To whom it may concern here: Thank you.

[stevieraygovan]

I'd posted about having my stories sabotaged by a group of petty malcontents who got together twice in two months to give my stories a sudden flurry of "0" scores. By using the "contact" link here I brought this issue to the attention of, well, that's just it: I don't really know who here would've received my note. Thus, the "To whom it may concern" in the thread title.

All I know is when I woke up this morning I noticed that those bogus scores had been removed. The previous rankings of my stories have been restored.

I really didn't have any expectations that they (The Powers That Be here) would or even could correct such a relatively small issue. They did though and I just want to say I'm very impressed with the sense of fair play here.

Whoever you are, that was very decent of you. Again, thank you.

 

[TxRad]

The powers that be here are Laurel and Manu, the site owners.

In the future, use the PM system and send a note to Laurel. You'll find her on several of the stickies (Permanent Threads) at the top of the AH forum and in the Contest Forum.

 

[Darkniciad]

Odds are that you helped out other people, as well. Trolls may decide to become your personal bane, but most of the time they've been flinging poo at other people along the way.

Probably a few other people who will see jumps in their scores the next time the log in.

I've reached the point where I can finally take the bombing runs in stride. It's not so easy when you first start out, though. It can also cripple your hopes of picking up a readership to wait for the normal maintainence sweeps to catch up with the troll when you put out your first few stories.

 

[stevieraygovan]

TxRad, will do. Thanks for the tip.

So, would it have been Laurel or Manu themselves who actually received my note and fixed the issue? They personally tend to little stuff like that? They don't have a staff of minions to whom they delegate the small stuff?

If that's the case then I'm even more impressed. That's very cool.

 

[stevieraygovan]

Darkniciad, yeah, I get what you're saying about learning to take the bombing runs in stride and in general terms I would, and I will. I'm also going to simply bow out of commenting negatively on anybody else's stories or comments.

Lesson learned.

I'd mentioned it elsewhere but the reason the sabotaging irritated me here had to do with the fact that they managed to kill some very highly ranked stories. Had they merely dropped the scores from something like a 4.25 to 4.02 then I wouldn't care. That wasn't the case here. They knocked out stories that were ranked #1 overall, along with a half dozen others which were also on the front page, in the top five.

I know it sounds corny but at least one of those stories, "Angelina", is a pretty special story to me. (Check out its follow up stories "Sisters" and especially "Stacy" to see why.) "Angelina" is a story I didn't want to see vanish. I wanted people to be able to see it, to see her, and having it sitting there with the highest score pretty much assured that new people would get that chance. When those idiots got pissed at me and sabotaged my stories they were killing something important to me.

Whatever. I appreciate the help you guys offer and like I said, lesson learned.

 

[Darkniciad]

You might want to link that special story in its own link in your signature. I know that when I look at my website hits, I see a nice chunk of traffic coming from the forum here.


[story=383064]Angelina[/story] -- [story=383620]Ch. 02[/story] [story=383760]Ch. 03[/story] [story=383877]Ch. 04[/story]


That comes out looking like this:

Angelina -- Ch. 02 Ch. 03 Ch. 04

You can just steal that code and paste it in, if you want.

 

[stevieraygovan]

Darkniciad (what's the story behind that nic anyway?), and here I thought I was being pretty slick by posting the link to all my stories in my sig! Of course someone here had to tell me how to do that too.

I'll never catch up with this whole technology deal.

If I were to do what you're suggesting I'd want the entire "Angelina" series plus its two follow up series included. By that point I might as well just stick to giving the link to all my stories.

I couldn't tell you how many hits I get due to my story link being shown here, mainly 'cause I don't have a website! This is my website, and you're my hit.

Btw, a technical question...

How do I include italics in a story? I write my stories using Word and occasionally I include italics but when I cut and paste the story into the "Submit story" window of Literotica the italics vanish. How do I add 'em back in there?

 

[Darkniciad]

The best way to do that that I've found is to insert the HTML tags for it.

I'm typing along, and then I want some <i>italic text</i>, so I put those two tags in there.

What I do after I finish editing is to set my word-processor to search for the italic code, put the tags in, and find next until I get to the end.

I also replace all em dashes with the special character code — That way, they come out as dashes instead of double hyphens when the story posts.

You do bold the same way ( if you ever have call for it. I've only used it for the angry voice of a god so far *laugh* ) except you use <b></b>

Oh, damn near forgot: Darkniciad was my first experimental wizard character in my pen and paper role-playing game. I didn't have the money to buy official TSR stuff, so I made up my own rules. When I was working on the testing for pure magic using characters, Darkni was the prototype.

The name actually evolved from a very minor character in Marvel Comics, Damikh the Enchanter. So, the character started off as Darkni ( the I is prounounced as "eye" ) the Enchanter. Then, we started getting more involved in the characters, giving them back-history and full names.

He became Darkniciad ( Dark - Nish - Eud ) Cantel Softspake. He pops up in my stories every so often, as do all my old player characters.

My other pen name, Les Lumens, comes from my handle when I was a nudie-chat admin ( bouncer ) I went by the name of Darken there. Les Lumens = Less Lumens = Darken.

