Stripping Formatting from Submissions

[Estcher]

A question for the moderators/administrators, or whomever takes a story submission, approves it, and posts it for general consumption.

I have no idea what your workload is. You are probably reading a lot of poor, middling, okay, and great stories a lot. My question is regarding the formatting changes you apply using, I presume, the Literotica style sheet.

I submit my stories in a docx format and pretty close to the style that is used to easily convert them over to epubs or mobis. I understand you remove the 2-character indent for subsequent paragraphs and I am now "used" to that with you folks.

However, I also use italics and bold in my stories, including my introductory comments and author closing statements. More importantly, I use it for interior thoughts. Whenever I submit a new story, I put in the Comments to Admins to please maintain my use of both. That has been successful up until now. The first 5 parts of my 6 part series Chastity Chronicles have had the italics and bold stripped out completely. The stories look like crap now. I don't know if this was intentional or not. I have resubmitted the first four parts AGAIN, and pleaded for the italics and bold to remain as is. With part five that was again ignored and I suspect Part 6 will be the same.

My question: Why would you strip them in the first place? It's like removing punctuation. Is keeping italics and bold such an onerous task that I can't possibly fathom the depth of the difficulty? I know there are <i></i> and <b></b> html code to assist with that. Does that help? Please help me understand.

I mean it feels spiteful to me at this point. Plus my EDITS asking for this to be corrected are just sitting there in the queue...

 

[jaF0]

I mean it feels spiteful to me at this point.

Buy a domain name, hosting account, the relevant software, invest the many, many necessary hours to install and configure it all and have at it.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I'm not a site admin, but here are a few things to keep in mind when submitting stories:

Firstly, it is not spite, personalised or targeted against you. It's a glitch.

Secondly, edits are low priority, they always take longer (one to two weeks is not uncommon).

So, what to do? Do you have the html coded in your stories? If not, starting doing it. Then, copy paste into the Lit submission page, Save Draft, Preview. If your html is correct, you will see the text as it will appear on Lit when it's published, including italics and bold. Submit. It's that easy.

In other words, don't submit in docx, use the Lit Form. That is foolproof and you can edit within the Form, so if there are coding errors, you can fix them in Draft.

When editing, always put EDIT in the story title, and put in a Note to the Editor, advising what you've done.

Be patient, code html in your draft, minimise bold and italics, use the Form. See how you go doing that.

 

[Estcher]

Thank you for your response. I never embed html code. My first 42 or so stories were all submitted as docx and as the Literotica site states their converter should maintain italics and formatting like that. This latest series of mine is the FIRST time this has failed. If it is a glitch it must be site wide and surely not specific to just the stories I submit. I would hazard a guess that my stories may have been intentionally or unintentionally converted to text first. Sure looks like it.

 

[Estcher]

Buy a domain name, hosting account, the relevant software, invest the many, many necessary hours to install and configure it all and have at it.

Hahahaha. So very helpful. Thank you for your acerbic wit. Very nice sarcasm.

Question: was that really necessary?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Thank you for your response. I never embed html code. My first 42 or so stories were all submitted as docx and as the Literotica site states their converter should maintain italics and formatting like that. This latest series of mine is the FIRST time this has failed. If it is a glitch it must be site wide and surely not specific to just the stories I submit. I would hazard a guess that my stories may have been intentionally or unintentionally converted to text first. Sure looks like it.

I've gone from .docx to .txt to .rtf over the years, but now submit everything in the Form. Embed the html in your draft, copy paste, and it never goes wrong.

Trying to second guess how the site processes uploaded documents is exactly that, a guessing game.

Go with what works every time, I reckon.

 

[Estcher]

I've gone from .docx to .txt to .rtf over the years, but now submit everything in the Form. Embed the html in your draft, copy paste, and it never goes wrong.

Trying to second guess how the site processes uploaded documents is exactly that, a guessing game.

Go with what works every time, I reckon.

Thank you. I appreciate the advice. I’ll try this next time.