Yeah, this could be a fun theme to play with.

puts on thinking cap

P.S. we know about the broken image on the comp page. Will try and get that fixed tomorrow.

Quote by deviantsusie
when we don’t see a cover pic until we open the story

Don't quote me on this but I assume the reason for enforcing the portrait format is that, one day, the various front page and category story lists might incorporate covers too. Maybe even as a grid with title, one liner and cover pic, like browsing Amazon and other bookseller websites. Who knows.

Sex sells. The end. 😁

Quote by KimmiBeGood

Oooo I'm gonna have to give you a listen, Mr Wordsmith... With my twin now... maybe she'd like to listen too. 😉

The more the merrier haha. Thank you in advance, and apologies for the whisperiness of the vocal. I was recording it downstairs while my family were asleep so had to keep it down. I recorded it in a bodged-together "vocal booth" so I could get the effect I wanted, but still had to be quiet. Took a tonne of editing too. I was up till silly o'clock assembling it and tweaking the filters, compressor and timing until I was happy.

I'll give some of yours a listen when I get a chance. Thanks for the share.

Audios are on the radar, and when the feature is back, I have an idea or two for doing some more to join my solitary effort so far.

I nudge the developers every month or so. They're probably bored of me asking. 🙄

Quote by KimUK
Look at the formatting options in the story box and the vast majority have been removed.

Removed, compared to what? A word processor? A content management system?

Let's turn it on its head: what formatting options do you need? Headings? Superscript? Subscript? Coloured text? Borders and tables? Choice of 600 different fonts?

A couple of heading styles might be nice, I agree. And I have asked for a drop-down of stock dividers that we can use. It's much better for screen readers to be able to mark up the divider as such, rather than use custom strings, so it isn't read out. For anything more fancy, the ability to add a divider of your own from your computer would be fab.

The problem with font choices and different size text, is that people will misuse it, and stories will render poorly, which negatively affects reader experience.

The limited options and less variance make it much easier to control how it looks on-screen.

I’ve seen * used as a divider on other stories here, so I know it’s not just me and why I used it on my follow up story.

A single star or a few characters is fine as a divider. You can centre it or not. Bold it. Your message earlier didn't appear to be about dividers. You were saying that paragraphs were not even possible without adding a star, and that caused a wall of text. And that Lush or the moderators forced you to write one sentence per paragraph. No wonder we all misinterpreted you if you're unclear!

Custom formatting is a balancing act. Using fully justified text and custom fonts makes it harder for dyslexic readers (look up The Waterfall Effect), so the site standardises on font and left justified text for clarity.

Colours too are fixed for the same reasons, so people don't employ yellow on white or something unreadable. Poetry especially renders badly on small screens if it's justified anything other than left alignment. Centre aligning a story tends to look terrible on all devices.

There's scope for a few more formatting options, sure. So if you have a use case for specific ones, please raise them via a help desk ticket. But I wouldn't hold your breath for anything beyond rudimentary selections, so readability for visitors is maintained.

Quote by KimUK

Look at the top of the first page in your image.

"Look," said Mike …

"It would be grand."

Who said it would be grand? The editors will pick that up straight away.

Presumably whoever spoke last with a dialogue tag on the previous page. Not everything needs a dialogue tag every line if it's only a conversation between two people.

I’m not so much against putting separate quotes on separate lines, but I find it odd that quotes should occupy their own line.

Who told you that? It's rubbish. Your second example is perfectly valid:

"Well, I don’t like it," said Carol and with that she turned and stomped noisily from the room and blah, blah, blah.

It's certainly what I'd prefer to read here.

When you write a story with Lush, it’s purposely designed to prevent any deviation in format. You can’t even paragraph without adding a (*) or some other mark to make sentences into paragraphs and what that often produces is a wall of words effect.

That's utter bollocks. I've pasted countless stories into the editor and they format just fine when published. And we have hundreds of thousands of other published stories that use paragraphs perfectly well.

I'd look at your source material and check the formatting there, as I mentioned in my previous post, and see if there's anything you can do to facilitate an easier transition to Lush.

