Some questions and comments from a noob

[Bramblethorn]

I'm not trying to be obtuse here, but I fail to understand the relevance of standards to asking why stories are reviewed. Most sites have standards, but do not require manual review of all content by owners/admins. This does not constitute the definition of a standard, after all. I question why they are reviewed manually because it appears more that they are scanned for illegal/objectionable material than for quality.

Keep in mind that Literotica is ancient by Internet standards. It was launched in 1998, five years before MySpace, same year as Google. Philosophies and technologies around website design and curation have evolved a long way in the last 21 years. Back when Literotica launched, "one person moderates everything on this site by hand" was a pretty common approach.

It also has a pretty high profile as text-erotica sites go, which means they may need to be a bit more careful about hosting material that could be used as justification for the next morals crusade.

And there's a pretty good reason for her sustained policy:

Today's Alexa ranking for Literotica = 2,371

Competitors:
lushstories.com = 37,691
asstr.org =14,221
Sexstories.com = 8,180
nifty.org = 12,790
asexstories.com= 13,872

Nobody comes close in terms of site ranking, not by a long shot.

That depends very much on who you're comparing to. For instance, AO3 - half Literotica's age, with moderation policies similar to what Nexte100 has been talking about - ranks at #503, well above Literotica.

Unlike the ones you're comparing to, AO3 isn't specifically pitched as an erotica site. But they sure do host a lot of adult material there, and that adult content is driving a lot of the traffic. (I crosspost some of my work there, and the more adult stuff gets VASTLY more attention...)

Wattpad ranks higher, and I think the story is similar there, but I'm not as familiar with it.

 

[ElectricBlue]

That depends very much on who you're comparing to. For instance, AO3 - half Literotica's age, with moderation policies similar to what Nexte100 has been talking about - ranks at #503, well above Literotica.

My cut and copy was merely those who Alexa pulled up as comparable sites, using whatever criteria they apply to do the comparison.

I've not heard of A03, will go take a look. Chloe has Wattpad experience, I think - hard work, I gather, and a young teen audience.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My cut and copy was merely those who Alexa pulled up as comparable sites, using whatever criteria they apply to do the comparison.

I've not heard of A03, will go take a look. Chloe has Wattpad experience, I think - hard work, I gather, and a young teen audience.

AO3 was set up as a home for fanfic, and it still is primarily for fanfic, but they accept original settings. Part of their draw is the categorisation/tagging/search functionality, and I really wish Literotica would implement something like it. As an example, if I want to search for a F/F story that deals with themes of autism and BDSM, not only does the search engine support that, but the tags are organised so that searching on "BDSM" will also find stories that have been tagged with "light bondage" and other related tags, without me having to guess at every possible variation an author might use.

Literotica is a very successful site, and its longevity is testimony to its strengths, but that doesn't mean there's no room to learn from other sites.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

Literotica is a very successful site, and its longevity is testimony to its strengths, but that doesn't mean there's no room to learn from other sites.

That's the downside of its age, I guess. Back then this was probably super modern, but over time it gets harder and harder to keep updating a website (or any piece of programming for that matter). I don't envy Manu, and can understand why new updates or improvements are slow, if they come at all. Most things like what you suggested with the tags would most likely require basically rewriting the whole search feature. It might even need an update to the database for how stories are stored, which would come with all sorts of problems for existing stories. Like, if you add new data to be recorded, what happens to all the countless stories that have already been published? Do Manu and Laurel need to fill in all that by hand? Contact the authors and have them update their story? What if they have long since abandoned Lit? Big site changes are never easy, especially not on a site that's been running for 20 years.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I’m on a old car forum that was roughly 15 years old, then they moved to a new forum program but lost 15 years of knowledge. It’s available on DVD’s, but who really wants to trawl through them looking for an item. This would be a disastrous thing to happen for this site.

Russ

 

[ChloeTzang]

My cut and copy was merely those who Alexa pulled up as comparable sites, using whatever criteria they apply to do the comparison.

