wanted an empty bottle of vodka lying in the foreground, and a couple in their underwear on the bed, blurred in the background, her sitting astride him.

That's very specific, and a Google search of course came up with nothing I could use, so I figured I'd try to split my search efforts and manually composite the elements. Hunted for "sensual woman on top" type images and found a few that didn't match but were possibilities, and downloaded them just in case. Then tried to find "empty vodka bottle on its side". Nope.

I turned to various AI tools for generating the full image. They almost all wanted me to buy credits to even see the first result and I wasn't risking cash when I doubted the results would even work out. Plus, any time I used "in their underwear" or "lightly clothed" or whatever, I got nsfw warnings, and the porny generators have nearly all gone to subscription models.

The most annoying part: not a single generator would render an empty bottle on its side. Not one. Even if I changed the prompt to only try to render an upturned bottle on a table. I got full bottles which were somehow full of liquid, even though the bottle was open and on its side. I got half empty bottles likewise. I even got weird bottles with a neck either end, still half full of clear liquid.

In frustration, I remembered seeker4 said Nightcafe was good so I signed my account up. Tried a prompt that wasn't too explicit at first, just asking for people in their underwear, her on top of him, and after a couple of tries got this:

https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/fcgHg2ETdH4zFm4MDW4q?ru=KrsMwHyeCae0yqFR2Fa91I2E5do2

Fine whatever, the bottle isn't empty but at least it looked the part and was actually bottle shaped. And crucially there was a natural break where the bed starts. So I snagged the pic, put it in Affinity, erased the couple, hunted the web for a couple in their smalls and eventually found one. It was full colour, tonally different, wrong lighting, wrong size but if I zoomed the vodka bottle in a bit, I could sort of get away with pasting the image behind it to line the beds up and maintain the perspective.

Then I adjusted the tone for colour correction, gave up fixing the lighting and just hoped nobody would notice, set about blending the two images where the beds joined so it looked kind of like a seamless shot, then applied a subtle blur to give the illusion of depth, and added Gaussian noise to try and match the grain of the vodka bottle image.

Annoyingly that left no room for the text. I wanted it in the space above her but had to put it in the middle. That did help hide the ropey stitch job, so every cloud.

Anyway, the result worked out and I was happy with the effort. I've just logged into my and have 35 messages from Nightcafe congratulating me on achieving rewards and earning badges and reminding me to log in to create more and that people have commented on my work and that I should gift people stuff to earn more points and I need to buy Pro and....

Wtf?

I didn't even click any button to "publish" the work. I thought it would.be private until such time as I was happy with the result, but no, it had published my failed attempt too, and people had commented on them both. I eventually found out how to log in (it kept logging me in as Anonymous User from the email links, and then refused to let me log in with my actual account until I ditched the cookies and started again). Found the delete button to erase the WIP image.

And found the Notification prefs.

My goodness. If you think Facebook has a tonne of settings, try Nightcafe. Notify me when someone I don't know comments, notify me when someone sneezes within half a mile of my creations, ... it goes on and on and on.

Now I've turned all those off, it'll hopefully stop spamming me. But I still haven't found out how to create something from a prompt and NOT immediately publish it. Probably there's a tick box I missed when I clicked Create. But I'm in no hurry to use it again unless I absolutely have to, so that's a problem for future me.

To be fair, I'm impressed with the quality, and it's certainly better than most of the AI image creators out there (thanks for the tip-off, seeker) but I'm not sure it'll become a staple part of my cover-generating workflow.

Quote by fuzzy1954
Bear has been on holiday in France we believe he'll return next week

Part-timers 🙄 Can't get the staff.

Quote by KimmiBeGood
I’m obsessed with an owl cam

That's so cool. I was thinking of getting a cam for our birdbox after a family moved in a few seasons back. When they left, I cleaned it out, but it's been empty since. Shame. The rent is cheep.

Quote by Seeker4
don't think I have ever even seen golf ball sized hail.

Nor have I. Judging from the size of the holes in the cheap, plastic outer skin, they were maybe 6-7mm, which is biiiig for the UK. It was this short, intense burst of cloud-dumpage - maybe 20 seconds - in the middle of a rainstorm, then it was gone.

Glad I wasn't outside. Would have hurt!

Quote by wxt55uk
we could talk about real football

Haha. I probably know only fractionally more about football than I do about that Americanised version of the game, handegg 😁 But thank you for the drink. Much obliged.

