Story Site Issues, Etc.

[MrEmann]

I think Torq even advise the private email as the best means to get a hold of him. I can't say he responds to everything, but I do know he responds. He was recently in contact with Me. it's my humble opinion that certain problems will generate a personal response. Certain other problems are dealt with behind the scenes. This opinion is based solely on my own interactions with Torq. Nothing else.

[RiverOtter]

I'm (slowly) rewriting a story I posted, as I am not satisfied with how it came out originally. Would it be possible to take the old one down if I sent in the new one? Would I have to submit the new version all at once, or could I still do it in installments?

Thanks!

[Ferranartist]

I really don't know where else to put this, but I've been trying, for a few months now, to get my author profile information changed when someone clicks my name on a story. I just need to get my website added. It's ............... I've tried emailing webmaster@bdsmlibrary.com twice, and sending a message to the administrator on the forums via the contact link at the bottom, and not gotten a response. If there is someone else I need to contact, please let me know.

[teleya]

Any update on the story count? It still registers as 1 reader per day.
Also, when i click on my name it doesnt open the page that would list all the reviews i have written. Around half the people do get the hyperlinks and half doesnt. Any thng i could do to get this fixed? I simply like to check who i reviewed.

Thanks
Teleya

[snowbear]

Hello! I have read over each forum category, but I'm still not totally sure where it would be appropriate to ask this.

I read this BDSM short story a while ago, only I can't remember the title or the author. However, I vividly remember the plot (it was a relatively short one-shot), and I recall coming across it several times, so I feel somewhat confident that someone may recognize this story if I describe it to them. Where could I ask people this?

Incidentally, the story plotline is:

This story is told from the point of view of the rapist (I can't remember if it was in third or first person). Basically, he raped several of the women in the neighborhood, who joined together and asked a Master and his slave to help them obtain revenge - though we don't discover this until the end. The rapist first watches his new neighbors (the Master and his slave) very intensely. He thinks the Master is a "pussy" because he is kind and successful. Throughout the story, we come to see the rapist as being very bitter and hateful towards women, and it's implied that he's very envious of the Master.

He closely watches the Master walk the slave on a leash, whip her, etc. He becomes obsessed with spying on the slave - he watches her eat at her Master's feet, go jogging, and so on. One night, the Master deliberately leaves his house after he ties up his slave on the sofa. The rapist can't resist this opportunity, so he sneaks into the house and rapes the slave. The set up is then revealed, and the women take their revenge by rapin him.

[Ozme52]

Something like that you can usually ask either in general bdsm or perhaps the pencil sharpening threads.


Can't help you with your story question though.

[snowbear]

Ozme52 - thank you! I'll try there

[Darinost]

Torq, I submitted a story back near the end of August that has yet to appear on site. If it's just working its way through the queue, that's fine, but I want to make sure that it didn't get lost in the shuffle somewhere.

[Mermaid Master]

I just had two tech questions and I am not sure if this is the right place to ask. I have one story here which has gotten a lot of readers and very high ratings. I am now doing stories that are illustrated. They are too large to submit in Word format but are of reasonable size in PDF format. My questions are first, do you accept illustrated stories and second, if so, can I submit them in PDF format?

[amanda_serve]

http://www.bdsmlibrary.com/stories/a...?authorid=3279

I submitted stories to this site and have contacted webmaster@bdsmlibrary.com many times over the past months to ask if they would remove or anonymize my email. I do not want nastygrams/feedback and I did not know they would display my real email.

How can I get them to change the email to author@needfeedback.com or something or just delete the page? They won't reply to my emails. It's been over a year now I think.

Does anyone have access to the admins who run bdsmlibrary?

I ended up taking off all my stories because I'd rather use a psuedonym and posting them on another site because of this one minor detail.

[lexora]

Hmm... odd I am sure there is a way, I never submitted a story to BDSM tho.. But then again I have several emails for that reason alone

[fallenang_l]

It appears that some special character sets are not being recognized on the site, all the stories have these squares where a special character should be, at first I thought it was only new stories but went back & it appears to be on all stories.

This is displaying this way on multiple browsers.

[ksst]

I am having this problem with the stories now too. I thought it was just my computer, which can be uncooperative, but I guess not.

[fallenang_l]

I am having this problem with the stories now too. I thought it was just my computer, which can be uncooperative, but I guess not.

I believe that the issue lies with either the server needing a character set update it was a issue I had previously on a similar site.

Webmaster can you pipe in on this issue, I love the site but some stories are unreadable

[Dr_BuzzCzar]

At least now I know it isn't just me experiencing the same thing.

