Stuck in Pending again

[Claire_RA]

@Manu and @Laurel

Sadly, one of my stories is stuck in pending again. I'm sorry for creating a new topic instead of using the old one, but the old thread has been closed after it got a little off topic.

My story "Sweet, Sweet Mess" (Erotic Couplings, ID: 4450162) has been pending for exactly one month now (since July 7). I sent a PM to Manu and Laurel on July 27 regarding the issue, but haven't gotten a response.

Also, last time when two of my pending stories were finally published, they were added to the bottom of the new stories list for their publication days which cost them a lot of attention. It would be really nice if this time, after waiting for a month, the story wouldn't get punished like that. Thank you!

 

[Hidden_Submissive]

Mine too: 4434271 and 4411923

Both since 6/17, so approaching 2 months. Polite PMs sent at the 1 month mark, stories still stuck.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Perhaps message them instead - not that this is guaranteed to work.

If you don’t know how to:

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/stories-pending-over-3-weeks.1650910/#post-102464023

 

[SoCalAshley]

Perhaps message them instead - not that this is guaranteed to work.

If you don’t know how to:

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/stories-pending-over-3-weeks.1650910/#post-102464023

Hate to sound like a Debbie Downer, Ashley Downer, but they almost never reply.

 

[Britva415]

@Hidden_Submissive

Two months is a long time. Since the expectation the site's story approver has set is that all submissions will be handled within 30 days, this is clearly beyond unmet expectations, and it's reasonable to presume that something has broken.

(They have insisted that there isn't a bug, but they also promise 30 days.)

So, consider deleting your 2-month-old submissions. Saving the text, of course, because you then want to submit them again, as completely new stories.

Don't change anything, just delete them and then resubmit them. And when you do, include a Note in the notes field and say what happened: They were pending for (say how long) and you have deleted the originals and are resubmitting them because of the perception that there was a bug or whatever it was that caused the promise of 30 day turnaround to be exceeded.

 

[Voboy]

Hate to sound like a Debbie Downer, Ashley Downer, but they almost never reply.

They often make the desired fixes without replying.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Hate to sound like a Debbie Downer, Ashley Downer, but they almost never reply.

Agreed - maybe one in forty notes. But they act more frequently than that, even if you get no acknowledgment.

 

[SoCalAshley]

Agreed - maybe one in forty notes. But they act more frequently than that, even if you get no acknowledgment.

Thank you for the encouragement. It's been 6 weeks pending for me.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Thank you for the encouragement. It's been 6 weeks pending for me.

Good luck - it must really suck

 

[Hubbell1973]

Ditto, first two parts went through smoothly, 48 hrs, The 3rd and final part is approaching 5 days. Hope to God it's not 15 days!!!!

 

[ElectricBlue]

Hate to sound like a Debbie Downer, Ashley Downer, but they almost never reply.

They might not reply, but they might act. There's a better chance of that happening via a PM than posting here.

 

[Hubbell1973]

Ditto, first two parts went through smoothly, 48 hrs, The 3rd and final part is approaching 5 days. Hope to God it's not 15 days!!!!

Released from Limbo today.

 

[Hidden_Submissive]

Perhaps message them instead - not that this is guaranteed to work.

If you don’t know how to:

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/stories-pending-over-3-weeks.1650910/#post-102464023

I have tried, twice.

@Hidden_Submissive

Two months is a long time. Since the expectation the site's story approver has set is that all submissions will be handled within 30 days, this is clearly beyond unmet expectations, and it's reasonable to presume that something has broken.

(They have insisted that there isn't a bug, but they also promise 30 days.)

So, consider deleting your 2-month-old submissions. Saving the text, of course, because you then want to submit them again, as completely new stories.

Don't change anything, just delete them and then resubmit them. And when you do, include a Note in the notes field and say what happened: They were pending for (say how long) and you have deleted the originals and are resubmitting them because of the perception that there was a bug or whatever it was that caused the promise of 30 day turnaround to be exceeded.

These stories are actually from May 2nd. I did this resubmit attempt once before. Something is very broken for me. This thread once again got moved to Author’s hangout.

@Manu I know the official stance is that there is no bug, but i’ve had this account in excellent standing for nearly a decade. I implore you to please check and see if something is wrong for me, Id really appreciate it

 

[LissyW]

I'm 140+stories into my Lit "career" and, almost without exception, all my submissions have been published in 2 days, so I became a little concerned about the latest one "Maddy on the Move Pt. 13" when it was still in pending after 3 days. Reading some of the posts on here though, it seems like that's NOTHING.

I do wonder why authors would continue submitting stories if they end up in pending purgatory for weeks at a time.