I've not heard of A03, will go take a look. Chloe has Wattpad experience, I think - hard work, I gather, and a young teen audience.

Wattpad has around 75 million reader, 80 % female between 13-25, about 25% North American and for some reason a huge reader base in the Philippines and a lot in China. They do stories in a dozen languages, they get over 100k stories submitted a day, they have venture capital funding and 90% of the stories are awful. A lot of teenage fanfic, written on and for mobile reading. It’s a very different environment and if you write their, it’s hard to find your readers and for your readers to find you.

 

[Emirus]

Newbies, likewise, can expect 4-6 days for their first stories to clear which is always attributed to closer scanning of content for compliance.

I’ve had 11 stories published so far and not one has appeared in less than a week. I submitted my latest 4 days ago (last monday) and I don’t expect to see it before this coming sunday at the earliest. So I must still be classed as a newbie?

I was advised (by a well known writer) after submitting my first two stories in MS Word to submit in .rtf because that’s the format Laurel prefers. It hasn’t made any difference.

I sent Laurel a private message several weeks ago asking what format she preferred. I’m still awaiting a response.

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

I’ve had 11 stories published so far and not one has appeared in less than a week. I submitted my latest 4 days ago (last monday) and I don’t expect to see it before this coming sunday at the earliest. So I must still be classed as a newbie?

I was advised (by a well known writer) after submitting my first two stories in MS Word to submit in .rtf because that’s the format Laurel prefers. It hasn’t made any difference.

I sent Laurel a private message several weeks ago asking what format she preferred. I’m still awaiting a response.

As my first story was a contest submission (and nearing the contest deadline) it probably isn't the standard for new writers. Of course, as the contest is going on right now regular submissions might get delayed a bit more than usual.

I did hear that actually pasting your story in the textbox in the submission form itself should be the fasted way though, even faster than using .rtf files. If you do it right with the html tags, that's 0 work for Laurel to convert and she can go right to checking the story itself.

 

[Voboy]

My longest story took nearly ten days, and I’ve got no idea why. It was, maybe, my tenth submission or so. Every other story I’ve posted, even the first, had gone live within a week, usually within 3-4 days.

You never know. I think being established helps, but I think good grammar and formatting helps more. And everything I’ve put up here I’ve submitted as a Word doc.

 

[SimonDoom]

My longest story took nearly ten days, and I’ve got no idea why. It was, maybe, my tenth submission or so. Every other story I’ve posted, even the first, had gone live within a week, usually within 3-4 days.

You never know. I think being established helps, but I think good grammar and formatting helps more. And everything I’ve put up here I’ve submitted as a Word doc.

I've written 24 stories in 2 1/2 years, and my average is 4-5 days. I had a story published in 2 hours after submission for a contest. But I think my last story took about 7 days to approve. I think people shouldn't sweat anything under 7 days. Laurel has her hands full and there's no point trying to speculate about what's going on or why it's taking time. In the long run it makes no difference whether your story is published in 2 days or 10.

My sense is that the time to publish has lengthened just a bit since I started publishing here. Wouldn't surprise me. The quantity of submissions is daunting. I don't know how they do it. It boggles my mind.

I suspect subject matter has something to do with it, and also whether in the first few paragraphs there are sufficiently few errors that Laurel feels confident that the story will pass muster, enabling her to skim the rest of it. But I don't really know.

Also, I use no special formatting. No italics, no boldface, nothing. I try to make it as easy as possible for the story to go through.

I write in Word, convert it to rtf, and submit in that format. I have never had a story rejected for any reason.

 

[Bramblethorn]

That's the downside of its age, I guess. Back then this was probably super modern, but over time it gets harder and harder to keep updating a website (or any piece of programming for that matter). I don't envy Manu, and can understand why new updates or improvements are slow, if they come at all. Most things like what you suggested with the tags would most likely require basically rewriting the whole search feature. It might even need an update to the database for how stories are stored, which would come with all sorts of problems for existing stories. Like, if you add new data to be recorded, what happens to all the countless stories that have already been published? Do Manu and Laurel need to fill in all that by hand? Contact the authors and have them update their story? What if they have long since abandoned Lit? Big site changes are never easy, especially not on a site that's been running for 20 years.