Quote by wxt55uk
judging by the size of the hailstones

That's not hail, it's weaponised weather! Insane. The biggest I've ever seen have been, like, maybe sixth of a golf ball size that damaged our conservatory roof one time. Those ones in the photo up there are next level.

saunters in and steps to the bar

drums fingers on the bartop

Hey Bearkeep, make mine a... umm, anything but vodka 😲 Anyone who reads How Not To Lose Your Virginity will find out why.

Just a fruit cider, please, and apologies for the spam, but I heard this was THE place in town to swap bar tales.

settles down in the corner nursing my drink

An update.

We don't use AI to detect AI. After extensive testing (1 year+), we weren't comfortable with any of the AI scanners out there. Many of them give false positives, and then try to upsell 'fixes' to humanize stories.

We advise you don't use AI detectors to check your own, or our published content.

We have our own methods based on empirical observation, and reach a consensus among the mod team. If a consensus can't be met, we give writers the benefit of the doubt.

We're still developing our processes, and are fully aware that stories with various degrees of AI-generated content are getting published, but we're very happy so far that we catch the majority.

A serious achievement indeed. Congratulations to both of you on this milestone.

Quote by joe71
One glitch: when you Like a comment or a photo, the heart symbol doesn't turn red

Ack, drat. That was reported yonks ago and I thought it had been fixed. I'll prod the dev team. Thanks for the nudge.

I've made a start reading the field (impressed so far) and my entry has just landed:

Playing With 火

Yes, fire. Wax. BDSM. Spanking. The theme demanded it 😁

Thank you in advance for reading. I'm going to try and read as many as I can.

I sincerely hope not.

The march towards Omnium unfortunately includes the Novels category, so I've taken the plunge with a series based on a bunch of random photographs I found that I'll use as cover art.

The first 'Frame' as I'm calling the chapters, has dropped, so get in on the ground floor and find out how our photography protagonist gets on Exposing Summer.

Quote by LuceDevlin
trimming conjunctions

Trimming every unnecessary word.

Quote by LuceDevlin
trimming the fat off it once it's done, yknow ... those pesky conjunctions and such

Well it worked for James Ellroy...

Splish

Quote by Mit
is there a list of acceptable editing tools that will not be considered cheating when utilised

No. Keeping this list up-to-date would consume more time than there is in the universe.

Use common sense. If you ask some software to write a story for you or edit your work to improve the wording/phrasing/etc, it's the same as if someone else had written/edited it. Therefore it's not your own work. Therefore it's not permissable.

If you ask some software or a person to check your work for technical issues you might have missed (i.e. proofreading) then there's no issue.

Bottom line, the comp rules state (and have always stated) that entries must be your own work. This competition is no different.

Quote by keylime314159
It indicates no AI help, including editing. That includes Grammarly and ProWriter, since they use AI.

It's fine.

https://www.lushstories.com/forum/site-announcements-feedback/announcing-our-elements-competition?post=4520848

Quote by TheShyThespian
Is it still okay to use Grammarly to check grammar and spelling

Yes of course. Or any other tool of choice, as long as it's limited to fixing basic mistakes of tense, punctuation, spelling, etc. The technical stuff we all miss after having stared at the piece for the fiftieth time.

There's a huge difference between "please mop up any grammatical mistakes I may have missed" and "write me a story about..." and "rewrite my sentences in the style of..."

Quote by AAnna
Earth wind and fire that would make a good name for a rock band

Yeah. Presumably the lofty heights of their career came after they fired Water from the band.

Quote by Meagananne1986

does a story have to include all four elements in the story?

I'd say not, given the comp brief:

For this competition, we want you to use one of these elements as a theme...

Quote by sprite

what about the other 114 elements? You only listed 4.

By all means write a story based around Holmium, Ho. 🤭😁

Circling back to what seeker4 said above about categories here being an ill-thought out mishmash of genres and formats, it would be far better if our "format" type categories were entirely separate. So:

• Microfiction

• Flash Erotica

• Novel

• Poetry

• Story

Were entirely removed from the other categories and were separately filterable. That way, we would retain the main category so you could have a Flash Love story, Flash Masturbation story, Micro Spanking story and so on.

But TechGoddess, among others, have already said this isn't desirable in Novels because each chapter is not necessarily "about" one thing. That's a by-product of some authors making each publishable piece multiple chapters, but that's down to author preference.

My argument, for engagement and readership, should be that any chapters containing multiple different scenes should be broken into smaller chunks and linked individually and "tagged" (categorised) to help readers find what they want. That's what drove this entire discussion. That way, people can dive in if they find a scene that matches a category they like, and if they enjoy your scene, could jump back to the start and take in the rest of the novel that they might never have found otherwise, or thought: "Novel? Ain't nobody got time for that!"