 

[LissyW]

Seperate question: If it is in Pending, but has a status of "published" ? with tomorrow's date, what does that mean?

 

[Hidden_Submissive]

I'm 140+stories into my Lit "career" and, almost without exception, all my submissions have been published in 2 days, so I became a little concerned about the latest one "Maddy on the Move Pt. 13" when it was still in pending after 3 days. Reading some of the posts on here though, it seems like that's NOTHING.

I do wonder why authors would continue submitting stories if they end up in pending purgatory for weeks at a time.

I haven’t submitted since May because of this. It really sucks, and I wish they’d acknowledge if something is up.

 

[LissyW]

I wish support was even half as responsive as the fellow authors on this forum.

 

[qidniz]

If it is in Pending, but has a status of "published" ? with tomorrow's date, what does that mean

It means that it will be published tomorrow. The publishing cycle is once daily.

 

[Claire_RA]

I have to say that I don't really get why this topic is being moved to the Author's Hangout. I appreciate the solidarity from the other authors, but they can't help with the actual issue. It seems misplaced here.

Regarding the suggestion to send @Manu and/or @Laurel a PM: as it says in the opening post, I did that already on July 27. That was after the story had spent 20 days in pending already. I only created the topic because there was no reaction at all after two more weeks after that. I'm absolutely willing to contact whoever is the right person to contact in the right way. But given the lack of communication, it's impossible for me to figure out if I'm doing something wrong or not.

I will try posting the latest chapter of my series Divergent Limit today. But if that ends up in pending too and I get no reaction again, I'll have to give up on Literotica. I'm at my wits end here. As someone who ran a small forum for posting stories myself for a while, I get what it's like being bothered by users, especially if they blame you for mistakes of their own. So I'm not ruling out that I'm doing something wrong. If I caused these delays somehow, I'd be more than happy to change whatever I've been doing wrong. But somebody would have to tell me something.

 

[Voboy]

I understand your frustration, OP, but I can't help but wonder whether it's useful to continually tag L&M quite so many times in your posts.

They do say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but this site often seems to be the exception. I suspect that it's not beneficial if TPTB here decide you're a nuisance, and constantly tagging them strikes me as a good way to draw that kind of attention.

I have no idea whether that's true; when I said "I can't help but wonder," I was being honest.

 

[Claire_RA]

I understand your frustration, OP, but I can't help but wonder whether it's useful to continually tag L&M quite so many times in your posts.

They do say the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but this site often seems to be the exception. I suspect that it's not beneficial if TPTB here decide you're a nuisance, and constantly tagging them strikes me as a good way to draw that kind of attention.

I have no idea whether that's true; when I said "I can't help but wonder," I was being honest.

I have waited 20 days before I said a word at all. And then I waited almost another two weeks before I created this topic. And then I waited 5 days to get any response from them, or whoever can help, to this topic at all. I really can't see how I'm spamming them with notifications here.

So far, I've mentioned the two of them a total of two times over the course of more than a month and I sent them one PM. And I only did that because that is the only recommendation other authors here were able to give me. If I had any idea what I could do instead, I'd happily do it. If the two of them or any of the moderators here would have told me "Don't listen to the people telling you to contact them via PM." I wouldn't have. I'm only doing this because I can't find any official information on what to do when you're stuck in pending.

So, with all due respect, but I don't think a PM after 20 days, a topic with a mention after 31 days, and a follow up after being ignored for another 5 days is me being unreasonably pushy. And trust me, if there is no reaction to this, I will not keep bothering them. If my story is just left in pending indefinitely and that issue is not addressed, I will just leave, slightly annoyed that I wasted my time here, but with no hard feelings or ill will towards anybody here.

 

[SmilingLez]

I have to say that I don't really get why this topic is being moved to the Author's Hangout. I appreciate the solidarity from the other authors, but they can't help with the actual issue. It seems misplaced here.

Regarding the suggestion to send @Manu and/or @Laurel a PM: as it says in the opening post, I did that already on July 27. That was after the story had spent 20 days in pending already. I only created the topic because there was no reaction at all after two more weeks after that. I'm absolutely willing to contact whoever is the right person to contact in the right way. But given the lack of communication, it's impossible for me to figure out if I'm doing something wrong or not.

I will try posting the latest chapter of my series Divergent Limit today. But if that ends up in pending too and I get no reaction again, I'll have to give up on Literotica. I'm at my wits end here. As someone who ran a small forum for posting stories myself for a while, I get what it's like being bothered by users, especially if they blame you for mistakes of their own. So I'm not ruling out that I'm doing something wrong. If I caused these delays somehow, I'd be more than happy to change whatever I've been doing wrong. But somebody would have to tell me something.

You aren't the first person to have a tech support request moved. This was mine from May 2026. 2 weeks after I posted it, every single story that was in pending status as well as every single story but one that was posted live for months were removed without a reason- just the original automated message saying put it in the author's forum. I did report that as a tech support issue and of course that tech support issue was moved to AH. Also all of the previous pending purgatory issues going back as far as 2003 we're also removed from the tech support forum. YMMV

AH seems to be a dumping ground for things that are swept under the rug. And we mustn't forget according to the site owners there is no pending bug

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/possible-pending-purgatory-fix.1655295/

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/backend-misclassification-event-bug.1656201/

 

[Claire_RA]

The story got approved and is now scheduled for publication tomorrow. Thank you to whoever approved it. If there is anything I could have done differently, please let me know.

---

@SmilingLez I've seen you post quite a bit about the issue. But I lack the expertise to comment on why stories keep ending up in pending limbo. I have no idea if that is a bug or maybe an issue with the GUI that shows the admins/mods which stories haven't been approved yet. My naive suggestion would be trying to add something like an automatic reminder if a story hasn't been approved or denied for 7, 10, 14 fays - or however many days is deemed as unnaturally long by the admins.

Whatever the underlying issue is, I'd like to assume that there are no bad intentions on behalf of the admins. I ran a much smaller erotica community for a short while and I can tell that you have to deal with a lot of BS from users. I had even people accuse me of deleting and "censoring" their posts when they were just old and not tech-savvy enough to post properly. But of course, the "disappearance" of their posts must have been the fault of the admin targeting them and deleting their posts. So I can only imagine how many stupid nonsense accusations Laurel and Manu must be hearing every day on a giant site like this one. So whatever the reason is why they aren't responding, I'd like to assume that there is a good reason. Of course, that leaves someone in my position unsure of what to do exactly.

Personally, if it were me running Literotica, I'd consider running a crowdfunding campaign on kickstarter or a similar platform to get this place up to date. I'm sure a site this big would find quite a few people willing to pitch in 5 or 10 bucks. And the collected money could be used to give the site a proper overhaul. Of course I don't know if that would work and how much money you would need exactly to pay a few skilled coders to fix the issues that have accumulated over the years and add a bunch of new features. But I think at least giving it a try couldn't hurt.

 

[SmilingLez]

The story got approved and is now scheduled for publication tomorrow. Thank you to whoever approved it. If there is anything I could have done differently, please let me know.

---

@SmilingLez I've seen you post quite a bit about the issue. But I lack the expertise to comment on why stories keep ending up in pending limbo. I have no idea if that is a bug or maybe an issue with the GUI that shows the admins/mods which stories haven't been approved yet. My naive suggestion would be trying to add something like an automatic reminder if a story hasn't been approved or denied for 7, 10, 14 fays - or however many days is deemed as unnaturally long by the admins.

Whatever the underlying issue is, I'd like to assume that there are no bad intentions on behalf of the admins. I ran a much smaller erotica community for a short while and I can tell that you have to deal with a lot of BS from users. I had even people accuse me of deleting and "censoring" their posts when they were just old and not tech-savvy enough to post properly. But of course, the "disappearance" of their posts must have been the fault of the admin targeting them and deleting their posts. So I can only imagine how many stupid nonsense accusations Laurel and Manu must be hearing every day on a giant site like this one. So whatever the reason is why they aren't responding, I'd like to assume that there is a good reason. Of course, that leaves someone in my position unsure of what to do exactly.

Personally, if it were me running Literotica, I'd consider running a crowdfunding campaign on kickstarter or a similar platform to get this place up to date. I'm sure a site this big would find quite a few people willing to pitch in 5 or 10 bucks. And the collected money could be used to give the site a proper overhaul. Of course I don't know if that would work and how much money you would need exactly to pay a few skilled coders to fix the issues that have accumulated over the years and add a bunch of new features. But I think at least giving it a try couldn't hurt.

You didn't get the nasty message I did from one of the site owners, so you are unable to say that it was not intentional.

Hypothetically, it would cost anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000 to migrate to a new (cloud v box) database without losing any of the stories/poetry/audio/interactive games. Most of the expense would be in recovery (separating the bloat - dead hyperlinks, active hyperlinks, images, etc. from content). Again this is hypothetical and based on my knowledge of creating and setting up custom CMS/DB and data recovery

So happy that your story got manually pushed through and will be posted

 

[Hidden_Submissive]

After this both of my stories got rejected for AI after months.I literally write them in vim and they’re the same style as stuff i’ve written for a literal decade.