Quote by kistinspencil
with the Comment Page entries gone, I will have to go through each story and make a list.

Oooft, that's annoying. I didnt expect that, but thinking about it with my System Architecture hat on, it makes sense. The link between the list on the Comments page and the actual comment must get severed when the account is deleted because it's keyed via the account.

The link is good (in most ways) because it cuts down on duplication and means that if anyone edits a comment, both parties see the edits immediately, instead of seeing a stale copy/notification (like we had on Lush 1, which was annoying). Data here is stored in one place and everything else links to it.

But when the link is removed (an account is deleted) it leaves "orphan" content on stories and no way for us mortals to find them from the interface. That's something the spam combatting tools will need to take into account when they're made available.

Yeah. Spammers are a royal pain.

I expect something can be done at the database level to remove all the comments linked to the (now defunct) account. Mass deletion will require developer intervention so might not be immediate. It's been flagged.

Content deletion is not a cut and dried case. Authors who decide to delete their account may leave anonymous content behind for a host of reasons - and that's desirable for the community. But for spammers, Admins need tools to remove the accounts and linked content.

I believe (could be wrong) that there are no such tools in place right now because the partner site's forum was previously not publicly accessible - it was paid access only, so spam wasn't an issue. Since we've come along, the forum is now available to anyone after registering an account, so the tools to combat spam need to be correspondingly bolstered.

To add a little more to what others are saying about just writing, don't be too concerned about a story if it's going nowhere. You can either flog it to death until it starts working or, often simpler, shelve it and move on, then come back to it.

I've done the latter on numerous occasions and the distance helped me see where the stumbling blocks were and to retool/rewrite/reimagine whole sections for the betterment of the story. I have received EP awards for two of my pieces that took the best part of 6-9 months to finish (on and off).

Another anecdote: the 6K-word piece I just submitted for the Ultimate Seduction competition, The Five-Year Silence, was written in 2 days and edited in 5. How so fast? Because I spent nearly a month prior to that flogging another story to death that I felt sure was going to fit the brief and, ultimately, didn't live up to my expectations.

I wrote 5956 words of that sucker and walked away from it, now gathering dust and may never see the light of day. I might revisit it one day and refactor it without the competition's thematic constraints. Or I might not. But without that story-writing process of failure, however frustrating it is to "waste" time on something nobody will read, I'm far happier with the completely different story I ultimately rocketed through and which practically wrote itself.

Storytelling is a cruel mistress sometimes. But I love her.

Quote by verity100

find a picture that I like... then try to imagine the circumstances that brought it about.

Snap! I often do this. Many of my pieces start with a picture that sparks an idea and I imagine how that situation came about. Some the other way round, which is harder to find a picture that does it justice, I think.

Quote by Green_Man
They are not simply thrown out.

I second this. RRs and EPs are a serious honour. I'm lucky enough to have a bunch and am proud of every one. Like you, some of mine have been awarded long after publication, by moderators who stumble across and enjoy what I write.

I'm always thrilled to receive them because I put a lot of effort into storytelling (and trying to get better at it) and know that I can - and often do - drop the ball by writing substandard content or being too experimental. That's all part of trying to improve, and I'm still hacking away at it.

Quote by Green_Man
some of the moderators... are known to be "stingy" with their awards

Raises paw

Ahem. My standards are perhaps a little unrealistically high. A story has to knock my legs off to get one and, usually, by the time I've decided to award it, someone else has done so anyway.

That's my excuse for being tight with handing out awards and I'm sticking to it 😎

Quote by verity100
I still managed to get a famous story star with only one "F" word in it

I've been here 6 years and don't think I am (was?) even close to a Famous badge on any of my stories, so you must be doing something right that draws readers! Keep at it, I say. You write very well.

Maybe I should take a leaf out of your book and cut down on the cuss words. Or put the time in to become a better writer overall. It's on the plan...

