The Problem with Literotica

[M_K_Babalon]

And notice how the very first comment after she posted was someone attacking her.
Yeah... I wonder why she doesn't come around often.

There's more to it than that, but those who's been here longer, or were in the thick of things I didn't see, know more. This is pre2015 stuff.

 

[SkyBubble]

But besides that annoyance, there's the black hole of pending that affects a number of stories, which apparently gets resolved instantly by resubmitting.

Sometimes.

As you can see, the most FUNDAMENTAL problem of all is the same old lack of communication from Laurel and Manu.

Yes, that's a problem. Come to the forum or put up a post that tells us what the problem is with the review system. At least then we'd know and we wouldn't have a hundred threads about it.

There is a lot to like -- love -- about this site. Communication could use improvement.

By the way, there's no universe in which one can claim that they don't have the time to put up a simple notification or a guide for some fundamental and very obvious problems Lit has.

It takes maybe 15 minutes. So you get to bed 15 minutes later.

Perhaps I'm the one who misunderstood, but I thought they meant it would send out notices to those that had been flagged for further review

That's always been the way it works. Your story would get sent back with a note -- sometimes vague -- stating some reason. Often, it's a small thing. that's easily fixable. Then the resubmission has sually gone through in a day or two.

Until recently.

Is the glass elevator going to be a glass dildo instead? And I can't WAIT to find out the use of the everlasting gobstopper.

Wouldn't you like to know?

What if 100% of the stories are never read by anyone, and they are sorted through a program that checks the story for AI, plagiarism, and other factors predetermined by the owners of the website?

One of the biggest problems with that would be that Literotica, like most erotica sites, is non-exclusive. Say you submit a story here, at Lush, and at AO3, and those sites publish it virtually immediately. The automated system looks, sees that an identical story is published, but isn't capable of discerning that IT'S BY THE SAME AUTHOR so it feeds it back as plagiarized. Yeah, sure, I plagiarized it from myself, stupid machine.

They want us to wait 2 weeks.

At least this is something, though it mostly restates what they said on previous threads.

I already have some copied to SOL and I'm looking at Lush Stories as well.

I've written stories on both of those sites. Lush is a good site, IMO. I like to have my stories on multiple platforms. We all saw what happened to C-S-S-A, NovelTrove, and a couple of others. If your story(ies) was (were) exclusively there, tough noogies. Gonezo. Too bad. Better luck next site. So even thought Lit is the site I use most and first, I like being on other sites as well.

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.

I hope you'll just add those and not leave here, but there are a couple of threads on other sites that people like.

Yes. I was told at the time that it was Laurel wot done it (or at least issued instructions for it to be done).

Did she clone herself?

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Did she clone herself?

Maybe that's it! She cloned herself, but it's like Multiplicity and now Laurel #4 is running things!

 

[IWroteThis]

That's always been the way it works. Your story would get sent back with a note -- sometimes vague -- stating some reason. Often, it's a small thing. that's easily fixable. Then the resubmission has sually gone through in a day or two.

That doesn't make any sense. How could they send out a notice saying it's pending human review AND include the outcome of said review in the same notice?

 

[TheJizzWizard]

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:

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.

I think it's the sticking to the formatting that really helps. I do the same, but otherwise we're totally different. I have less than 10 stories, I've got body fluids and explicit acts throughout, hard fetish content. I had two stories this week go to published within ten hours. (One was within 2, I was asleep when the other went so it may have been just as quick). My very first story even went through fine. I just followed the guides when editing, and now when I write, I write to those specific guides to save time in editing.

 

[lovecraft68]

I haven't seen this many alts since the golden years of the General Board.