What stuff do you like about the site, on both the story and the forum sides?

[AG31]

I've been following with interest Things to make Lit a better site, and it inspired me to revisit my "stuff you like" idea.

I thought I had posted something like this very early on in my dealings with Literotica. I was struck by a lot of things that seemed like good inventions. But I can't find any such post, and, unfortunately, I can't remember that newbie's happiness at this and that feature. At the time I was by no means an experienced web person, but I don't believe these features were available on the 2 or 3 other boards I visited.

I'll go first. I'll give myself a few hours to try to recall my virgin encounter with the site:

- The ease and flexibility of the search feature in the forums, including being able to put one user's name in the Search field and another's in the By field to find interactions.

- The ease of alerting someone that you're responding to their post, or want to get their specific attention for a post of yours. (They get tagged when you display their post in a reply or quote them.)

- The ease of quoting someone and simultaneously alerting them.

- If you start a thread you automatically get set as Watching it. This doesn't date from my early days. It's pretty recent, and much appreciated.

- The way you can mix and mach categories and tags on the story side.

- Lists that you design yoursself, both public and private.

OK. I've given it 4 or 5 hours. It's all become too familiar.

 

[NuclearFairy]

The fact that it still works even when my internet is being metered.

 

[NotWise]

I'm pleased that it's here.

 

[iwatchus]

It is free and an adequate reading experience to not get in the way.

The forum system is basic, but solid within that. And the notifications do their job well as OP stated.

 

[ronde]

Years ago, I dabbled in some other erotic story sites and learned just how fortunate we are to have Literotica.

One site I submitted one story to refuses to publish anything unless the story is "edited" by their hand selected editors. The procedure was you submit, the editor edits and then the site publishes the story. I had no opportunity to review the edited story prior to it being published. What got published wasn't my story. It was my story edited to read like the editor thought it should have read. Character traits were changed as well as dialogue and those changes basically changed the plot of the story.

Another site I submitted a story to didn't publish my story the first week, or the second week or the third week or the fourth week, yet I kept seeing new stories popping up during that time by the same set of authors. Those authors also had the majority of stories published on the site. It was obvious that those authors had priority over new authors. When I inquired as to why my story hadn't either been published or rejected when it was obvious other authors had had multiple stories published, my answer was that they would never publish my story since I had complained.

I wrote for a couple other sites that are now defunct. They were easy to submit stories to and published them within a week. There was very little advertising on the site, so I suspect they didn't have enough financial backing to survive.

Another site I considered has every page so full of ads was difficult to navigate through simple things like signing on, submitting a story, and seeing when it was published. Every click would bring up what I wanted to see but it was buried in a plethora of ads. There was also no notification that my story had been published and no method for notifying an author that the story had been read or had received comments without clicking on every story to get that information.

Literotica may not be perfect, but my stories, assuming I follow the site rules, are always published within a week. The few rejections I've received have been some unknown screw-up when I pasted the story from Word. I had one rejection for a story that ventured too far into the realm of politics and that was because I hadn't reviewed the site rule for a long time.

I think authors new to Literotica do get a bit more scrutiny than established authors, but having administered a similar, now defunct site, I understand the reasons for that. New authors will often bang out a story and submit it even though they've never read the content rules. Software that looks for key words or phrases might not catch a problem.

Literotica does not publish the typical, "this happened to me" story which ends up being one paragraph of two hundred lines of text with negligible punctuation.

Literotica does have several ads, but they don't get in the way of submission of stories, checking on stories, or reading stories. No "free" site is truly "free". It's the ads and pay per view content that keep a site going. Literotica has the least obtrusive ads of any erotic story site I've seen, though I admit that I haven't seen them all.

I've seen several complaints about the voting system, but it's better than most. The site I administered had a binary rating system. The system was always heavily rated toward "thumb up" because most readers may not find a particular story to be really good, they won't give it a "thumb down". At least Literotica has a range of possible ratings and there's really no great difference between a "4" out of a possible 5 and an "8" out of a possible 10. The relative rating of the story is the same.

I've also read several complaints about the forum. At least this forum is here and it works. One site I wrote for had a forum and a link to get from the story side to the forum, but required a different sign-on and password for each. On several sites, the only way to contact an author is via email rather and posting questions etc. in a forum format.

 

[Levorotatory]

Unlike one of the major alternatives that has been defunct for years and was even banished from the wayback machine recently, literotica is still here.
Unlike another competitor, literotica does not require a paid subscription to access to the search function and a substantial portion of the stories.

 

[lc69hunter]

Love reading the stories, but get hammered and slammed for my comments and opinions. Up here on the board, I can make comments and have serious conversations, and have a good positive favorability rating because the stupid anons have no access.

 

[NotWise]

I don't have a lot to compare to, but I did read on other sites back when Lit was young. I came back years later when I wanted to write because of their content rules and Laurel's hand on the reins.

The more story-oriented forums (especially Editors, Feedback, AH) were an added plus that I didn't know about when I first read here.