Keeping contact with fans?

[KikiKisses]

So I’ve had some interesting interactions with some of my stories and I posted earlier about having a little bit of frustration about not being able to comment directly in the comment section, and having to send a private comment to them or find them on the forum. I find it a little clunky.

What do other authors do if they want to communicate more directly in a community style way? Reddit? Discord?

Obviously I’m not there yet but I’m curious.

I have some really encouraging comments from people and I would love to get their feedback, and build a following.

 

[PennameWombat]

But you can comment in the Comments section on a story. Do you mean that because there's no threading and no connection, any response you make there just sits? Yes, that's the case.

And, the couple of times I tried to use a direct message to thank or otherwise respond to a comment, the users had their DMs disabled. So. Never mind.

In short, my following is anyone that has chosen to be a Follower here and I communicate with them by releasing a new story. At which time they get notified by the site, and can act. Or not.

Beyond that, as you imply, this site doesn't have facilities for maintaining a personal 'community.' As I have zero interest in doing so, I don't try to take them to any other sites. But there are writers here who use Patreon, which seems to be the most common.

You cannot put links outside of Literotica in your stories, but you can put such links (Patreon, Amazon, Discord, etc.) on your profile page. But that requires readers to not only read your story, but also click on your name to see your profile.

 

[KikiKisses]

That’s what I mean. That you would put links to other sites in your bio. You could mention that in your story and invite people to follow you there.

Yeah it bums me out that there’s no way to communicate with anyone besides talking to them here or sending them a private feedback message that they may or may not see or may or may not answer. So I was wondering if people had a preferred platform for that. I’ve never used Discord but I thought some people might have some opinions about what to do.,

 

[Statius]

Look just put at the beginning of your story to feel free to contact you through your email on bio page, that you encourage it. IF and that's a big IF they want to contact you, they will. You can't control that or argue about, or explain, your story, intentions, etc.. unless they contact you.

 

[KikiKisses]

Look just put at the beginning of your story to feel free to contact you through your email on bio page, that you encourage it. IF and that's a big IF they want to contact you, they will. You can't control that or argue about, or explain, your story, intentions, etc.. unless they contact you.

That wasn’t my intention. More answering questions, etc.

I think I’ll just do that for now.

 

[metropolinational]

I find the commenting system extremely frustrating in many ways. My top wishes:
1. threaded responses with notification to OP that someone has responded (like this forum)
2. automatic posting - with retroactive moderation if abused (like this forum)
3. ability to quote, like, emojis (like this forum)

in short, why cant they just attach a forum thread to each story? Why have a separate super clunky commenting system?

At this point, I have pretty much stopped commenting, even on my own stories in reply to people who ask questions. The post takes so long to show up (sometimes more than four days!), I've forgotten I posted and I'm sure the original commenter forgot too.

I do reply to direct emails though, and love it. I would say there are a few readers that have become friends. An incredible benefit of writing here.

 

[old_prof]

I find the commenting system extremely frustrating in many ways. My top wishes:
1. threaded responses with notification to OP that someone has responded (like this forum)
2. automatic posting - with retroactive moderation if abused (like this forum)
3. ability to quote, like, emojis (like this forum)

in short, why cant they just attach a forum thread to each story? Why have a separate super clunky commenting system?

At this point, I have pretty much stopped commenting, even on my own stories in reply to people who ask questions. The post takes so long to show up (sometimes more than four days!), I've forgotten I posted and I'm sure the original commenter forgot too.

I do reply to direct emails though, and love it. I would say there are a few readers that have become friends. An incredible benefit of writing here.

One of the issues is that they need to allow commenters to not be logged in (or even have accounts). Whether we, as authors like it or not, the site is run for the readers, not us. And many (most?) readers do not want to sign up for a sexually explicit site if they can avoid it. So anonymous readers (and commenters and voters/raters) are her to stay.

And technologically, the two sides of the site are completely separate; Manu would need to reimplement the capabilities over there. My understanding is the forum side is a packaged software they used, while the story side is mostly home grown.

By the way, if you keep commenting, you are placed on a whitelist of who gets to comment immediately. I just recently was so blessed. At the minimum, I wish that all authors were whitelisted to comment immediately on their own stories. They know who we are. They have significant leverage over us. We can be coerced to behave.

 

[metropolinational]

I don't know why commenting needs to be moderated at all. if I am secretly UBL's ghost and post some terror plots in here, I would just be reported and banned. Why not have the same for stories and comments?

That's how X and Facebook and a million other sites do it. The idea of moderating each word and each sentence BEFORE they are published is essentially pre-internet.

 

[old_prof]

I don't know why commenting needs to be moderated at all. if I am secretly UBL's ghost and post some terror plots in here, I would just be reported and banned. Why not have the same for stories and comments?

Before my time, but apparently there was a period where lots of spam and ad links were being submitted as comments. This was a (not unreasonable in my mind) response to that.

 

[IWroteThis]

You would think that they could use one of the free Bayesian filters to handle the bulk of comment moderation, which would free up more time up for story moderation.

 

[metropolinational]

I find it hard to believe that the reason they allow anonymous readers to comment and rate is about volume. Most of my entries get thousands of reads, hundreds of votes, and dozens of comments. It's easily 30 or 50 to 1 in terms of readers vs raters/commenters. Only about half of my commenters are anonymous. Based on those numbers, my guess is they would not lose more than 1% of their visitors if they made it a requirement to be logged in when reacting to the story.

I could of course be wrong, and surely there is a reason why they are bothering to moderate all those comments. I really hope it's not just that "this is how it's always been done". if so, that would be tragic.