Yep to all of this. I'm talking about what would be nice to have, not necessarily what's feasible.

That said, some of these issues can be dealt with simply by not getting too precious about old stories. That's the approach Literotica has taken in the past. For instance, check out the tags on this old story which I picked more or less at random:

uncomfortably hot – entire army – human world – chanted spell – foul folks – army darkness – main chamber – lord darkness – rang room – ancient prophecy

If you look at just about any story from 2000 or earlier, you'll see similar tag weirdness. AFAICT, the reason for this is that Literotica didn't originally have tags at all; they were introduced a few years after the site was created, and pre-existing stories were retroactively tagged by an automated process. Most of those automated tags are effectively useless; nobody is ever going to search on "rang room" or "main chamber" for a story.

Does it matter that the older stories don't have functional tagging? It probably hurts those stories a little bit. But the site as a whole is better for having a tagging system, even with its limitations and exclusions.

Possibly the biggest challenges are the social ones rather than the technological ones. Part of what makes AO3's tagging system work is a community of volunteer "tag wranglers". If I tag a story with something that isn't already in the system, one of those wranglers will get a notification to look at the tag and decide what to do with it - have I just misspelled an existing tag, or does this need to be a new tag? If it's a new tag, how should it relate to existing tags? (e.g. the example I gave before, where "light bondage" is recognised as a subset of "BDSM").

That's something you can do in a fandom-based community. Fandoms have a long-standing culture of volunteering and coordinating to run stuff. There is a little bit of that on Literotica, e.g. the work Chloe's done on running themed contests, or the Volunteer Editor system, but I'm not sure (e.g.) the Loving Wives readership/authorship really has enough sense of community to support a volunteer-based system. Setting it up and keeping it running smoothly would be hard work, harder than the coding side of things!

 

[ThisNameIsntTakenYet]

Possibly the biggest challenges are the social ones rather than the technological ones. Part of what makes AO3's tagging system work is a community of volunteer "tag wranglers". If I tag a story with something that isn't already in the system, one of those wranglers will get a notification to look at the tag and decide what to do with it - have I just misspelled an existing tag, or does this need to be a new tag? If it's a new tag, how should it relate to existing tags? (e.g. the example I gave before, where "light bondage" is recognised as a subset of "BDSM").

That's something you can do in a fandom-based community. Fandoms have a long-standing culture of volunteering and coordinating to run stuff. There is a little bit of that on Literotica, e.g. the work Chloe's done on running themed contests, or the Volunteer Editor system, but I'm not sure (e.g.) the Loving Wives readership/authorship really has enough sense of community to support a volunteer-based system. Setting it up and keeping it running smoothly would be hard work, harder than the coding side of things!

I mean, for new stories I don't think it would be that much more work to include a similar tag management aspect into the submission process. That said, any more work Laurel has to do is probably too much, with how many stories are submitted every day. Even if it's just a few more minutes of work for her to check the tags proposed by the author and do what AO3 does, it would very quickly add up. Sadly, any idea that adds more work for Laurel is probably a bad idea, so that isn't really a solution either (even if we can do a similar script-based approach to process the existing stories).

 

[8letters]

Possibly the biggest challenges are the social ones rather than the technological ones. Part of what makes AO3's tagging system work is a community of volunteer "tag wranglers". If I tag a story with something that isn't already in the system, one of those wranglers will get a notification to look at the tag and decide what to do with it - have I just misspelled an existing tag, or does this need to be a new tag? If it's a new tag, how should it relate to existing tags? (e.g. the example I gave before, where "light bondage" is recognised as a subset of "BDSM").

