Backend misclassification event bug

[SmilingLez]

@Manu

Full transparency once again.

All of my previously approved stories were simultaneously reclassified and removed, except for one. Also the four stories in pending purgatory were sent back. All with the no reason given automatic rejection message.



Since they were approved, published and visible for months, this looks like a backend misclassification event rather than normal moderation.

Posting the screenshot for visibility in case this is affecting other users as well.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

All my stories are still there, for whatever reason.

 

[SmilingLez]

Any updates on this bug @Manu ?

 

[SmilingLez]

Any news on why all of my published stories (live for several months) except the highest‑viewed story were rejected at the same time and sent back? Was this an automated backend event? @Manu

 

[TheWritingGroup]

One wonders if they were (falsely) reported and the review process hasn't hit yet?

 

[SmilingLez]

One wonders if they were (falsely) reported and the review process hasn't hit yet?

It doesn’t look like a report issue, because these stories had already been live for months and were all rejected at the exact same time except for one (not rejected).

When content is reported, it goes into a separate review flow and doesn’t retroactively mass‑reject previously approved stories.

This lines up more with a backend event than a moderation action.

 

[nudeblaqgirl]

Things like this really motivate me to put hours/days/weeks into a story and submit it here

 

[Underscore_2]

Possible alternative scenario employed by other heritage platforms:
Platform servers are ancient, overloaded, and struggling/unable to cope with current traffic levels.
Solution: slash and burn.

 

[ElectricBlue]

@Manu

Full transparency once again.

All of my previously approved stories were simultaneously reclassified and removed, except for one. Also the four stories in pending purgatory were sent back. All with the no reason given automatic rejection message.

Since they were approved, published and visible for months, this looks like a backend misclassification event rather than normal moderation.

Posting the screenshot for visibility in case this is affecting other users as well.

This sucks.

Time for a new account, I'd say. You're flogging a dead horse, trying to get this fixed.

@Manu @Laurel - is there anything can be done about this? SmilingLez seems to be copping a glitch in the dataset with something automatic going on. Needs human eyes!

 

[RejectReality]

It's literally never happened to anyone else. Having it happen at the same time new submissions that had been sitting forever were rejected hints strongly toward it being done on purpose.

The reason I asked about the rejection reason for all of them is that I suspect an AI rejection for the lot. My guess is that the majority of the long pending stories are AI flagged. ( And the rest are the tiny fraction that are caught in the genuine dashboard bug that's been around forever, which is easily remedied with a reset of the queue position ) The others that had been accepted already probably squeaked by on a ehh... looks human enough despite the flag, but if the two new ones also get popped, and in light of the constant drawing attention to oneself... Well, the squeaky wheel doesn't always get the grease. Sometimes it gets the hammer. They got a second look, and the benefit of the doubt got rescinded.

The fact that not everything was rejected means there was a content reason for the retroactive rejections, and the most likely suspect across such an assortment of stories is an AI flag.

 

[cadeauxxx]

I'm not making a new account. It took me 10 years to finally get to 1,000 followers. I have published more than 200 stories. Why should we have to make a new account over an error that isn't fixed? That's not my fault or anyone else here stuck dealing with this problem.

It's literally never happened to anyone else. Having it happen at the same time new submissions that had been sitting forever were rejected hints strongly toward it being done on purpose.

The reason I asked about the rejection reason for all of them is that I suspect an AI rejection for the lot. My guess is that the majority of the long pending stories are AI flagged. ( And the rest are the tiny fraction that are caught in the genuine dashboard bug that's been around forever, which is easily remedied with a reset of the queue position ) The others that had been accepted already probably squeaked by on a ehh... looks human enough despite the flag, but if the two new ones also get popped, and in light of the constant drawing attention to oneself... Well, the squeaky wheel doesn't always get the grease. Sometimes it gets the hammer. They got a second look, and the benefit of the doubt got rescinded.

The fact that not everything was rejected means there was a content reason for the retroactive rejections, and the most likely suspect across such an assortment of stories is an AI flag.