Rejigging and splitting chapters is a lot of work for those authors who have invested time in writing novel-length content so it's unlikely to happen.

Overall, it would probably be helpful to subgenre the rest. 'Fetish' is a bit broad and imo would be better if it were axed, leaving the other fetishy things to take over. We could use Fetish as an umbrella term, but who's to say whether Cross-dressing or Watersports or Facesitting is or isn't a fetish? And BDSM? The masks, whips, chains and cages end of the spectrum is arguably fetishy to some, but completely normal to others. Tying someone's wrists, blindfolding them and teasing them with a feather is BDSMish, but it'd hardly be classed a "fetish" in most people's definition. It doesn't seem fair to marginalise one and not the other, so if I was redesigning the structure from scratch, I'd let each topic stand alone and be specific to an act rather than a type.

But then it gets murkier still. College Sex? Teen? Hardly acts. Those two are pretty much the same, barring mature students. Then there's MILF and Mature, again, types of people not acts. So maybe splitting categories further into broad sections would have been better: "Act" and "Characters" for example. Then we could have Teen + Anal + Flash. Or MILF + Exhibitionism + Novel.

But then we have 'setting' too. Fantasy. Sci-fi. Supernatural. Historical. Medical. Money. True. Etc.

So that begs the question: should there be a 4th umbrella group...? It's neverending.

At that point, it starts to make stuff really hard to find, if people need to know that they're looking for an act vs looking for a setting or style of story. So does it simply make sense, as seeker4 says (and I'd love to have), to scrap categorisation altogether and just use tags as the default search feature?

But then the concept of the Omnium badge disappears, and that's quite a draw for people who like stretching themselves. Soooo.... I dunno.

I doubt anything's gonna change soon anyway. But it's fun to think about ways to make this place better for both authors and readers to connect more easily and find content they want to consume.

Quote by Seeker4
The main Stories page... You can set it to be anyhow.

Cool, that's what I thought.

So depending on someone's settings, there's perhaps some confusion between what people consider the "front page". That could explain why some people claim the IF category shows up and some don't.

As a web developer, I class the "front page" as the bare domain (New stories, Classic stories, latest comp winners, who's logged on, etc). And I class any of the category list pages (/stories, RRs, any particular genre, story lists containing a particular tag, etc) as "landing pages".

Others may disagree with that terminology, so I apologise if I've been talking at cross purposes on occasion.

Quote by Seeker4
the 14th story down on the front page

You have more than 10 stories on the domain front page?

Quote by Down4anything23
Everything now must say “step.”

Yes, and everything is labelled with it because it attracts traffic.

Now our government are trying to say that term's illegal too 🙄

Quote by Down4anything23
There is something else obviously going on that I am not privileged to know.

You and me both! I'd blame the government meddling in issues above their paygrade. There's talk of passing a law that criminalizes any mention of step-relatives and sex because it causes untold societal harm. Or somesuch bollocks. Last draft I saw, it only mentions images and videos so we may escape, but we might be forced to axe the entire category.

Enjoy it while it lasts...

Anyone who likes that category can bookmark the category landing page instead and not be bothered by any other categories getting in the way. Trust me, it's of little consequence to readers whether it shows on the domain front page or not. That's not how the internet works any more: every page is the front page.

Quote by Alfresco
Which feels like a bug but may not be.

It's not, sadly. IF stories are not shown on the front page. I don't know the reason but it may be legislative or something. 🤷‍♂️

But almost nobody camps on the front page anyway. It's a transient location just to show the world that content is changing rapidly. Any readers who are into a category will watch that specific category landing page for stories of that type.

Quote by Ls63563

I love watching real normal people doing what they are doing because it’s what the want to do.

This, every time. Forget all the fake screeching and nails and spray-tanned "stars". Real people enjoying themselves is where it's at.

But it's gotta be respectful. None of this irritating face slapping fad. Spanking other parts is fine 😁

Little and larger

Hah, yeah.

For a project external to Lush I'm developing a taxonomy system based on synonyms that work a bit like your "see" example. Anyone who searches/filters a tem like 'oral' will first get results with Oral tagged directly, then results from content that contains the synonyms, as weaker matches. That way, anyone can use any of the related terms and get relevant results.

As you say, it requires someone to be on it and group related terms from time to time. The beauty is that the admin can deliberately include common misspellings like masterbation / masturbation as synonyms, so even searches with typos can find content.

I'd love to implement something similar here for tags.