The Problem with Literotica

[Britva415]

I took the point to be that submitters would be able to somewhat reliably tell the difference between a story stuck due to a bug and one stuck due to a potential issue that is waiting to be reviewed.

There already is a reliable way to tell, and, the solution proposed wouldn't change it.

If it takes longer than 15 days, it's stuck. Whether you know it was flagged for more review or you don't know it was flagged for more review, either way, you still don't know whether it's stuck in "flagged-for-more-review" status until that amount of time has passed.

If that amount of time doesn't pass, and it gets published or sent-back, then, it wasn't stuck.

 

[ronde]

The reason this objection doesn't work is that Laurel maintains the same ability to take down violating stories. Sure, it might be up for a few hours, but why bother knowing that it will only result in losing their TA status? There could be other limits in place, like requiring 24 hours between new stories, which would give any given violating story time to be discovered and taken down. I think the benefits would vastly outweigh these costs.

So, Laurel publishing everything submitted by a "Trusted Author" and then going back to what she's already published to look for violations of the site rules is somehow faster? She'd still have to at least scan every story after it's published just like I believe she currently does before she publishes a story. I'm also sure it takes more time to delete a story from Literotica after it's published than it does to just not publish it.

 

[ronde]

True, but if it is indeed the case that Laurel is slowing down and is getting overwhelmed by the work, at some point there will need to be a solution. No reason not to develop some ideas for her to choose from.

I'm pretty certain that after running this site for over 25 years, Laurel has had all the suggestions that have been made in this thread plus a few thousand more. She's found a business model that works for her and making changes would probably result in more complaints caused by the unintended consequences of trying to satisfy the complaint of some of the thousands of authors who write or have written for her site. One would do well to read the history of Literotica in the FAQ section to see that she's already done this.

What if the solution is for Laurel to just reject every story that she can't publish in a normal work day. Would that be better?

 

[SmilingLez]

I'm pretty certain that after running this site for over 25 years, Laurel has had all the suggestions that have been made in this thread plus a few thousand more. She's found a business model that works for her and making changes would probably result in more complaints caused by the unintended consequences of trying to satisfy the complaint of some of the thousands of authors who write or have written for her site. One would do well to read the history of Literotica in the FAQ section to see that she's already done this.

What if the solution is for Laurel to just reject every story that she can't publish in a normal work day. Would that be better?

The most important thing in the history of literotica is that their current CMS is 20+ years old. It probably worked well 2+ decades ago but right now it is buggy. The control panel is just a user interface. I have no idea if my story is actually pending or just has a user facing "Pending" tag (automatically assigned after pressing the submission button) and will never see human eyes because it is not actually in the pending database

 

[ChloeTzang]

I tend to be optimistic to a fault about these sorts of things, but the fact that the issue is so glaring and yet the silence so persistent makes me worry that something might be going on that has nothing to do with a glitch. it might be a personal or health concern, something they don't want to tell us about (yet). I truly hope that is not the case. But the possibility makes me step back before getting too judgmental or critical. We're still seeing about 175 stories get published every day, and that's a lot, and it means the job is getting done, even if not as fast as we'd like.

It makes me rather cautious about placing all my eggs in the Literotica basket. I have 10 years of writing and 80+ stories here plus a lot of friends. That's a big investmentand I think the site owes us at least a statement on what the issue is. So far there is not even an acknowledgement that there is an awareness of the pending stories black hole glitch - and I know it is driving aithors to other sites unnecessarily.

That there IS no statement does concern me. It's a major issue and I would far rather see this and the AI rejections issues fixed than watch the Actitivy page be fucked around with - something that is NOT urgent and that no-one is asking for.

THAT causes me to seriously consider making sure my stories are backed up and live on another site or two as insurance. It's time consuming and a waste of my time (now) but I would rather do that than unexpected;y go down in flames. I already have some copied to SOL and I'm looking at Lush Stories as well. LIT is the site I got started on, I love it here and I'd never walk away but the lack of communication on this has me really concerned. I'vePM's Laurel and Manu muself on this two or three times with no response. I have no intention of harrassing them tho - I've asked. Other people habe asked. There has been no response. I draw my own conclusions and I'm sorry to say that, but I don' want to be left hanging.