Ooh, one other point I forgot in my earlier post: make sure your first lines in a paragraph aren't indented when you paste them into Lush. That really throws the editor into a wobbly, as it often thinks you're trying to make a bulleted list or apply some special formatting.

I’d love to format my own work, split it up into chapters or sections for a short piece,

You can. Just submit each chapter separately, waiting for each to be verified before submitting the next so they don't accidentally get published out of sequence, and title them accordingly.

For pieces under 10k words you can subdivide them using simple formatting within the body, e.g.:

Chapter 2: KimUK

The story continues... You can even center the headings in the story editor (which you can't do in the forum). Or you can use simple handmade dividers:

-o0o-

Just be aware that screen readers might "read" those out as separate streams of characters, so keep them short and simple.

add a couple of images to break up the text

Fair point. We used to have that facility, but it's not in this version after we transitioned to a new hosting environment. The feature may make a comeback (along with audio stories) in future.

P.S. let's try and steer this thread back on topic. If you want to discuss the editor and its foibles, please open a new thread in an appropriate forum. Thank you.

Imagine reading a book:

They went together to view the house. "I like it" said the husband. "I don’t" replied his wife. "I’m not sure about it" their son replied. They returned to the car.

It reads as though the author doesn't understand English grammar conventions.

If you mean that Lush paragraph and line spacing is quite wide, like it is in the forum here and in stories, it's to make it easier to read, especially on small devices.

However, what I think you're referring to is that it puts double line spaces if you paste in content with extra lines between the paragraphs.

In your word processor, if your styles are set up with no paragraph leading, then it's common to add an additional line break to compensate. If you copy and paste that verbatim, Lush will add an extra line break between paragraphs because that's what you've told it to do.

The formatting engine is fairly permissive so it's likely not Lush enforcing a format, it's probably the way you're uploading content.

If you're in Microsoft Word, try this trick before your next submission:

1. Bring up the search and replace tool.

2. In the 'search' box, put in ^p^p.

3. In the 'replace' box, put in ^p.

4. Do a Replace All.

Then copy and paste into Lush. It should close up the extra line breaks.

You can always undo the Replace All or simply not save the changes if you wish to preserve the extra line breaks in your original.

As an alternative, edit your Normal paragraph style and add a few pts above each paragraph, e.g. 6pt or 12pt depending on the size of your font. Then you won't need the extra line breaks in your source documents and you can copy and paste verbatim into Lush without issue.

Quote by AvidlyCurious
[pussy or cunt] I think it's a matter of taste or habit, more than location.

This. I've never heard of either term being bound to a region. They're all pretty common words, though 'cunt' does sound waaaay better in an English accent.

Word choice and flow are super important to me when writing my stories, and that often carries through to reading habits. If I read a first time story about some lass who's had a strict upbringing, having her meet some guy in a bar and say, "Stick your hard dick in my tight cunt" within ten minutes of meeting him, is going to make me roll my eyes and move on.

Having her get more comfortable with him, disappear to the ladies, come back and then whisper, "I'm not wearing any panties and it feels so wrong" seems more natural for that character. In that type of story, reserving the harsher wording for later tends to make it appear more believable to me.

But if you're going all out from the very first scene, or want your character to appear coarser, then cunt away in paragraph one.

Absolutely fine. Just edit your story and change the category. Add a mod note to say that's all you've done and someone will push it back on the site as soon as they can.

Quote by NishasWorld
I look forward to the next comp. God knows why

To write a kick-ass story like you did in this one?

After reading the top ten and beyond, I'm soooo glad I didn't enter. My feeble attempt at a story would have been eclipsed by all the ingenuity on display in this competition. The wide open genre seems to have sparked some serious creativity. Glad I wasn't shortlisting; there's no way I could have even whittled it down to a top 20, let alone 15 or even 10.

Congratulations to all who entered and placed. Extra credit of course to the top three for their achievement. You deserve every ounce of praise for rising to the top of what is already the crème de la crème of writing talent we have on this site. Enjoy your well deserved basking in the limelight.

Hats off also to the judges and all the people behind the scenes who make the competitions what they are.

Onto the next!

