Forum: Lost Stories

So be careful what you link to as I tend to lose patience sometime and may ban you from posting on the forum.

What you ought to do is bill the other sites for advertising charges.....

Is it possible to "sticky" this here and in Story Recommendations?

It makes sense(and doesn't surprise me since I've reposted more than one link), but given that some of us never link to external sites if the works are available on SOL, it seems to possibly be overly broad...

Maybe a more targeted approach,such as banning links to certain specific sites? If they want to pull their stories and take them elsewhere to try and get more money, fine; but there's no reason for you to allow that to be driven from SOL.

Personally, I find the practice of posting and pulling to be abhorrent, and I refuse to read or recommend authors that do it; If I already had license to read it, you cannot justify to me a demand that I need to pay more money to read it again.

Leaving SOL in a fit of pique over how Fake Internet Points are calculated, and then trying to force SOL to send traffic to your new home on the internet is, to me, a bit of wild folly. You may be a good author, but you're not very bright.

This is NOT to say that I agree with everything that Lazeez does, but he's not throwing tantrums either.

(any author offended by this statement is probably in the target audience, and can get over it or get forgotten, I don't care which)

I'm one of the guy which take time to add links to his posts. I could change some of my links to quotation with attribution and leave others to be reconstructed.

Still, I'd like some clarification...

Is there a white list or a black list?
Is the ban limited to competitors?

Does the ban include wikepedia, news articles, SOL Authors site, links to SOL Authors blogs?

Some further clarification please.

Can we assume the ban does not include hard copy book references, or is that assumption in error?

Actually there is no need to post links. Most search engines support the nifty Google "site:" directive which allows you to search specific words only on the specified site. So mention the correct keywords and just a reference to what site to search and there's no need to post a link. Not posting links is important because these support those sites through the search engine crawlers that pick up link references. And as Lazeez mentioned: SOL is not an advertisement platform for other sites.

Your query in the search field should look like this:
"site:storiesonline.net your search words"

What also works:
"site:.xxx your search words"

And if you are familiar with boolean operators you can use AND and OR to fine tune your search.

I wish people would spend just a little time investigating what else is possible. For example searching for certain file types. (torrents, images, music, docs, etc.)

One exception to the no other site rule may be the Clitorides stories. If an award winner is on another site, SOL will give you a way to get to it, except if it is no longer there. Another oddity is when the story is withdrawn from SOL and later reposted here the Clitorides listing doesn't know it is back. JRiters stories for example.

Is only the link unwanted or the whole mentioning of the story?

I often recommend stories in genres that don't have a good representation here. Like Kingdom Builders, LitRPG, and "harry-potter-like-magical-school-setting" stories.

I admit I don't post many links and when I do they tend to be the author's page first then the story itself. In my bookmarks I have links to several writers pages on different sites some are different blogs on different sites which I keep an eye on since not all of their stories are available on sol.