There is a pattern here where people stuck in pending purgatory, at one point I had a story that was rejected under a false flagging of AI. It happened to me years ago, but I haven't had another flagging of AI since 2024. That was a humbling experience that made me want to improve my writing skills, and since then, I have gone through great measures to avoid overusing certain words and creating patterns in sentences. I was mad at first when it originally happened, but once I calmed down, I realized it was an experience to learn from and I saw room for improvement. If anything, the AI false flagging made me come to see how I had become comfortable and had not improved my skills in a bit of time.

My situation is over a story that has been stuck in pending that was never rejected. I've resubmitted it 5 times with notes to editors, and each time, the date gets changed and it just stays stuck in pending. I don't think that's an error, otherwise the date wouldn't have changed when resubmitting. Something is going on with that. And it is only this story. I've had others go through fine. It is a series chapter, and now my series has been stuck unable to update on here while I have new chapters ready to go. If it's a bug, I think it has to do with series chapters, though other people I talk to have not had this problem.

We obviously love this site, otherwise we wouldn't still be here despite this headache. Literotica is my favorite place to upload stories and it is where I began building my fan following over a decade ago. I never abandoned this place and don't want to. I still would love to post my newer stories and expand my library.

@Laurel @Manu I would be so grateful if you please fixed this problem for me and got my story to go through. I've sent you messages with links to it from my account. This story has been stuck since February. Since the last time it was submitted, the date was changed to May 20th. It has almost been a month sitting there. I don't mean to bother you about this constantly, but I would be so happy to get this story posted.

 

[lovecraft68]

It's literally never happened to anyone else. Having it happen at the same time new submissions that had been sitting forever were rejected hints strongly toward it being done on purpose.

The reason I asked about the rejection reason for all of them is that I suspect an AI rejection for the lot. My guess is that the majority of the long pending stories are AI flagged. ( And the rest are the tiny fraction that are caught in the genuine dashboard bug that's been around forever, which is easily remedied with a reset of the queue position ) The others that had been accepted already probably squeaked by on a ehh... looks human enough despite the flag, but if the two new ones also get popped, and in light of the constant drawing attention to oneself... Well, the squeaky wheel doesn't always get the grease. Sometimes it gets the hammer. They got a second look, and the benefit of the doubt got rescinded.

The fact that not everything was rejected means there was a content reason for the retroactive rejections, and the most likely suspect across such an assortment of stories is an AI flag.

If the stories have been live for months, then its not an AI issue, this site barely looks at any new submissions, they're going to go back and check months back? No.
Three answers here, one, the stories were reported by one of the people the OP has ticked off because they call them out on their never-ending BS or the site doesn't like them calling out their failing system. Last is as the OP suggests a serious glitch caused by an overloaded and about ready to crash at any time system.

Aside from that, you need to stop running in here and defending the site every time it fucks up. It's getting well past tiresome and always proves why over the years many people have seen you as a site mole. "Site is being accused of issues and not caring, must defend!!"

Funny thing about this is years ago it wasn't as common for people to have so much knowledge about how a site like this works behind the scenes, now this generation is far more tech savvy and at the deepest levels and this site is getting exposed more and more.

I wasn't being dramatic about the inevitable crash, at some point it's going to happen.

 

[lovecraft68]

Things like this really motivate me to put hours/days/weeks into a story and submit it here

Here's my spin on your comment that I see coming.

'Things like this really motivate me to put hours/days/weeks into a story and submit it somewhere else.

Because I think we're going to see more and more of a Lit exit soon. We're only a tiny handful of authors here, I can't imagine how many have dealt with the pending and other issues and said fuck it and went to another platform.

Shame seeing it's all correctable with some investment.

 

[Underscore_2]

So many theories. Let's just face reality. The servers were first employed 25 years ago. They are in dire need of an upgrade but unfortunately the investment requirement far outweighs the value of the site so its never going to happen.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Sorry to see this happening to you, @SmilingLez. It sucks, and it's unfair.

Your pending stories were likely rejected due to AI flagging, and we spoke about the validity of Laurel's methods extensively. Still, the fact that they took down your already published stories is pure BS. They have already been checked once for AI.