It's tough. Sometimes as you say, a few thousand words will just pour onto the page and other times (like with my current competition piece) it's a hard, hard slog.

I don't think there's any cure for it, but I often find that trawling the EPs and RRs here and reading some exceptional pieces of work spurs me back into writing mode. Reading great work inspires me to try doing the same. Might work for you too.

Quote by Charlotte_

How do you make stories that used to be linked together into a series? I miss the "read next" links.

1. Visit a story you want to link.

2 Edit it.

3. Scroll down and type the name of the series in the Series box. If it already exists, it'll match as you type.

4. Select it if it exists, or click Create {series name} if it doesn't This step is important or it won't be assigned properly. You can tell when it's done because it appears beneath the Series box on its own, like tags do.

5. Submit your story. Note that at present this results in the chance it'll get diverted to the moderation queue (I think it depends if there are blank lines after the story or it does some "tidying" of spacing on submission, which makes it think the story is "different" than before - not sure). If you just add a brief mod note 'Adding series name' or something, then we'll know that's all you've done and can approve it quickly. Note also that if that happens, the published date that's shown changes to 'now' even though the story remains in the original order in your stories page. I think that's an opportunity for improvement and I'll mention it to the developers.

Once your stories are linked you can visit the series page to reorder each set.

Hope that helps

Update: I can comment on most stories just fine, but not those in categories that I previously blocked in Lush 1. I can't find the settings here where I can mute/block certain genres. If anyone can point me in the right direction, it'd be appreciated.

Even so, it does seem a little incongruous to:

a) See stories on the front page that are in my blocked category list.

b) Be able to read stories in those categories.

c) Be able to score on stories in those categories.

d) But not be able to comment on those stories.

Quote by LakeShoreLimited
the paragraph spacing is not an issue when posted to other sites.

Yeah, it is unfortunately site specific (or, rather, editor/toolbar specific). Some will detect multiple paragraph markers and consolidate them into one. Not here.

I think that's pretty much what the Lush 1 "paste from Word" tool did.

Yeah, Word peaked in terms of its features/usefulness ratio at around the 2000/2003 editions.

Since then they've added useless crud to the point there's little distinction between the suite apps, and cluttered the UI so it's a slog to perform rudimentary documentation tasks.

Plus they've not fixed things that have looooong been issues like insert cross-ref not remembering your choices per reference type. If they had merely bug fixed Word 2003 and iterated it fractionally, I'd have had more respect.

Aaanyway, back on topic, paragraph spacing and styles are one of those features that really make Word stand out and be useful. Well, when they work. Pasting in chunks of text often brings unwanted style definitions with it, which are a pain to stamp out and normalise.

The extra line break will be present if your Word document has them between each paragraph. Many people do this when writing:

Lorem ipsum dolor sita...[enter]

[enter]

Lorem ipsum dolor sita...[enter]

[enter]

...

because Word's default paragraph spacing sucks.

What you should do is this:

1. Open the Styles panel.

2. Find Normal in the list.

3. Click to alter/edit it.

4. From the dropdown at the bottom of the popup panel, choose Paragraph.

5. Change the Spacing After setting to 6pt or 12pt or something sizeable; roughly as large as your font point size is a good rule of thumb. You can also alter the line spacing to 1.2 (or something like that) if you wish, for a more pleasurable reading experience.

6. Confirm the changes to the Style.

Tada! No more need to press enter twice. The paragraph will have line spacing automatically added to it with a single carriage return.

If at any time it asks you to make changes to all docs in future based on this template, you can do so if you wish. Or save the empty doc as a new .dotx template file. That's what I do: I have a "story.dotx" template so if I want to start a new story, I just choose it from the file>open menu and my style environment is already set up.

Copying and pasting into Lush from such a document is then simple without any need for subsequent faffing.

I had the same thing this morning. If I click to leave a comment it immediately takes me to a "forbidden" page that says I need to upgrade. From Platinum/forevergold!

