How to find
- Thread starter Munmun326
- Start date
TheWritingGroup
Writing Group
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2024
- Posts
- 2,643
The Wayback Machine is your best bet, and it isn't 100%.
darwin1859
Really Really Experienced
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2017
- Posts
- 442
What MOST people do is they post here in LFS and describe the story; there are several of us who enjoy trying to find it. Also, someone here may well have read it and may be able to fill in some gaps.
But if you want to know how I find things, here's how:
If you know the URL of the story you can find it on wayback, because it archives by URL.
If you don't have the URL, but you know the author, you can construct the author's works URL. There are two kinds and the old style needs the numeric ID number of the author. If you examine the contact links, its like that but s/contact/submissions/. (And this may not be obvious: the wayback will then show you links into Wayback for that author's stories.)
If you find a story, like "...birthday-surprise-ch-01" and you want to see if there's a chapter 2 archived, just manually edit the URL "...birthday-surprise-ch-02" and search for that. Or there is a way to find all URLs starting with "https://www.literotica.com/s/birthday-surprise-ch-*" You can also use this is you think you know the story title to find similar stories.
If you only have the story title, you can usually guess the story URL. One complication is that stories with the same title are differentiated by a numeral so there are probably dozens or hundreds of "Birthday Surprise" as birthday-surprise, birthday-surprise-1, birthday-surprise-2, etc. You can also use that "show all URLs with a prefix" feature.
There are a couple complications with older stories. For a while, Literotica used ":80" or ":81" in the URL and at some point posted some stories as "https://english.literotica.com/s/..." . Really old stories used a different URL scheme where the story part of the URL had "showstory.php?id=<a numeric story id>" and really, really old stories had idiosyncratic, presumably hand-crafted HTML page names.
Wayback isn't the only archive, there are others. People have been stealing from Literotica for ages, and LE authors also post to other websites, so you can sometimes find stories on other websites.
There are also other websites where people LFS. Reddit has a literotica subreddit (there's a mod with a username like "laurel" who, I assume, is our Laurel) and people post LFS queries. One advantage of posting on reddit is that they have no rules against posting direct links into Wayback (but here on LE, that is forbidden).
Finally, this is extremely hit-or-miss, but you can search google, restricting the search to the Wayback as a way of trying to search wayback (because it isn't, to my knowledge, searchable, except by URL).
One last way I've tried. If you know something very searchable, like the exact story title, and not too old (years, not decades), then you can search for it on Yandex (a Russian alternative to Google), restricting the Yandex search to literotica.com. And the advantage of Yandex is that they still allow you to examine the cached page. You might have to search for each page of the story. This is my fallback if something's not on Wayback, or is incomplete on wayback. Far too tedious for casual reading, but you can save a copy of the story that might otherwise be gone. (Gemini suggested this trick... So, AI is not completely useless.)
But if you want to know how I find things, here's how:
If you know the URL of the story you can find it on wayback, because it archives by URL.
If you don't have the URL, but you know the author, you can construct the author's works URL. There are two kinds and the old style needs the numeric ID number of the author. If you examine the contact links, its like that but s/contact/submissions/. (And this may not be obvious: the wayback will then show you links into Wayback for that author's stories.)
If you find a story, like "...birthday-surprise-ch-01" and you want to see if there's a chapter 2 archived, just manually edit the URL "...birthday-surprise-ch-02" and search for that. Or there is a way to find all URLs starting with "https://www.literotica.com/s/birthday-surprise-ch-*" You can also use this is you think you know the story title to find similar stories.
If you only have the story title, you can usually guess the story URL. One complication is that stories with the same title are differentiated by a numeral so there are probably dozens or hundreds of "Birthday Surprise" as birthday-surprise, birthday-surprise-1, birthday-surprise-2, etc. You can also use that "show all URLs with a prefix" feature.
There are a couple complications with older stories. For a while, Literotica used ":80" or ":81" in the URL and at some point posted some stories as "https://english.literotica.com/s/..." . Really old stories used a different URL scheme where the story part of the URL had "showstory.php?id=<a numeric story id>" and really, really old stories had idiosyncratic, presumably hand-crafted HTML page names.
Wayback isn't the only archive, there are others. People have been stealing from Literotica for ages, and LE authors also post to other websites, so you can sometimes find stories on other websites.
There are also other websites where people LFS. Reddit has a literotica subreddit (there's a mod with a username like "laurel" who, I assume, is our Laurel) and people post LFS queries. One advantage of posting on reddit is that they have no rules against posting direct links into Wayback (but here on LE, that is forbidden).
Finally, this is extremely hit-or-miss, but you can search google, restricting the search to the Wayback as a way of trying to search wayback (because it isn't, to my knowledge, searchable, except by URL).
One last way I've tried. If you know something very searchable, like the exact story title, and not too old (years, not decades), then you can search for it on Yandex (a Russian alternative to Google), restricting the Yandex search to literotica.com. And the advantage of Yandex is that they still allow you to examine the cached page. You might have to search for each page of the story. This is my fallback if something's not on Wayback, or is incomplete on wayback. Far too tedious for casual reading, but you can save a copy of the story that might otherwise be gone. (Gemini suggested this trick... So, AI is not completely useless.)