A quick update takes maybe 15 minutes to wrote and post, max. it does not have to be detailed but as a courtesy to all the people who have invested so much work on their stories here, I think its a reasonable ask.

And havng had one of my stories go into the pending black hole......I take everyone elses issues with this seriously. Same as with the AI rejection issue - after discussing that with some of the German guys who have been hit (and yes AwkwardMD, I know your theory but....it's a guess) - these are both serious issues that impact the site going forward.

 

[TheLobster]

Have story comments also been "permanently pending moderation" lately? Or taking longer than 24 hours? I hadn't heard that there was anything out of the ordinary there, just with story moderation.

It’s unlikely you will hear from people here, since many are in the ‘trusted commenter’ group and have their comments posted instantly.

I’m not, though, and my last comment took almost three days to appear. It was on a Halloween story, too, which you’d expect to take precedence, while the contest is ongoing, over comments on some other random stories.

Before that, it would always be just one day maximum before my comments were posted, usually somewhere around early morning in the US.

 

[TheRedLantern]

So I wasn't going to worry about these site issues, figuring they'd get resolved eventually, but seeing Chloe's Spidey Sense tingling makes me take them more seriously.

How much do some of the more seasoned Lit members know about the CMS used? Do we have any evidence that would tell us whether they're using something off-the-shelf, something off-the-shelf that they customized, or something built from the ground-up to support Lit and Lit alone?

That seems like the largest technical piece that Lit brings to the table. There's the whole business aspect that they've built, too, that I assume pays for at least the tech plus some of Laurel & Manu's expenses.

I ask just to, as Chloe is discussing, prepare for an unexpected and unhappy event. To me, the worst case scenario is that this site shuts down and no other site emerges to catch us, and we (the community of authors who like sharing our work) are left with the choice of disbanding or trying to create a new home.

Alternately, has anyone tried approaching Laurel about buying the site? If nothing else it might be a conversation that Laurel would be prepared to engage with if the approacher were also serious (obviously this would need to be a serious conversation that included proof of funding, detailed cash flow statements, and a business plan ... not just a DM to Laurel).

 

[AwkwardlySet]

We're still seeing about 175 stories get published every day, and that's a lot, and it means the job is getting done, even if not as fast as we'd like.

175 privileged stories, you mean. There is no equality whatsoever, which is why there is so much dissonance here. It's still noticeably below what Lit used to output.

 

[sirhugs]

175 privileged stories, you mean. There is no equality whatsoever, which is why there is so much dissonance here. It's still noticeably below what Lit used to output.

who ever promised you a rose garden?

 

[onehitwanda]

At the risk of throwing oil onto this bonfire, another data point:

I published my latest work two days ago - at around 2pm UK time. It went live this morning - so lets call it 36 hours all told. That's pretty brisk, even by my normal standards. My median publishing time is probably 4-5 days over the 40+ works I've published here.

Things I did during submission:

1. I chose specific, non-sexual tags like slow burn and dialogue -I tend not to tag with graphic terms given that those are kind of implicit in the site
2. I wrote my usual note to the admin in the notes box, which is generally a simple:

Hello! As always, this is written in British English.

to sidestep any potential flagging for spelling. I've done this on all my stories for years.
3. I copied + pasted and submitted directly into the new story text box on the submission page.
4. I then spent several days pinging between preview and edit as I caught the last few issues in layout and language. I have no idea if this is recorded and feeds into the system somehow, but it's how I've done things here since forever.

Things I did while writing:

1. Punctuation, punctuation and more punctuation.
2. I made sure I used proper capitalisation.
3. I was obsessive about spell-checking and grammar.
4. I kept paragraph lengths reasonable - three to four sentences max on average.

I have no idea whether any of this helped, hindered, or sailed unseen through the publishing pipeline.

