Problem with using HTML syntax in a story

[Oppreciator]

So I've got a very limited knowlegde of HTML coding, but I've noticed a possible trend that's caused mine and a few friends' stories to be shot down by the moderators, and that's using symbols used in HTML coding in our stories.

My most recent story uses a "%" in the title and several times throughout the text, and it's taking a strangely long amount of time to get and response from the moderators, so I wonder if that's the case. I've also said something similar with a few other authors who had their stories turned down, and I thought that might be the case.

Basically it seems that Literotica's ancient web design is preventing certain stories from being uploaded at all

 

[ElectricBlue]

Given that the story title (or part of it at least) becomes part of the web address for that story, wouldn't % be a prohibited character within an address?

Embedded in story text wouldn't be a problem, since it's then a standard text character - but why would you use html to create it?

 

[Oppreciator]

Given that the story title (or part of it at least) becomes part of the web address for that story, wouldn't % be a prohibited character within an address?

Embedded in story text wouldn't be a problem, since it's then a standard text character - but why would you use html to create it?

It's just a suspicion I have about the way that Literotica handles it's post, but you may know way more about this than I do. I'm not sure if the % symbol is a prohibited character for the title, as nothing has ever told me that it's not. I imported my story as an rtf from google docs. Basically I'm just hoping that something as simple as a few % signs isn't going to be the reason my story gets rejected

 

[ElectricBlue]

It's just a suspicion I have about the way that Literotica handles it's post, but you may know way more about this than I do. I'm not sure if the % symbol is a prohibited character for the title, as nothing has ever told me that it's not. I imported my story as an rtf from google docs. Basically I'm just hoping that something as simple as a few % signs isn't going to be the reason my story gets rejected

I wouldn't think so - if html goes pear shaped you're more likely to find out when a story does go live, and the format is all over the place.

There was a while there that I got clever and published a bunch of stories because someone showed me how to do html, but after half a dozen stories where it went wrong (either through my mistake or some glitch I couldn't figure out) I now keep html down to a bare minimum. Maybe a word or phrase or two in italics, but that's it. It became too much hassle to fix.

How long have you been waiting for a story to go up? Are you sure you've actually submitted it?

 

[RejectReality]

Given that the story title (or part of it at least) becomes part of the web address for that story, wouldn't % be a prohibited character within an address?

The FURL system handles that. It takes any special characters and simply eliminates them. Should the resultant FURL then mimic an existing FURL, it gets a number appended to make it unique.

To the OP — I doubt that a simple percent sign would be enough to trigger Laurel into an unwarranted HTML rejection. I personally use the — special character code for every one of my em-dashes because Lit's text processor outputs double hyphens when it encounters the em-dashes in my documents otherwise.

Granted, I've been doing that for years, and Laurel is used to it, but a percent sign looks a whole lot less like HTML than my em-dash code does.

There's only one story moderator, btw. Laurel processes all of the stories. Which means she has to skim to make the number of stories that are approved feasible. So mistaken-identity rejections do happen.

As to your story sitting in the queue for a long time... There may be something there. You said you talked to others who had been rejected for what you believe were mistaken reasons concerning HTML, but did their stories also remain in the queue for an unusually long period of time?

That could possibly be a clue to the elusive bug that's causing stories to fail to appear in Laurel's dashboard, which ( other than people accidentally saving stories as drafts rather than submitting ) is the reason most stories sit in the queue for unusually long periods of time.

I'm honestly surprised that I haven't experienced it if that's the case, but I could just be getting lucky.