I never see that "Sorry, that name is already chosen screen" when I sign up for a forum or email or something *laugh*

 

[michchick98]

How do I include italics in a story? I write my stories using Word and occasionally I include italics but when I cut and paste the story into the "Submit story" window of Literotica the italics vanish. How do I add 'em back in there?

This is a 'file' I used to send to the people I edited and I decided to polish it up a bit and submit it to the How-To contest this past year:

Basic Text Formatting 101

There are also several good articles in the Writer's Resources that'll explain how to format text.

 

[stevieraygovan]

Ahhh, so it's <i>italics text</i>...

I tried it yesterday by doing it this way italics text, which works on some other websites. Hey, wait a minute! The way I normally do it just worked here, but <i></i> didn't!

I'm confused.

Btw, my latest story just showed up on the site tonight. It's another request story, working again with the same woman from my first request story.

This one's a little bit different for me...

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=397755

One other technical question: Is it possible to go back and edit a story even after it's on the site? Now that Laurel or Manu or whoever purged my sabotaged scores I'd like to go back and remove some of the notes I included at the beginning of this new story...

 

[Darkniciad]

Here's the process for an edit:

Make note of the story/chapter that you're editing. Go to the first page of the story, and copy the numbers at the end of the URL in the address bar of the browser. This is the Lit ID# of the story.

Start a new submission.

Use the same title ( or as much as will fit ) as the original sumbission. Then, append *EDIT* or something similar to the title.

Fill in the category, keywords, and description with placeholders. They're not important unless you're editing them as well.

Paste/Upload the new text, as usual.

In the "notes" section, explain exactly what you're editing. In this case, the text of the story. I always paste the Lit ID# of the story in the notes section, just to make sure there's no question about which one I'm editing. I also note that I want to maintain the title, description, keyword, votes, comments, etc. from the original submission, only changing the text.

( that's the standard procedure, but I spell things out just to make sure there are no mistakes )

If you are only changing the title, description, keywords, etc., then you can use pretty much the same procedure. Instead of pasting the story text ( which you aren't going to change ) paste a duplicate of the "Notes" section in the "story text" box.

Normally, edits are subject to the same wait as any submission. Lately, I've seen my edits go up in 2-3 days -- as many as 6 chapters at a time. I even had an edit on a contest story go up in less than 24 hours once ( thanks, Laurel!)

EDIT: In the forum, you use square brackets to enclose tags. On the story side of the site, you use the HTML standard angle brackets. Angle brackets used on the forum are automatically translated into special characters that look the same, but can't execute code. Square brackets on the story side of the site just come out as letters in boxes that confuse the hell out of readers *laugh*

 

[stevieraygovan]

Dark, thanks a million. I only wish I knew about the HTML italics coding before I wrote my stories. I'm not one to do THIS to highlight a key word but I can think of a half dozen times where I could've used italics and I just didn't know how to include 'em here.

As for editing the story after it's posted, if I have to re-submit and wait all over again...meh...screw it.

I just wanted to edit the opening note to this one new story, simply in the hopes of not antagonizing any more potential saboteurs.

So far, so good though: It got a "5" from the one person so far who voted on it. I guess none of the people who hate me have seen it yet. LOL!

 

[Darkniciad]

No problem I know I had a pain in the ass of a time figuring all this out when I first started, so I jump in the moment I see someone ask a question like this ( or even just lament not knowing how to do it in the feedback portal or something )

 

[TxRad]

Dark, a simpler way to handle coding is to save your story as Dos Text With Formatting. Then copy and paste. The Word code is replaced automatically.

Give it a try, it works for me but i still check it.

 

[michchick98]

Ahhh, so it's <i>italics text</i>...

I tried it yesterday by doing it this way italics text, which works on some other websites. Hey, wait a minute! The way I normally do it just worked here, but <i></i> didn't!

I'm confused.

Don't be. Here on the message boards, [ ] is used instead of < >. So when you hit the bold, italics or underline buttons up there, the square brackets appear around the 'b' 'i' or 'u' as opposed to the normal ones.

 

[ellynei]

Looks like my system for italics and bold is the worst of them all...

In my 'working' text, I have ' around 'thought dialogue', and I make a (--) above a paragraph containing bold or italics not connected to dialogue.

Then I search these things when preparing a text to lit-submission and insert the appropriate italics on/italics off and bold on/bold off.

Somehow it always reminds me of Karate Kid I.

Italics on, italics off. Italics on, italics off.

Dunno why, really. I don't see the connection


P.S regarding someone mentioning confusion on submission and forum italics.

For submissions its <I> for forums it is rectangularish brackets around 'I' you know [

 

[Darkniciad]

Dark, a simpler way to handle coding is to save your story as Dos Text With Formatting. Then copy and paste. The Word code is replaced automatically.

Give it a try, it works for me but i still check it.

Old habits. I always coded everything by hand. Never found any option that didn't muck the doc up with umpteen missed carriage returns, etc. By the time I'm done screwing with that, I may as well just drop the tags in *laugh*