Clearly other people can comment so it may be an account setting (e.g. a blocked category carried over from Lush 1 that I don't know how to change here). I've mentioned it. Hopefully we can get some guidance on what to do.

Thanks for the report.

Yes. I had the same issue in Lush 1. Like AppleByBoom, I altered my "normal" style in Word to have a slightly larger line spacing (1.25 for readability) and set the paragraph spacing "after" to 6pt or 12pt or something (can't remember offhand).

That way I only need to do one return at the end of every paragraph. Looks good in Word. Pastes well into here. Saves the ^p^p find/replace dance and/or the extra line deletion dance after pasting into Lush. Win-win, yay.

Quote by RejectReality
It's about 70/30 queue/sail through for me.

I have an unfounded suspicion it might be to do with tidying up spaces at the end of the piece. Maybe on resub, if it trims the whitespace as a service (or something) that triggers the "eeek, the story body is different" and diverts it to the queue instead of passing straight through. But if your story has none at the end, it bypasses it.

A total guess so I might be way off.

Split quoting in the forum is awesome.

Steps to nirvana:

1. Select a chunk of text in a forum post you want to reference.

2. Tap the quote button beneath that post.

3. Look at your Write Reply box and see the selected text has been pasted at the end of whatever was already in the box, if anything.

4. Reply in context and bask in its awesomeness.

5. Repeat steps 1-4 to quote as many people as you want in a single post.

Yeah! No more wading through tonnes of full-post quotes to find a single-line reply at the bottom referencing a point a third of the way through it.

Love it.

Yep. Frustrating.

Counting words is one of those things that's inherently easy for humans to consider and understand, but difficult for computers to perform accurately in a similar manner. Even Word has a set of rules and gets it "wrong".

1. Hyphenated words sometimes count as two or more.

2. Two words separated by a non-breaking space count as one word.

3. Using a dash with space around it - instead of an em-dash - may count as an extra word.

4. Separators like ~oOo~ are considered a word.

5. They can consider "invisible" web markup as words, so large chunks of whitespace or formatting like bold, italic, etc can bump the word count significantly.

And so on...

The 10k limit is a soft rule at moderator discretion. If it's a bit over, fine. If it's a lot over, maybe not.

Mainly, it's there to help keep the site speed up. Loading tens of thousand word stories takes an appreciable amount of time when scaled up to a large user base, so limiting the amount downloaded in each request helps the servers, keeps the site snappy, and allows those on lower bandwidth connections to enjoy the stories without having to wait a while for content to appear.

I've made a (categorised) list of about 50 things I can think of or have noted, or have trawled from the various threads here. No timelines ('cos I don't know them). I'm sure I've missed stuff or promised things that the developers will club me for, so a few other people are weighing in to check I've not gone overboard.

When it's in some publishable format, I'll see what can be done about posting it somehow and making it the go-to resource. Who knows, maybe it'll only serve us for a month or two and then we'll need a new sticky topic with the next batch of changes in it to keep the amount of reading to a minimum.

My aim will be to a) list what's being worked on/known about, which will... b) provide a fairly easily scannable resource so that if anyone encounters a bug or missing feature, they can check if it's known about before filing a helpdesk ticket. That cuts down on the volume of tickets, which helps moderators and developers and ultimately everyone here.

Watch the forum space in the coming days...

Absolutely. The help desk is there to raise missing stuff, bugs, features, and so forth. That's probably the most constructive avenue, but there's the issue of bogging it down.

Maybe a single sticky post where someone (me?) can list the things that need addressing. When they're done, cross them out. If they break, uncross them. At least then, before raising a ticket, someone can squint through the list in the OP and see if it's already there, instead of wading through threads to find stuff.

Would that be useful?

Quote by NicolasBelvoir

Lush is now mainly a site for chatting and swapping porn pics. With some stories added on.