I think that boat has sailed. You'd have to have a fairly comprehensive tag system in place at the beginning for something like that to work. There's too many tags with stories that would be difficult to put into some organized structure. What tags would "irish accent" be grouped with? (FYI, "irish accent" is the only accent I could find stories associated with and the tag has been used by five different authors).

 

[ElectricBlue]

I’ve had 11 stories published so far and not one has appeared in less than a week. I submitted my latest 4 days ago (last monday) and I don’t expect to see it before this coming sunday at the earliest. So I must still be classed as a newbie?

You've got yourself on her content radar, maybe. I think you've mentioned several stories have had a go-around or two before they've passed Go. You might still be getting a smidgen of a closer look.

 

[Emirus]

You've got yourself on her content radar, maybe. I think you've mentioned several stories have had a go-around or two before they've passed Go. You might still be getting a smidgen of a closer look.

(1) My first story, now deleted at my request, was initially refused, quite rightly, because of poor punctuation and even after publication was still pretty bad in that respect. (2) She looked at the title of Charlie, William and Anna and jumped to the conclusion it was Group Sex. When I pointed out to her, as soon as it was published, that it was definitely Romance she immediately put it right. (3) In Retribution she objected to something very minor as being gratuitous violence. It wasn’t important to the story so I changed it.

Nine stories have gone through without a problem (except for the weekly wait) so I don’t really see how you can say “several stories have had a go-around or two.”

 

[ElectricBlue]

Nine stories have gone through without a problem (except for the weekly wait) so I don’t really see how you can say “several stories have had a go-around or two.”

Okay, so two stories. It seemed more, because you commented on each one as you navigated the knockbacks, and I thought there were a few. "Several" means more than one, less than four, maybe two or three (in my use of the word, when I don't know for sure). It was only offered as a maybe, because a week is longer than many regulars report. No big deal .

 

[Bramblethorn]

I think that boat has sailed. You'd have to have a fairly comprehensive tag system in place at the beginning for something like that to work. There's too many tags with stories that would be difficult to put into some organized structure. What tags would "irish accent" be grouped with? (FYI, "irish accent" is the only accent I could find stories associated with and the tag has been used by five different authors).

I can't give you an exhaustive list, because of the limitations of our tagging system, but some guesswork led me to several other "accent" tags:

english accent
british accent
scottish accent
french accent
german accent
russian accent (just the one story)
american accent
southern accent
aussie accent (just one)

[edit: the forum software has helpfully broken the links I posted above by replacing the space in each URL with a "**0". To fix, edit the URL and replace **0 with a space again. I'd do it here but the forum will just break them again.]

and plenty with the tag accent, some of which are also tagged with a more specific accent tag.


The obvious first step in organising those would be to link all the others in the list as children of the generic "accent" tag. That way, anybody who has a fetish for exotic accents who goes searching on "accent" isn't going to miss "french accent", "russian accent", etc. etc.

After that, obviously "english accent" and "scottish accent" would be child categories of "british accent". (I didn't find any for "scots accent", but if it ever shows up, it could be marked as a synonym of "scottish accent" so that searches for one will find the other.)

Does "irish accent" fall under "british accent"? I'm honestly not sure, given that Ireland is part of the British Isles but not of Great Britain; I'd probably ask a few Irish people rather than making that call on my own, or go do more research because somebody out there is bound to have come up with a classification system for accents already.

And then, if somebody ever submits stories tagged with say "belfast accent" or "dublin accent", those can be categorised as children of "irish accent".

But you don't need to deal with absolutely everything right away; you can prioritise the most commonly used tags and then work down the list from there.

 

[JPGmvny]

While I'm no expert I think a Irish accent being from what is sometimes called the Republic of Ireland (its name is just Ireland) and the North. The latter, to me, is much harsher and, again to me, harder to understand, sometimes in need of subtitles.

 

[GroverLang]

While I'm no expert I think a Irish accent being from what is sometimes called the Republic of Ireland (its name is just Ireland) and the North. The latter, to me, is much harsher and, again to me, harder to understand, sometimes in need of subtitles.