Some indirect things that I have control over:

1. I've only ever had one story sent back, and that was for a relatively innocent underage kiss. I grovelled, removed it, and resubmitted.
2. Lets be honest - I'm pretty vanilla. Nobody's going to be shocked by anything in my stories.
3. I have a large body of existing work. most of which is rated well, and I've placed in a couple of competitions in the past.

In a fair system, none of the stuff above should have an effect on how quickly my works get published. At best, I'd expect them to help prevent me being flagged for additional review.

Things I know:
1. Stories are falling through the cracks
2. There is at least one new element to the publishing workflow - an AI detection system.
3. We had the recent *cough* upgrade *cough* to the story backend for "efficiency" reasons.

Now, things I suspect:

1. Laws have changed, the world is different to how it was even five years ago. Sites like Lit live and die on their hosting providers / payment gateways, and they cannot afford to run afoul of them. We already know they're using some sort of AI detection system; they're probably also using something that analyses for illegal content, and something else that probably gives a scoring on grammar etc. They might even be using a plagiarism detection system for all I know. There's probably a output score - below x or piss hot on AI, and it's a straight rejection. Between x and y, you go to the manual human review queue, above y and you probably get some sort of easy publishing route with limited review.
2. Longevity and publishing history correlate with "easier" publishing. I can't imagine I would be having 2-4 day publishing times if I were a new author.
3. Laurel is less involved with the day to day running. Why I suspect this? I don't know; I could be wrong, but... it feels like there's more automation on the go. More, poorly-tested automation. People get tired, perhaps she wanted less involvement. There's almost certainly more auto-generated shit to deal with now than there was a few years ago; I can't imagine that's a fun day for anyone.
4. Because of 1 and 3, 2 is being factored into the automation. Perhaps each of us has a "karma" associated with our profile that weights us somehow in the algorithm. If everything were working as intended, this would mean a simplified experience for authors with an existing body of work who weren't pissing hot more frequently than their karma allowed. And new authors, after a couple of enhanced reviews, would also go into the good children line. Problem solved!
5. Everything is awesome!
6. Or is it? Because there are clearly bugs in the automated processes. Edge cases that were never tested or discovered are blinking in and out like wisps, rounding errors in calculations are dropping things that shouldn't be dropped, and the systems are sometimes based on assumptions that are just plain wrong. Perhaps there are race conditions in the functions that move stories between points in the publishing workflow. Perhaps the backing database is running red-hot and just hanging on. Perhaps the flagging process always fails closed on Tuesdays, and nobody's ever looked at the stats - that's if they're even instrumenting the site at all.

After all, 3.6 Roentgen is neither great nor terrible - especially if the dosimeter is shagged.

My long and rambling point is - while I suspect all these things, I can't prove them. I've been lucky - unrealistically lucky so far. I suspect my luck will run out sooner rather than later and I, too, will get to do the Grim Fandango in the delete / resubmit pageant.

Were this my site I'd be a bit more forthcoming about issues in the process. But that's easy for me to say, I suppose.

 

[m_and_em_stories]

My experience as a new user trying to publish on this site.

-Really long delays on my first story being published.
-Then ran into tons of glitches as they 'upgraded' the site, comments appearing on my story that has comments disabled. Deleted comments being around for days then being replaced with a new batch of comments (still have it disabled)
-Then my edit to my first story was ignored for 3 weeks before I gave up and deleted it from the waiting queue.
-Zero engagement from site admins. Multiple threads about issues and largely comes down to "they give us a service we can't really ask for more than they're giving" despite no actual response from admins, no communicating "there are issues please resubmit all stories" or anything that would actually help people resolve the issue.

While working around those issues and dealing with the site I've found I have less control over my works than I expected, the apparent inability to directly delete/edit stories having to re-submit a new story is frustrating.

There are some good conversations on the forum but I can't help but imagine alternatives to lit give a better experience to their authors, so my next step is to try publishing on those to try and find one that gives more control to authors, better reliability and speed to the process and more accountability beyond what lit is doing right now.

At some point just being the largest collection of stories (maybe) wont be enough if new authors are always faced with long delays, multiple issues and zero accountability so are encouraged to find other platforms.