Quote by simplyjohn

Gold member with just 17 media items.

In which case it's probably not that, haha! I'll get back in my box.

Are you trying to upload a story cover image too? There was a bug I raised last week that prevents you from uploading a story if the number of media items in your albums exceeds the limit for your subscription level. The progress spinner just never ends.

If so, try deleting a few images to get under the maximum for your subscription level (12 images for free members) or upload your story without a cover for now. You can always go back and add one later.

If it is that, sorry for the bug. I'm not sure if it's been fixed yet or if there's a patch coming soon.

Quote by kistinspencil

I have a 1 showing on the notification bell, but there is nothing on the drop down

This is not a fix, but from my experience of getting these 'ghost' notifications, it usually happens when you get, say, a bunch of notifications from the same person (perhaps a story comment and a Like) or two comments on the same forum thread from two different people.

Depending on how you open these to read them - new tab, click the notification itself, refresh the Interactions panel and click the entry in the list, etc - the system is only informed of the one you interacted with and clears that from the notification queue. But the act of landing on the destination page often means you end up seeing the outcome of both notifications. So it kind of does a 'soft clear' directly from the queue but doesn't also relay that to the notification handler. Thus a mismatch occurs and you get a 'limbo' counter which you can't clear.

Not sure if that's exactly how it works, but something like that might be the culprit. It could also be exacerbated by the fact that, when you click on the notification and it sends off request(s) to clear it down, "an error occured" randomly happens in the background due to a temporary server overload, and the request never gets through or the response gets eaten.

The way to fix it is to wait until another message comes in and use the Clear All link in the bell notification panel. But until you get a new notification, you're stuck with the phantom counter. Annoying glitch.

Anyone into Cheating stories? I've returned to familiar ground and written another about a suburban affair with a little twist. Check out Neighbourhood Watch and please let me know what you think to it.

Quote by cydia
Finally, a use for WW's nipple piercings

You said you wouldn't tell.

Apparently, it's now fixed. Please test.

Quote by kistinspencil
I take it this is not seen as an issue,

How on earth do you come to that conclusion? I take a day off and the sky starts falling, lol.

Apologies for the button not working as intended. I've reported this to the dev team and will feed back.

Second person is a bitch to make sexy. I think I've tried it, like, once in prose, and even then I cheated and made it a letter format. Not going there again.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, like, half hour ago. And it was gooooood.

I don't know if that's the official stance, but if it is then yes it should be updated. I think we used to be able to edit pages like that ourselves. Don't think we can any more, so it's a case of filing a ticket and waiting for someone to have time to do it.

I'll ask the question but I don't think there's a time or quantity limit on them.

Quote by deviantsusie
Hopefully it will get verified and get the 10 votes by tomorrow night

It's in, and don't worry about the votes count. As far as I'm aware, it's not a thing any more and the comp general Ts and Cs page hasn't caught up yet. I'm sure Jen will spank me if I'm wrong.

The dev team are investigating. They underestimated you "because we didn't think anyone would get that high" 🤪😂

So far they've tried it with a couple of hundred entries in the reading queue and it worked. Since your search now works, probably some level approaching 400 is the tipping point and the query falls over.

My guess is they'll either optimize the search or place a limit on the reading queue. Watch this space.

It was unintentional. Will be fixed in the next code push. Thanks for spotting it.

Someone has been tinkering with the stylesheets and I think it indicates platinum members. But I'm not entirely sure if it's intentional or something left over from when the full yellow box identifiers were removed. I've asked the dev team to clarify.

Free members can have a maximum of 12 images. And yes, you can add and delete your pictures at will. Details here. Hope that helps.

Quote by Seeker4
At least my entry here got a comment for the first time in, like, a week.

I started reading yours and got sidetracked, sorry. I'll pick up where I left off when I get a moment.

Wow, lol. You got some catching up to do!

I wonder then if it's sheer volume that's making the search bork. When I'm on my Interactions panel, if I click Friends it throws an error every time and gives no results. If I change the dropdown to something other than All Content, it works. So it might be a similar issue that the search/filter can't deal with a lot of content.

I'll raise this as an issue with the dev team, thanks.