But if Lit's admins are now checking retroactively, should we expect that they will finally check all the numerous stories that are in breach of their other policies? Or is AI the only boogeyman? It seems to me that Laurel and Manu are consistently inconsistent about enforcing and protecting their own policies.

Three answers here, one, the stories were reported by one of the people the OP has ticked off because they call them out on their never-ending BS or the site doesn't like them calling out their failing system.

I wonder if that might be the reason, but I doubt it, despite what I've seen here. I doubt that Laurel takes stories down just like that, regardless of who reports them. It would be truly sad if that's the truth. I mean, how does one even report something that's already published for AI? How would the reporting person judge it to be AI?

Last is as the OP suggests a serious glitch caused by an overloaded and about ready to crash at any time system.

I think if that were the case, Manu would have reacted already. But who knows?

In my opinion, the most likely explanation is that, after rejecting @SmilingLez 's newest batch of submissions, Laurel retroactively checked her already published stories and took them down. Consistently inconsistent.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

So many theories. Let's just face reality. The servers were first employed 25 years ago. They are in dire need of an upgrade but unfortunately the investment requirement far outweighs the value of the site so its never going to happen.

I must ask, how in the world have you managed to make over 2.5k forum posts in less than a month? That's like a hundred forum posts per day. We should call Guinness.

 

[SmilingLez]

Here is the rejection message sent with every story sent back

Dear Writer,

Thank you for your submission to Literotica. We appreciate the time and effort you've taken to write a story and submit it to our site . However, we've found that we cannot post your submission in its current form. The checklist below may help you in re-examining your manuscript.

This is better suited to our forum: http://forum.literotica.com/
Please feel free to re-submit the story after a Volunteer Editor has examined it, or after you've made revisions. You can find a list of Volunteer Editors here.

Please consult our Writer's Resources section and make sure you read our submission guidelines.
If you have any questions on these, please let us know.

Thanks for your time, and look forward to reading you again!

Laurel & Manu
Literotica.Com

 

[SmilingLez]

Here is the rejection message sent with every story sent back

Dear Writer,

Thank you for your submission to Literotica. We appreciate the time and effort you've taken to write a story and submit it to our site . However, we've found that we cannot post your submission in its current form. The checklist below may help you in re-examining your manuscript.

This is better suited to our forum: http://forum.literotica.com/
Please feel free to re-submit the story after a Volunteer Editor has examined it, or after you've made revisions. You can find a list of Volunteer Editors here.

Please consult our Writer's Resources section and make sure you read our submission guidelines.
If you have any questions on these, please let us know.

Thanks for your time, and look forward to reading you again!

Laurel & Manu
Literotica.Com

As you can see there is no checklist and no reason why the stories that were in pending purgatory and posted live for months were sent back

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Here is the rejection message sent with every story sent back

Dear Writer,

Thank you for your submission to Literotica. We appreciate the time and effort you've taken to write a story and submit it to our site . However, we've found that we cannot post your submission in its current form. The checklist below may help you in re-examining your manuscript.

This is better suited to our forum: http://forum.literotica.com/
Please feel free to re-submit the story after a Volunteer Editor has examined it, or after you've made revisions. You can find a list of Volunteer Editors here.

Please consult our Writer's Resources section and make sure you read our submission guidelines.
If you have any questions on these, please let us know.

Thanks for your time, and look forward to reading you again!

Laurel & Manu
Literotica.Com

Could you send me one of the published stories that was taken down via PM? I'm curious about what prompted this, because I can't conclude anything from that rejection notice.

 

[SmilingLez]

Could you send me one of the published stories that was taken down via PM? I'm curious about what prompted this, because I can't conclude anything from that rejection notice.

I'll pass, I accepted what happened to me. All I did was post asking if anyone else was experiencing the same thing.

 

[metropolinational]

Good God. This is insane! I'm so sorry this is happening to you. I would be so, so frustrated!

 

[IWroteThis]

So many theories. Let's just face reality. The servers were first employed 25 years ago. They are in dire need of an upgrade but unfortunately the investment requirement far outweighs the value of the site so its never going to happen.

