Story Pending for 2 Weeks, Any Advice?

[TheDok]

My best advice is stop fretting Your story will be published or rejected all in good time Unless there is real glitch or it has been waiting 4 weeks Iwould also avoid messaging Laurel who is a victim of the sites successMy last story was rejected for being written with AI ( it wasn’t) so I resubmitted either a note saying I don’t use Grammarly or an equivalent and then 29 days later it was published. In the next few days the Halloween competition starts and those stories will get priority. Patience I know it’s not easy but your baby will soon see the light of day.

 

[feel_the_beast]

My best advice is stop fretting Your story will be published or rejected all in good time

My experience, and that of some others, would be that this is a bit of wishful thinking.
I withdrew mine, and resubmitted, and THAT got it published within about 36 hours.

 

[EmilyMiller]

My best advice is stop fretting Your story will be published or rejected all in good time Unless there is real glitch or it has been waiting 4 weeks Iwould also avoid messaging Laurel who is a victim of the sites successMy last story was rejected for being written with AI ( it wasn’t) so I resubmitted either a note saying I don’t use Grammarly or an equivalent and then 29 days later it was published. In the next few days the Halloween competition starts and those stories will get priority. Patience I know it’s not easy but your baby will soon see the light of day.

With all due respect, I think this advice is - at the very least - out of date. The only way that people who have got out of stories being stuck for weeks recently seems to be deleting their submission and resubmitting it. I think I have seen at least five people be successful with this approach and none with the just waiting approach that used to work.

 

[EmilyMiller]

My Halloween comp entry was just approved.

But… this was only after I had pulled it and resubmitted.

That’s now at least six people who have been successful by adopting this approach. It seems like the least bad bet if you are caught in purgatory.

 

[TheDok]

My Halloween comp entry was just approved.

But… this was only after I had pulled it and resubmitted.

That’s now at least six people who have been successful by adopting this approach. It seems like the least bad bet if you are caught in purgatory.

Each to is own but this suggests there is something wrong with the submission process because ordinarily you would expect it go to the back of the queue (line) to be approved is the site becoming too busy and causing submission failure one wonders.My issue is not with resubmitting but unecessary hassling of laurel because all that will do is delay everything else. Just a thought .
Glad your story has been accepted

 

[EmilyMiller]

this suggests there is something wrong with the submission process because ordinarily you would expect it go to the back of the queue (line) to be approved is the site becoming

Precisely. But there is mounting evidence that what is going on is not normal delays, but stories getting lost.

There is also mounting evidence that resubmitting is the only way to fix it.

 

[fantasea69]

Thanks for the tip! Gonna try right away.

 

[feel_the_beast]

My issue is not with resubmitting but unecessary hassling of laurel because all that will do is delay everything else. Just a thought .

I would also submit that notifying the admin that an essential feature of the site is broken is not 'hassling' them, but only trying to make sure they're aware of serious functionality issues which they certainly should want to know about.

 

[TheDok]

I would also submit that notifying the admin that an essential feature of the site is broken is not 'hassling' them, but only trying to make sure they're aware of serious functionality issues which they certainly should want to know about.

I agree they ought to know but how many times have they been told ? Not every author writes comments on the forum anfter and and if Laurel is getting dozens of messages per day on the same topic? Personally I try to submit stories around. 10 am in the UK when it is 5 in the morning in East coat US when I hope the site is quieter

 

[feel_the_beast]

but how many times have they been told ?

Don't know. But I do know that in this type of situation, lots of people follow Freddie Prinz' mantra: "It's not MY job!"
Everyone who's experienced this issue should msg the site admin so that they are aware of the scale of the problem, and can then assign it the appropriate priority for investigation.
Otherwise they are liable to assume that it's just a tiny minority of idiots who can't figure out how to properly submit a story. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, I've heard.

 

[Britva415]

My issue is not with resubmitting but unecessary hassling of laurel because all that will do is delay everything else

Whether it's necessary or not in this situation is unclear, but even unnecessary communication is not going to delay anything.

Anyway, I'm starting to become convinced that the most important way to communicate about this is to use the bug reporting form. It's different from email and DMs.

 

[TheDok]

Agree about using the bug reporting form. do you know if you or anybody else has done this? i have sent the following message via "contact us"

Hi, on the forum, there are many complaints about waits of several weeks for stories to be published, and there are at least six people who waited for several weeks before pulling their story and resubmitting, whereupon the story was published within a couple of days. This seems to imply that stories are being "lost" during the submission process. My question is are people being impatient or is the site so busy that when multiple questions are submitted simultaneously, the system is failing.

 

[Britva415]

Agree about using the bug reporting form. do you know if you or anybody else has done this? i have sent the following message via "contact us"

Hi, on the forum, there are many complaints about waits of several weeks for stories to be published, and there are at least six people who waited for several weeks before pulling their story and resubmitting, whereupon the story was published within a couple of days. This seems to imply that stories are being "lost" during the submission process. My question is are people being impatient or is the site so busy that when multiple questions are submitted simultaneously, the system is failing.

Emails, PMs, and comments in the contact form all might carry just a little bit more weight than Forum posts, if only because Forum posts probably won’t ever be read even if we @ them.

However, bug tracking carries a whole different level of accountability, metrics, and motivation to take the subject matter seriously.

At least, it should. I am assuming that there’s a bug trcking system behind the bug reporting form, but I could be wrong. Maybe all it does is the same thing as the “contact us” form but with some kind of tag or flag categorizing the comment as a bug, and there isn’t any tracking system.

But I don’t know that there isn’t, so, on the off chance that there is, let’s take them up on their invitation to report bugs using the bug reporting form.

 

[A24storyteller]

@feel_the_beast nothing happened. I guess I am stuck. Still waiting...

 

[feel_the_beast]

@feel_the_beast nothing happened. I guess I am stuck. Still waiting...

I'm very sorry that the 'resubmit' workaround hasn't worked for you, a24, and also that I really don't have any new advice for you. Hope they get this sorted sometime soon, but I've read posts indicating this issue may be years old, so I'm not very optimistic.