Because Lush is homed on a site that was, up until six weeks ago, a place mainly for chatting and swapping porn pics. The stories have been added on; that's why it feels like it _now_. But it won't be that way forever.

Given infinite time and resources, it could all be made the same as it was, sooner. Sadly that's not the case and everything takes time to (re)build. In addition, there are ever increasing and oppressive content restrictions being put in place by stakeholders such as financial gateways and hosting providers that have an impact on what can be rolled out and how it is managed. Lush 1 would equally have been affected and would have required sweeping changes to comply; basically forcing us to moderate every single picture posted anywhere on the site, in addition to the stories.

Yes the upheaval is inconvenient in the short term. Yes there are features I would dearly love to see returned as soon as possible, including stable email notifications of stories published - as an author that can make the difference between a few reads and hundreds.

The points Susie and others have raised are all valid. Everyone has their own idea of what features are important, and not everyone's vision aligns. Some features in Lush 1 were bodges. Bodging them again for the sake of getting it working right this minute, for parity, isn't a sustainable path; it introduces instability which makes it harder to add new stuff and maintain existing features down the line.

If I had a roadmap, I'd publish it. Maybe now much of the firefighting is out of the way and people can (mostly) log in and use the site, a tentative schedule can be published. I don't know.

Trouble is, if a schedule or feature hit list is published and it's not adhered to or doesn't meet some people's expectations, it will be used as a vehicle to trash the site. If a changeset is published after every software push, it might give some people a reason to flame the site for prioritising feature X over feature Y. Maybe an advertised fix means something else breaks (which happened regularly in Lush 1 and happens in every complex software system the world over - it's not unique). In that case, publishing the fix list gives people ammo to ridicule it.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Still applies. Please report the profiles and someone will take care of it.

From my (perhaps simplistic) understanding, any part of the site that can be viewed without a subscription can't contain any graphic imagery. Willing to be corrected if that's not the case.

Quote by Brookell

I work in IT and rule number one when making changes is you do not remove functionality  without giving something better (easier to use or more convenient) in return.

I also work in the field and appreciate that, while this sentiment generally holds true, when a system has outgrown its codebase and extenuating circumstances dictate otherwise (in this case, shut the site or rapidly find a new home on a platform that could be iterated towards something better over time) then difficult decisions need to be made that contradict such ideals.

I have it on good authority that a revised editor toolbar is in the works and should be hitting the shelves next week, all being well.

Quote by NewLushSeeker

you're not going to do a spooky mood for a rom-com

Hehe, unless you're Edgar Wright doing a RomComZom like Shaun Of The Dead

But yeah, very interesting question, Luca. I love mood and setting to help drive the realism and insert the characters in it. Usually, mood or a situation comes first for me. Then I figure the plot out as I go.

As for dialogue, it's work in progress. I find it difficult. Oblique dialogue is something I'm gonna have to embrace to help sell better characters. Off the top of my head:

She eyed me over the coffee mug. "What time are you coming home?"

Now, with that dialogue opener, the boring, direct answer is:

"Midnight."

Better options include:

"Jesus, Carrie! You checking up on me?"

And:

I shook my head in disbelief. "Elle was right. You don't trust me."

Not sure that's truly a good example of oblique dialogue but hey. Both those options add conflict and intrigue and a little bit of spark. So I'm trying to incorporate more of that stuff, but man it's hard work. 

And thanks for the shout out, Kimmi. Means a lot that people are touched by what I write.

Quote by danadmin

Just a note to say in the next update (middle of next week), we will be giving moderators the option to send messages when they approve stories, we are also hoping to have the new editor ready which will support copy and paste.

Wooohoooo! Thank you.

I don't know where 'dinosaur' came from. I've not seen that reference. I struggled for the first few days to get used to where things are - still do at times - so I feel for people's experiences. Plus everything's shifting around us, goal posts are moving, features are being introduced, bugs are being fixed, new ones are being introduced, just like every software project.

