Forum: Lost Stories

I love it when somebody provides the answer to a query about a lost story. I love it more when, like Keet in this one, they provide the search term that worked.

Keet
8/30/2020, 3:59:05 AM

@redwan7460

author: Lazlong
story: The Fountain of Youth
(The word to search for was "flatliner")

Could someone please tell me how many chapters this has? I get: For the rest of this story you need a Premier Membership

Thanks.

how many chapters

If I looked at the right story, 34 chapters.

There is a sequel running to 23 chapters. He was planning to add two more books to the series but was forced to give up on those plans when his health deteriorated.
At some point he had a heart problem, was hauled off to hospital and when he came back, his PC's main drive had non-recoverably self-destructed. I don't think he had useable backups.

The contents page you get by following the above link shows all the chapters; in this case you can read the whole of Ch.1 and a snippet from the start of all the other chapters. Some stories you don't get the snippet for all chapters but they are listed as text not links, then you have a note on the contents page like 'Access to unlinked chapters requires a Premier Membership'. You can read the sample/snippets to get a feel for the story. The last chapter snippet concludes with a notice 'When this story gets more text, you will need to Log In to read it', I can't decide if this is a site bug and it should say 'There is more of this chapter... For the rest of this story you need a Premier Membership' like the previous chapters, maybe something similar noting it's the last chapter, or if it's a general-purpose notice since even concluded stories like this one may have more added later if the author wants (as happened with many of cmsix's stories). The way to tell if it's (nominally) finished is to look at the story listing (e.g., on the author's page) and see if the entry for that story says 'Concluded:' or instead has the dreaded 'Incomplete and Inactive'.

IF I understand correctly, if a story has been archived because of NOT logging in for a given number of years. If the author adds more, all the stories are non-archived. If the author has placed it in the premier area, the membership is required.

Correct, with a few wrinkles. The unarchiving is (or at least initially was) not automated, so there may be some delay there. An archived author may have some stories non-premier, where these were written together with another author who has not yet had their work archived (and, if that author then becomes eligible for archiving, such stories go behind the paywall immediately without the week's grace/notice). On the authorlist pages, archived authors are noted by a check rather than solid background. The last posting date on those pages is the last posting of story content OR blog entries, and for some authors this posting could have been done by site management so will appear to be too recent. Management posts for an archived author (which can occur if the author agreed to posting of content sourced from elsewhere) will be behind the paywall immediately (they may be publicly available for a few hours, until the next archive check). An author's works are archived when the author has not logged on to the site (even to read stories or check mail) for some while; initially this period was five years, but it is currently being slowly shrunk down to three years. A corollary is that all pseudonyms of an author are archived together, although note not all authors archived together are pseudonyms. Archive checks/actions are run at 5:30 GMT/BST AM&PM, except a day or so around the clocks changing where the checks may occur an hour earlier/later so nobody has to come in on a Sunday to make the change, and so that the check has been performed by the correct time. It's impossible to tell if a story was already premier-only when the author is archived; presumably, such stories will remain premier-only if the author is unarchived. On the authorlist pages, if an author has an email link, then they have logged on to the site within the past year, even if they've not posted anything for over a decade - the converse is not necessarily true, as an author may elect not to show an email link.

This info is derived mainly from direct observation and from Lazeez's postings and notices, but isn't official as I'm just a site user.