If you think they're still running the same version of MySQL on the same version of Linux on the same physical server that they stood up in the beginning, you should stick to "reading" picture books.

Sorry, but that's simply not the case. Even if you don't understand technology enough to know how these things work, the information is out there showing that they have upgraded all of those. They have even switched which programming language they use. ("Lit tech has gone from simple HTML to PHP/MySQL and we're now well on our way to launching the new ReactJS interface." That was an update from the Lit account, about 7 years ago. Five years later, in another update, we found out that they skipped mentioning at least one language. "We weren't yet familiar with PHP, so we went to work learning PERL/CGI.") Heck, the web server they currently use was first released in 2004, so they can't be running the same one they started with.

No, the problem is the code base behind the scenes. I'm sure that porting it to a new language/platform multiple times didn't help, but the real issue appears to be the lack of proper testing. We've been assured that Manu tests everything, but that's not exactly reassuring to somebody in the industry.

Sorry, but developers should not be the ones doing final testing. They did their testing while (re)writing the code, but they're not really testers. Testing is about finding things the developers missed. Where I work, when we put together a team for testing, we pull in people from the user pool and the support team, but never the developers. We have meetings where we focus on where users have the most problems/complaints, strange edge cases that have failed in the past, and features that are rarely to never used. Only once a minimum set of testing criteria has been created and agreed upon do we turn them loose to "play."

 

[lovecraft68]

In my opinion, the most likely explanation is that, after rejecting @SmilingLez 's newest batch of submissions, Laurel retroactively checked her already published stories and took them down. Consistently inconsistent.

As we all know, the answer is we will never know because communication and transparency are foreign words to owners and always have been.

Your opinion could be valid except I just have a hard believing-or maybe I'd rather not-that a site that has who knows how many stories stuck in pending is spending time going through submissions posted months ago.

If not a glitch then something seriously stinks and seems personal here.

And again, that would not be anything new here.

 

[Underscore_2]

If you think they're still running the same version of MySQL on the same version of Linux on the same physical server that they stood up in the beginning, you should stick to "reading" picture books.

Sorry, but that's simply not the case. Even if you don't understand technology enough to know how these things work, the information is out there showing that they have upgraded all of those. They have even switched which programming language they use. ("Lit tech has gone from simple HTML to PHP/MySQL and we're now well on our way to launching the new ReactJS interface." That was an update from the Lit account, about 7 years ago. Five years later, in another update, we found out that they skipped mentioning at least one language. "We weren't yet familiar with PHP, so we went to work learning PERL/CGI.") Heck, the web server they currently use was first released in 2004, so they can't be running the same one they started with.

No, the problem is the code base behind the scenes. I'm sure that porting it to a new language/platform multiple times didn't help, but the real issue appears to be the lack of proper testing. We've been assured that Manu tests everything, but that's not exactly reassuring to somebody in the industry.

Sorry, but developers should not be the ones doing final testing. They did their testing while (re)writing the code, but they're not really testers. Testing is about finding things the developers missed. Where I work, when we put together a team for testing, we pull in people from the user pool and the support team, but never the developers. We have meetings where we focus on where users have the most problems/complaints, strange edge cases that have failed in the past, and features that are rarely to never used. Only once a minimum set of testing criteria has been created and agreed upon do we turn them loose to "play."

If the Web server they're using dates back to 2004 (22 YEARS AGO) I wasn't far off the mark with my assertion, was I?
Instead of me sticking to picture books I suggest you go back to learning basic adding and subtracting.
If there's one kind of person that I dislike it's the one who fills paragraphs expounding jargon while proving themself wrong.

 

[IWroteThis]

If the Web server they're using dates back to 2004 (22 YEARS AGO) I wasn't far off the mark with my assertion, was I?
Instead of me sticking to picture books I suggest you go back to learning basic adding and subtracting.

No, you weren't even close. That was when it was first released, not when the version Literotica is currently running was released.

If there's one kind of person that I dislike it's the one who fills paragraphs expounding jargon while proving themself wrong.

Then you should STFU and stop being that person.