Notifications have been (and continue to be) flaky at this time. It needs fixing big time. As does the ability to retain formatting when pasting/uploading from an external source. Those are two killer writing features that need attention.

I presume they've been raised as tickets, but I'm not sure. I've not dived into the helpdesk to see what's still open.

Wheeeeeeeeee, this is pointless but I'll play along.

> Are you an author?

Yes!

> Do you primarily use the chat rooms, forums, neither or both.

Forums, trying to help people transition and remain informed about what's going on and why everything won't happen right now.

> What is the main device you access Lush with? phone/tablet, lappy or PC

Laptop/phone. It doesn't matter. It's the same codebase now on a single domain, unlike previously.

> On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the happiest) how happy are you with the chatroom changes?

Never used the chat rooms. Not starting now.

> On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the forum changes?

Maybe 4? It evolves by the day. But it's actually usable on mobile, unlike before where it was pinch-zoom city and I'd have rated the forum experience a 2.

It's not perfect. What is? Linking to individual forum topics works fine on desktop but copying a post link to the clipboard doesn't seem to work reliably on mobile (might be my obscure browser). We never had that feature at all on Lush 1, so that's a major step up.

Quoting is hit and miss here right now. It's workable. Quoting multiple people or adding quote blocks via the toolbar would be a nice-to-have one day.

Glad to see the back of BBCode. Man, that was awful.

The only major regression I can see is uploading images direct from device. And that's coming soon (which should hopefully work in PMs and wall posts too).

> As an author, on a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the story changes?

Right now, you mean? Might change tomorrow. Dunno. 4ish? Compared to the story pages and experience on Lush 1 which I'd rate a 3 in comparison. It was clunky and dated.

The story pages here look mint, barring the story cover image if it's not strict portrait dimensions. Hopefully that requirement can be relaxed one day.

On the publishing front I've not tried in anger. But with the formatting not pastable from Word and no apparent ability to import, that's a major stumbling block that I hope can be fixed quickly. It'll largely depend on the toolbar that's used. The one on Lush 1 was bodged and hacked over time to be what it became. It was very basic for a long time. And let's not forget what happened to everyone's stories when the editor was swapped out and all the spacing got screwed up if you went and edited an old story. That was a major pain - for authors and moderators.

> On a scale of 1 to 5, how happy are you with the general overall design changes?

So far... it's a huge step up. I'd rate it between 4 and 5. Unified codebase, usable forums, sleeker appearance. Sure there are (currently) some omissions that'd make things smoother still. IM is flaky. But so were BBs.

All in good time.

> Which forum features do you miss the most?

Not so much miss, because the new forum is fab. Catching up on threads was a pain in Lush 1 because only the latest post in each forum was highlighted on the main page so it was easy to miss topics. Two posts per forum here is better, and overall it's waaaaay easier on the eye.

With 'New Posts' in the Lush 2 forum, we never need miss anything. But there's such a post volume that it'd be great if there was an indicator of which forum each topic title was in (clickable to take you to the relevant forum landing page). At the moment I have to guess from the topic title whether it's in one of the forums I care about.

> As an author, which story features do you miss the most?

Formatting when pasting in from an external source.

Notification of activity is hit and miss right now.

Squishing my existing cover art into the portrait box instead of letting it fit naturally (constrained only by height would be fine).

> Which general features do you miss the most?

Some of the privacy controls. I'm sure they're on the list as things evolve. Lush 1 probably had about 5 settings when it launched and they grew over time (though comprehensive, they were an absolute mess - some for hiding stuff, some for showing it).

I think the team are doing an amazing job tackling everything and keeping the plates spinning. It's a shame about the impatient members who have given up because it's currently not exactly the same as before. Lush 1 was built over 15 years, feature by feature, hack upon hack. Not everything can survive a transition to a completely new system from day one.

Lush 2 has pretty much been rewritten from scratch in a very short space of time before the old site ran out of support. With the amount of downtime Lush 1 had due to ailing hardware (and said hacks) it was on borrowed time. When it next fell over, it might never have been revived without anyone to charge the defibrillator paddles.

With no other viable options (partners in a similar story sphere due to conflict of interests, or people unwilling to host adult content due to various payment or legal restrictions) Lush has terraformed a biome on an alien planet inhabited largely by swingers

Very little about the way the indigenous folk used the platform is compatible with a story site, so that aspect is being built entirely from scratch to coexist with our new neighbours. There's a lot of overlap with other areas of Lush 1 that have now been expanded, merged and tweaked too. There were only two user levels in the existing system; we had more. That's a fundamental, system-wide change with far-reaching ramifications from an architecture viewpoint, which needed to be changed in "their" system to match "ours". And that's not an isolated case; it's not all one-way.

As many hacks and warts as possible from the story side of Lush 1 (and StoriesSpace!) were ported in the restrictive timeframe. I'm astounded the development team shoehorned in as much as they did before blastoff. Everything else will be considered feature by feature, just as in Lush 1. But in a more sustainable manner.

We survived in Lush 1 without series links for, what, 12? 13 years? And they were twitchy AF with that dual input box and selector contraption. Until then, we had just rudimentary next/previous links that were a pain to manage on a story-by-story basis.

After listening to feedback, less than a month after launch among all the other teething troubles and bug patches, we have series ordering here: better and more flexible and usable than before, showing up as navigable sets in each story to allow readers to enjoy more of an author's universe. That's dedication. That's hard work. That's taking a bolt-on feature from Lush 1 that took 13 years to materialise (through nobody's fault) and re-engineering it in a more sustainable and manageable form. In a month.

It's not us vs them or "we are being told by the new host company" as if they're some monolithic entity determined to bulldoze everything about the written word in lieu of making us all date each other. To imply so is plain rude. It's about taking each piece of what made Lush great and slotting it into an existing framework so both can be supported and not fall over or need to go down for 20 minutes (or longer) every day for maintenance.

The previous thread was locked because, with the best will in the world, nobody is going to read through 13 pages of bugs/rants before deciding whether to post their own findings, just in case it's a duplicate. The helpdesk is there to be used. File support requests as you find them. One per ticket to keep things specific and manageable. Someone will field them as best they can, while we all learn new ways of working and keep abreast of the changes.

Asking divisive questions in the forum about why the new planet on which we've just landed only has saplings instead of the gnarly oaks from the one we had to hurriedly leave behind isn't constructive.

I've not seen it mentioned, but it can be raised for when the profile options are gradually beefed up.

I found it a most annoying feature because I often write a comment first, then go back to score and find I'm forced to write a comment. In that case, the writer loses out on the score.

Conversely, if a story is good but doesn't leave a lasting impression or (more likely) I have nothing to add beyond what has already been said, I prefer to drop a score and move on. Being forced to write a comment means the comment is going to be worthless to the author anyway ("Great story") or, worst case for the author, I back out of scoring and commenting altogether because I've nothing more to say.

If this feature is to return, a notice above the comment box that enforced commenting-on-vote is switched on by the author would go someway towards alleviating this quirk of Lush 1.0.

Likes make sense for forum posts. For stories, I'm on the fence.

As far as I can figure, stories here should have either likes or a score. Not both. Trouble is, if we ditch scores and just go with likes - as has been suggested many times in the past because the voting system is subjective at best and scores in the lower numbers shouldn't get past moderation - people who live and die by numeric popularity will be disappointed.

But if we keep scores then Likes don't seem to add much. And, if anything, dilute the rating space.

It's a tough one.

As to your question, votes (and presumably likes) will still only play a small part in the competition process. The story quality and how it fits the theme are the overriding factors. Whether likes are taken into account or not for shortlisting, I have no idea.