That's very odd. I wonder if something was glitchy cos it's working okay for me now. At least, on mobile. Haven't tried desktop.
It's a bit weird insofar as it seems to empty all the stories in the list, then pause... and pause... then repopulates the list with the search results.
Roughly how many stories are in your reading queue, btw?
Quote by wxt55uk
it was unexpected fait that had me scrambling to get something out this week.
At least you've entered! That's the main thing. I've hacked away and binned my entry more times than I care to admit. It's currently in the bin, btw.
Quote by wxt55uk
if a story is rejected, can it be resubmitted after the deadline?
I doubt it. We encourage authors to submit their work early, though we do process competition stories as priority whenever we can. Yours is at the head of the queue so someone should get to it fairly soon when they have a free moment.
Quote by kistinspencil
Is there someplace else you want feedback left?
You can drop me an IM here if that's more convenient. Or if you're sending screenshots or screencasts etc through, I can furnish you with an email address.
Anyone here interested in testing out the forthcoming Story Cover Editor, please give it a whirl.
The Save feature isn't wired up to save to your story/media yet, but if you hit save and preview it you can scroll down (on mobile) or look beneath the button (desktop) and see the rendered version.
You should be able to move text around using the grab handle below-right of each box. Or you can use the arrow keys.
Upload your own images or use one of the templates (a bigger gallery of templates is planned) and have a play. Anyone familiar with Canva will feel right at home.
Feedback welcome (here or via PM is fine). Thanks, everyone.
It is with great pleasure I announce that an esteemed Editor's Pick has been awarded to el_henke for his story, Snap, detailing an exquisite moment between a photographer and subject.
In the words of the author:
Ninth entry in an experimental series of standalone episodes aimed at capturing a fleeting moment, an emotion, an act, and ultimately, exploring new horizons.
Couldn't have put it better myself. Congratulations, Henke. Well deserved, sir.
Grammarly makes some ridiculous suggestions. I binned it ages ago.
I tend to now do the zoom in/out trick. Just increasing the font size by a point or two helps things look different enough on the page that some errors leap out.
That's odd. When you edit your story, do you see the Preview button next to the Save button, near the bottom? If so, tap that, check your story looks okay and then tap Publish at the bottom of that second page.
If not, please let us know what you do see, and how you're going about the process of publishing, and someone will try and assist.
Names are fine, in moderation, for emphasis. I use that in my Tabby: Cheating Colleague series when he refers to her by her Sunday name.
But in your example, if he'd responded: "Like I need another invitation, Lily." and she'd said, "Wow, you're so big, Paul." then it wouldn't appear as natural.
The dev team have taken your idea about auto removing entries if you like/fave/comment, and added it to the feature roadmap. Not sure how long the road is, nor how many junctions there are before that point, but it's on there!
Quote by KimmiBeGood
I rarely used tags already defined, but liked to make up my own
Hehe, that's fine if they make sense to you and are something people might search for. But ilovesprite and so forth, while arguably true for many people here, are probably not conducive to helping people find relevant content based on what themes the story conveys.
Ultimately, we need a balance of tags that are meaningful and are assigned to a fair few stories so that people who browse for a niche tag or (perhaps in future) more than one tag, will find related works once they've enjoyed the current one. At one end of the scale, we have generic tags that contain 6K stories, and at the other end, daft made-up tags that are assigned uniquely to one story only. Neither tag extreme does readers any good. Somewhere in between is where good tagging fits. We should aim there.
If a tag or common tag combo doesn't exist, and it fits your story theme, by all means add it.
I have asked the dev team for a multi-select actions feature on the reading queue. I believe it's on the radar.
At present there's no other way than one by one. But the Remove option was added to the top of stories last week, as well as in the panel beneath the story, so it's slightly less onerous to do.
Auto removing them if you vote or comment is a good idea. I'll raise that too. Won't be possible on "read". There's no guarantee that visiting a URL means you've read it, and there's no other decent web hook, besides scrollbar position. If we go in to mod a story and scroll down to get to the Edit button, it'd remove it from our reading queues!
Going forward, one approach might be to increase the tag limit and remove all the combo tags, replacing them with discrete terms. Then, in tandem with multi-tag search, authors could just tag stories with things like mother, daughter, threesome, blowjob, and it could filter by all of them.
However, increasing the tag limit raises some knock-on design issues, and increases the potential for tag spam, which makes it more time consuming to maintain from an admin viewpoint. So I'm not sure how viable that is.
There is another avenue: significantly improve the general site search. If that could be made to consistently return more relevant results, then author-supplied tags become a secondary concern.
I know that search is one of the projects the dev team are working on (they're evaluating some new tools for indexing content) so maybe if this bears fruit, the loss of tag data might not be such a blow.
I still think tagging and multi-tag searches are a valuable tool, especially when combined with misspellings and synonyms, to allow readers to browse related content. But if the new indexer (which bills itself as typo-tolerant) delivers, then I'll gladly alter my stance on this.
Quote by KimmiBeGood
And I forgot to check the comp box. 🙃 Can someone please help this numbnut out?
Checked the box for you.
Yep, "sex" is a useless tag. It should not exist except when augmented with other words. Nobody is going to search for that, and if they do, it'll return so many results as to be pointless. It's like sites that include "miscellaneous" as a category because nobody thought things through!
Taxonomy is difficult to get right and provide both meaningful choices to authors for selection, and meaningful results to story seekers.
Besides removing and merging misspelled tags, the reason for the slow, iterative tag progress since moving to Lush 2, was because I and other mods spent hours - and I'm talking hundreds and hundreds of hours - painstakingly going through the ones that had combinations, ensuring they were split into two or more separate tags and then reassigning those to any affected stories so the nuances of the terms weren't lost. It was a massive chore and I, for one, could only do a few hours at time without going bananas and/or losing the will to live.
Examples include standardising things like:
mother/daughter
mother+daughter
daughter and mother
daughter/mother
daughter,mother
mother,daughter
Etc etc
Into just one tag:
mother and daughter
Bearing in mind that there were misspellings like 'mther and duaghter', you can see this is a laborious process.
Further, any existing tag with tangentially related or circumstantial combos that would be better served by their own combinations to aid searchability were split into new tags like this:
mother/daughter threesome
-- threesome
-- mother and daughter
mother,daughter
--
-- mother and daughter
Daughter mother uncle cock sucker
-- mother and daughter
-- uncle
-- cocksucking
There are arguments for and against doing it this way, mostly subjective. Perhaps some people might prefer "uncle and daughter" to be a tag, and "mother" to be separate. We could accommodate both. We could even separate them all and you'd have to pick all three individually, but with only a maximum of 10 tags per story allowed, that eats into the allocation.
So, some popular combos make a lot of sense. But somewhere we need to draw the line so we don't get hundreds of similar tags that all have one story in them. That doesn't help authors assign them, nor does it help readers find them.
Compounding this is the fact that, at the moment, the tag search is only mono-tag. I would like (and I think this is on the development radar when the overall search facility is bolstered) the ability to search by more than one tag, and each time you add a tag, it filters the results to include stories with all of them featured. So you can add and remove tags to your search criteria to narrow or widen the search to find exactly the type of stories that you wish.
To do that, we need a meaningful taxonomy that uses broadly acceptable terms that the majority of people will search for. Not everybody thinks alike, so that takes time. A lot of time.
There's also no notion of synonyms in our tag system yet. In general, that is a vastly underused concept in site search systems across the web. I might search for 'blowjob'. And if I search for that term, I would want to see all stories with that tag show up first, because that's the word I used. But after those, I would like to also see stories that contain tags:
blow job
fellatio
cocksucking
cock sucking
bj
oral
oral sex
giving head
Okay, we might standardise on some of those and get rid of the two-term phrases in favour of single words (or vice versa) but the point is that if we could synonym words behind the scenes, tag searches suddenly explode with possibilities when doing multi-tag searches. Yes, result sets are larger overall, but if the results favour exact terms first and synonyms second, it a) opens up stories to people who haven't used the exact same term, and b) allows authors a richer set of tags to choose from, without overloading them. So, when assigning a tag, if you type 'fellatio' when assigning tags, it could offer the synonyms too, as you might prefer one of those.
There's a further notion that we should include (and somehow notify the system) of misspellings in the synonyms. So if someone mistypes 'masterbation' in their tag search, it will ignore the tag, since we've flagged it as a misspelled synonym, and instead search for 'masturbation'. Same when assigning tags: misspellings can be autocorrected by virtue of the "standard" spelling being the one assigned to the story. That really helps everyone - authors and readers - as it keeps the tag set down to a manageable level, while augmenting search results.
Have we lost a lot of this nuance in the recent tag cull? Sadly, yes. Quite how we reintroduce meaningful tags for stories from authors that have long since left is unknown.
All we can really do at this point, with the help of current authors checking their stories and massaging their own tags to reflect the content, is gradually start to rebuild the tag set upward; being mindful at all times that the end goal (alongside keyword matching improvements) might be multi-tag searchability from a semi-curated and sensibly-maintained pool of terms that we can hopefully one day expand to include synonyms and misspellings, to build a world class search facility at Lush.
Pagination of albums is now fixed. Thanks to the dev team for the swift response to the gremlin.
Further to this, and the announcement about media limits, these are now in place. Pagination on media profiles has made a welcome return, but there's a slight late-breaking snag: pagination beyond page 1 forgets the album you were in.
This should be patched fairly soon (hopefully tomorrow, with luck: don't hold me to that) but in the meantime, if you want to navigate to subsequent pages in an album, you'll need to add the album ID into the URL by hand:
1. Navigate to the album you want to browse.
2. Copy the album={id_numbers} from the URL.
3. Navigate to a page using the buttons or pagination input.
4. Add the album ID you copied back into the URL, after an ampersand: &album={id_numbers}
Unfortunately you'll need to add the album ID each time you visit a different page. But hopefully it won't be for long when a patch is issued.
Quote by Yeahme
The other problem with Infiniscroll is that once a certain number of images have loaded onto the page, that page uses significant amounts of memory.
Absolutely. And to mitigate that, programmers come up with all sorts of fancy tricks to unload content that's outside the viewport to keep performance up and memory usage down. These have the UX downside that if you scroll back up, the browser has to make further server requests to replenish the unloaded content, which slows down scrolls and increases bandwidth usage - a bad idea on mobile networks.
The solution is - and always has been, since the dawn of the web - to paginate such content using URL variables on discrete page loads, and to cache the hell out of images. Fast. Efficient. Great user experience.
Quote by PJH
I don't know if the problems that I was having within the site caused my story to disappear for more than a day and a half
No, the queue length varies daily and moderators don't always get to stories they claim immediately. Sometimes we grab a story and then something in real life draws focus off the site, or we need to discuss elements of a story among ourselves, which takes time.
There are no guarantees on processing times. It may take a little longer on occasion, especially if we have a lot of bigger stories in the queue from Gold members.
Thanks for your understanding.
Quote by Yeahme
Now all the media is on the same page that loads a few images at a time as you scroll... Please change it back!
I agree. Infiniscroll is fine for a social site that has no footer and no intended end to content, but for managing one's media it's a poor UX choice.
Pagination with distinct page refreshes between (i.e. not asynchronous requests) is more browser and device friendly anyway. Keeps memory usage down, and performance up.
Odd. The Home link in the menu when visiting my profile works fine. On mobile at least. Not tried it on desktop. Is that what you're using?
You can get to the front page at any time by clicking the LushStories logo in the menu bar, btw.
Quote by utterchaos
Um, went to submit my story and it shows as 5.1k words on the submission screen, but it's exactly 5000 on the story word count on the editor?
The count in the story editor is what we go by, so yeah, don't worry about the one on the submission screen. It has some kind of weird upward rounding algorithm or counts author/mod note and title and keywords or whatever. It's... somewhat wonky.
Quote by Venus18
It’s happening on my IPhone 🤷🏽♀️
Thanks for the report. That will help the dev team track it down and fix it.
Yeah, the shaded background is a visual cue that it's not yet published. It's the same colour as when you Preview your story after entering it in the first panel on the Write Story page. Reminds you to give it one last check through to see it looks okay before hitting Publish and having it sent to the moderating team. Or, in sprite's case due to a glitch, creating nine copies of the story in her drafts folder.
Quote by NishasWorld
I would like to use mine to offer a prize for spotting something in my story. Is that OK?
I can't see anything wrong with this approach. You're engaging readers with your writing, which is the intent of the coins. But don't take my word as gospel and please wait for a few others to chime in.
Nah, it's a bug and I think it might only affect Android devices, but I'm not sure. Certainly does it for me.
The only way round it I've found is to flip your phone to landscape.when on the media list. Then you can scroll through them. Bit annoying.
In light of the recent changes to the story submission process, all edits you make to stories - including tag changes - are now going to be diverted to the moderation queue.
Please, if all you're doing is making tag changes, add a Mod Note to that effect so we can process them quickly and get the stories back on the site.
In the meantime, the dev team are working on improving the queue to highlight such changes automatically for us. But a mod note helps massively too, so please use them if you make edits to give us a heads-up what you've changed. Thank you.
Ahaaaaaa. Now that's more masonryish! That's actually much better than the grid. Thank you.