The difference between north and south is the difference between New Jersey and New Orleans. Ireland is the island which is divided into Ulster (northern Ireland) and Eire (Southern Ireland). Eire is a Republic and Ulster is one of the four countries making up the United Kingdom.

Northern Ireland harsher and more difficult to understand? I’ve been to New York several times. No more needs to be said.

 

[KeithD]

The English-language divide seems to be growing. I've lived extensively abroad within British ex-pat communities and had little trouble with communications. But we watch a lot of Masterpiece Theatre series here. I only understand half the Scottish on series like "Monarch of the Glen" and two thirds of English series like "Endeavour." I'm still understanding Aussie series (like "A Place to Call Home") fine, though.

 

[Bramblethorn]

The English-language divide seems to be growing. I've lived extensively abroad within British ex-pat communities and had little trouble with communications. But we watch a lot of Masterpiece Theatre series here. I only understand half the Scottish on series like "Monarch of the Glen" and two thirds of English series like "Endeavour." I'm still understanding Aussie series (like "A Place to Call Home") fine, though.

Australian TV tends to shy away from our more challenging accents/dialects. As a city kid, I find strong Aboriginal English about as challenging as very strong Scots dialect, but even in Australia it's much easier to find the Scots on TV.

Here's a mild example of the dialect I'm talking about - I've heard stronger, but it's difficult to find it on video.

 

[Handley_Page]

I'm not trying to be obtuse here, but I fail to understand the relevance of standards to asking why stories are reviewed. Most sites have standards, but do not require manual review of all content by owners/admins. This does not constitute the definition of a standard, after all. I question why they are reviewed manually because it appears more that they are scanned for illegal/objectionable material than for quality. I'm inferring that you intend the latter, however. Is that what you mean?

The vast (and I mean VAST) majority of online websites rely on small teams of volunteer moderators to eliminate such objectionable material after the fact, lessening the burden on the owner to vet everything. Disclaimers and forum rules are apparently defense enough against inadvertent illegal (underage, etc) material being posted.

This, more than my desire to understand the nuances of process, motivated me to ask why they review everything.

Standards ?
Of course Lit has standards; that's why it is famous.
'Other sites ' may 'have standards, but few contributors seem to adhere to them.
Take, for example the "Rules"; particularly the one about under-age doings. Had you read previous rants about this subject, you'd find that it is an inflexible, no dodgeing, no wiggle-room, no arguing, absolute.

" Disclaimers and forum rules are apparently defense enough against inadvertent illegal (underage, etc) material being posted. "

This is not a view shared on Lit. The legal rules about the Lit world (which is literally global) can be either Very Strict or Very Fluid. A standard exists where no territory is going to make a legitimate complaint.

As to how long it takes for approval, you'll probably find it shrinks when Laurel is familiar with your writing.

 

[SimonDoom]

From an American point of view, I think by far the hardest English language dialect/accent to understand is a really thick, heavy Scottish accent. Sometimes it doesn't sound like English at all. I'm always amazed at how many accents there are in England. The United States is far larger, but most of the population outside the South, New York, Boston, New England, and Appalachia speaks a variation of a dialect that is universal enough that I don't think anyone has trouble understanding one another. I'm a "General American" (news broadcaster American) speaker and I have no trouble understanding any other American accent. But British accents are much tougher to understand.

 

[IsaacTolkien]

Slow editing actually does make sense for Literotica. If you let people edit more easily than submitting new stories, they'd edit endlessly, and the mod would spend all her time reviewing edits. We'd end up with an impossible backlog of stories. So new stories get priority.

A site that does have instant submission and edit is wrist.xxx. it's a much smaller community (you have to register even to read) but very welcoming. And they allow some things Literotica doesn't.

 

[Bramblethorn]

From an American point of view, I think by far the hardest English language dialect/accent to understand is a really thick, heavy Scottish accent. Sometimes it doesn't sound like English at all.

obligatory Hot Fuzz scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw