Wondering when my story would get out of pending

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Maybe she doesn't want to promote or encourage certain things.

 

[StillStunned]

As each piece of code is both shown and then its result, it would be pretty hard not to be factually correct. It’s also based on comments by Manu.

You know that, but if it were my site I'd like to verify it. The fact that she edited information into your other "How to" shows that she's scrutinising that kind of stuff a bit more closely than most stories.

 

[FrancesScott]

Maybe the woman has holidays, gets sick, gets tired of reading endless variations on the same stories

My feelings exactly, and I was taking your recommended approach. Then @iwatchus says he breezed through in six hours. So that undermines the sick / busy / taking a break viewpoint totally. If we all face delays, fair enough. We don’t pay for a service. But uneven treatment is not cool.

 

[iwatchus]

At the risk of saying the same thing three times, my submission is a one page essay about how to use HTML to format Literotica stories. There is no questionable content.

I wonder if she is asking Manu to review it as well. And his schedule may be very different. Your earlier (wonderful) bit on grammar is right up Laurel's alley, but she may want to defer to manu about the HTML and how it works with the tool chain he built.

 

[FrancesScott]

I wonder if she is asking Manu to review it as well. And his schedule may be very different. Your earlier (wonderful) bit on grammar is right up Laurel's alley, but she may want to defer to manu about the HTML and how it works with the tool chain he built.

OK - how does that apply to PennyT, who is having exactly the same delay? Having read some of her delightful work, I can think of no one less likely to have questionable content. And her distinctive voice is clearly not AI generated.

If there is a good reason for preferential treatment - like author A has never had a work sent back (I’m in that category) and Author B has had two stories sent back - then fair enough. Differential treatment where this is not the case - to use a technical term - sucks.

 

[FrancesScott]

You know that, but if it were my site I'd like to verify it. The fact that she edited information into your other "How to" shows that she's scrutinising that kind of stuff a bit more closely than most stories.

The essay that was approved in two hours?

And I’ve very politely contacted her - twice. And she has responded before, but not now.

And - again - your argument doesn’t apply to PennyT who is in precisely the same boat as me.

 

[FrancesScott]

Maybe she doesn't want to promote or encourage certain things.

There is an analogous essay from - I think 2022 - which I link to in my piece. But the 2022 one is out-of-date, hard to follow, and not exhaustive, which is why I wrote mine. So this argument doesn’t fly.

 

[StillStunned]

And - again - your argument doesn’t apply to PennyT who is in precisely the same boat as me.

That's probably because I was replying to you, not to Penny.

Penny says herself that her story has several elements that might require extra scrutiny. And even then, no-one is entitled to have their stories approved within 24 or 48 hours. Nice if you get that, of course, but it doesn't mean you'll have expedited approval in the future. Maybe after so many fast approvals, it's your turn to wait a little longer while someone else gets approved first.

 

[ElectricBlue]

That's probably because I was replying to you, not to Penny.

Penny says herself that her story has several elements that might require extra scrutiny. And even then, no-one is entitled to have their stories approved within 24 or 48 hours. Nice if you get that, of course, but it doesn't mean you'll have expedited approval in the future. Maybe after so many fast approvals, it's your turn to wait a little longer while someone else gets approved first.

Never thought I'd see a dick swinging contest between a man and a woman, but here we are. My approval's shorter than yours, sucka ,

 

[StillStunned]

Never thought I'd see a dick swinging contest between a man and a woman, but here we are. My approval's shorter than yours, sucka ,

You might have to point out to me where I was boasting about my short approval.

 

[FrancesScott]

Aside from authorial squabbling. There very much seems to be something going on at the moment. I don’t buy the “it happens to everyone sometimes” argument, approval times aren’t stochastic events - with a once in fifty year outlier happening to someone every day. We are talking about two authors with previously blameless portfolios experiencing the same outlier at the same time. That suggests something more than a statistical anomaly.

Fair enough if it’s happening to everyone. And again we get the level of service we pay for. It’s just galling that some authors are not impacted. And this is 100% nothing to do with category or content.

It’s conceivable that Manu is scrutinizing my schoolgirl HTML. It’s conceivable that PennyT has tried to slip an underage protagonist into her story (it’s not really, but whatever). But each argument that is made about why my piece might be delayed is not applicable to hers, and vice versa. What are the odds that we both have exactly the same issue at exactly the same time. Pretty slim in my opinion.

This is not just a “shit happens to everyone, it’s just your turn” deal. Something else is going on and I have no idea what.

 

[TheLobster]

Different approval times for different works is not "uneven treatment." Your stories aren't interchangeable commodities, one would hope, and neither are those of other authors.

This fact alone, sprinkled with a modicum of good will and charity, is enough to explain away the discrepancies in waiting times.

 

[FrancesScott]

The lack of understanding of statistics demonstrated in this thread is almost as depressing as the outlier wait times.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

I don’t buy the “it happens to everyone sometimes” argument,

And yet, it is what it is.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

When I was just a little writer, I asked some Litsers, when will my story be seen. Will it be now, will it be then.

Here's what they said to me.

Que Sera, sera, when it will be seen is not up to we. The date is not ours to see, Que Sera, sera.

 

[TheLobster]

The lack of understanding of statistics demonstrated in this thread is almost as depressing as the outlier wait times.

Your own understanding of statistics that you present here is laced with assumption as to how certain class of authors should be treated. It is on this base alone that you proclaim their experiences as "outliers".

In reality, a waiting time of 3-5 days is hardly long, given the consensus on similar threads being "wait 2 weeks and only contact Lauren if it doesn't move until then."

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Welcome to my world @FrancesScott

 

[FrancesScott]

Welcome to my world @FrancesScott

How so?

 

[AwkwardlySet]

How so?

This is what happens every time I dare criticize the site, Manu, or Laurel. Regardless of how well-founded my criticism is, people leap to their defense with remarkable zeal, completely ignoring logic and facts, and they usually come up with strained excuses or even speculate about things far beyond their knowledge.
Sure, I am probably not right every time, but even when it's blatantly obvious that something is amiss, the apologists are not deterred.
Criticizing Laurel will get you nowhere on this forum, trust me.

 

[FrancesScott]

Criticizing Laurel will get you nowhere on this forum, trust me.

In my limited dealings with her, she has been lovely. To be honest, I assumed she had taken a break, or - less positively - was unwell, or just overworked. I even advised others to chill and be patient. Then that all got destroyed by @iwatchus posting what he did.

And you are right that people who have nothing much to add and have clearly not read previous posts like to pile on for… reasons.

I don’t think I am entitled to anything, I don’t have a contractual relationship with the site. But I continue to mantain that something strange is happening. It seems fair comment to say so.

 

[Bamagan]

What I see as the simplest explanation:

Laurel probably uses some kind of code script(s) or search feature to scan stories before she looks at them very closely. Certain types of non-standard punctuation seem to set them off, which may be relevant since you said you provided examples of code. They probably look for instances of html formatting as well, and your submission would likely have triggered such a detector.. My evidence for that: I used to use the old-fashioned i for italic formatting and b for bold; in at least some of my stories she switched those to em and strong. So she at least occasionally modifies formatting code, which means a little extra work on her part compared to whatever buttons she needs to press to approve for publication.

I suspect stories that get through the queue like Taco Bell through a bowel manage to avoid setting off her scripts, or else trigger a very small number of hits. Everything else would get set aside for dealing with after she's plucked the low-hanging fruit of the day.

 

[PennyThompson]

stories that get through the queue like Taco Bell through a bowel manage to avoid setting off her scripts

Thank you for that vibrant metaphor

 

[StillStunned]

Laurel probably uses some kind of code script(s) or search feature to scan stories before she looks at them very closely.

The other day I thought it would be fun to go to the very oldest page in the AH and see what people were discussing back then, back in 1999. I wasn't surprised to learn that long approval times was already a big topic then - someone mentioned four weeks.

Anyway, in one of the threads Laurel talked about how someone from Russia was writing some code that would reduce the work by 75%.

Hopefully the software has been updated since then, but I think it's safe to say that yes, part of the approval process is automated.

 

[PennyThompson]

I try to have a lot of grace and patience for sites and services like this one, where it's all run on bespoke systems by small teams who do it for passion and sustainable income and not quarterly revenue growth. We all know what the awful enshittified alternative is!

It is frustrating when you're the one caught in the bespoke tangle, though

Part of me thinks that if Laurel were to ever pull the curtain back just a little bit, and give us a better idea of how the system and workflow works, we might all be more patient with the process. But I could also see the arguments for not wanting to reveal any of the secrets, for fear of exploitation by SEO spammers or whatever.

But also also I could imagine anyone with even a drip of content management or web programming experience being absolutely horrified if we knew what was actually going on behind the public-facing interface

 

[FrancesScott]

My evidence for that: I used to use the old-fashioned i for italic formatting and b for bold; in at least some of my stories she switched those to em and strong. So she at least occasionally modifies formatting code, which means a little extra work on her part compared to whatever buttons she needs to press to approve for publication.

Ironically my story contains the following (it’s just an excerpt, I know I can’t post it all here):

OK, let’s return to HTML tags…

Emphasis (Italics)

Here we have two ways to achieve the same thing. The original way to create emphasis was via:

<i>Emphasis</i>

which gives you:

Emphasis

However, <i> has been deprecated in favor of <em> so nowadays we should write:

<em>Emphasis</em>

which gives you:

Emphasis

No, I can’t see the difference either, and Literotica still supports the old tag.