[fallenang_l]

I've tried to test this & it displays on multiple browsers & multiple systems, I think that this is something that the server admin will need to fix & hoping they do soon or recommend someway to view the stories without the odd characters displaying.

[fallenang_l]

Bumping this post up a bit, not sure why but this story - Sandra Ottershaw Ponygirl 314 - http://www.bdsmlibrary.com/stories/s...p?storyid=9403 - Does nto show the characters while this story - A Latex Girl Thing - http://www.bdsmlibrary.com/stories/s...p?storyid=9402 - May be a editor issue but unlikely & hoping the site admin can help!

[MstrJake]

I have the same problem. I use Windows 7 and Firefox. Most stories open with strange symbols in place of single and double quotation marks. I can fix it by clicking on the View menu, then Character Encoding. Most stories have preselected Unicode (UTF-8). If I click on one of the other choices such as Western (ISO-8859-1) the symbols are instantly replaced with the correct symbols. However, the change does not stick. When I go to the next chapter I have to do those steps again. I know this fix works, but I don't know what it means, if you know what I mean. Still researching. Hope this helps a little.

[Panther007]

I'm having the same problem and it's on some great stories but really hard to read with weird question marks instead of quotation marks.

It's been this way for awhile now, hopefully it will get fixed soon.

[shabbadew2002]

I'm having the same problem with my stories. Torq - brother, can we get this fixed... and soon? Thanks! Brewt has been having the same problem too. So, it's not just with a few authors or stories...

[karel]

same problem. Not all the text has these unrecognised characters, but some parts do.

[Tavy]

I noticed one of my stories displayed ok and two had the "weird question marks". On re-checking my original submissions it appeared that the one using word with Smart Quotes enabled produced the weird symbols while one using Open Office with plain quotes displayed ok!

So I may be wrong but it seems that if .doc files are submitted with plain quotes the irritating little ? s can be prevented.

[MrDang]

Hi, I've found a way to make special characters display correctly.

For Firefox (Assuming you're using the latest version):
1. Click the 'Firefox' menu button on the top left corner.
2. Select 'Web Developer'
3. Select 'Character Encoding'
4. Select 'Western (ISO-9959-1)'
The page should reload and the correct characters display.

For Chrome:
1. Click the little wrench icon on the top right corner (not the close button, but just below it)
2. Select 'Tools'
3. Select 'Encoding'
4. Select 'Western (ISO-9959-1)'
The page should reload and the correct characters display.

For IE (Assuming you're using the latest version, you're not still using IE6... right?)
1. Click 'Page'
2. Select 'Encoding'
3. Select 'Western European (Windows)'
The page should reload and the correct characters display.

The annoying thing is that you have to do this every time, unless you use an extension or addon to override the site's default encoding, which for some reason is set to Unicode. It doesn't matter what format you submit your stories in, because it'll always break those 'special characters' once your browser uses Unicode encoding, whether it is RTF, HTML, PDF or whatever.

I don't know if the site administrators can fix this but at least I hope this helps some people.

EDIT: I noticed somebody already mentioned the same thing about two months ago. Anyway I still hope it helps.

[VeniVidi]

If you search the web on this subject there are a numerous complaints about this issue relating to numerous different websites. It appears that the default "encoding" may have been changed.

For older web pages viewed under Microsoft the suggested quick fix is to Right-Click; select "Encoding"; then select "Western European (Windows)". Sorry but I don't know the equivalent Unix/Linux/Mac or anying

Apparently if the webpage <META ....> contains the proper "encoding" (e.g. UTF-8) this eliminates the problem.

Hoping this helps at least some

[shabbadew2002]

Dear Delia:
Thank you for your response. A number of my stories were submitted in .rtf format originally and there was no problem with any of my stories until very recently. I can only assume that something changed on the site in the intervening time.
Sincerely,
Shabbadew2002

[VeniVidi]

Please Ma'am, this isn't the fault of this website. Here is a typical post from elsewhere which highlights what the problem actually is:

<quote>

Content-Type
Source: HTTP/1.0 (RFC1945)
The HTTP content type may be extended to give the character set. As an HTTP/1.0 header, this unfortunately breaks older browsers. As a META tag, it causes Netscape Navigator to load the appropriate charset before displaying the page. E.g.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-2022-JP">

It is now recommended to always use this tag, even with the previously-default charset ISO-8859-1. Failure to do so may cause display problems where, for instance, the document uses UTF-8 punctuation characters but is displayed in ISO or ASCII charsets

</quote>

Which implies that if the "previously-default charset" is being used, older systems will probably display that webpage correctly whereas newer systems which use the new default (which I think may be UTF-8) will display incorrectly.

Even if you post your stories elsewhere they will may the same problem until the proper <META ...> tag is added to the webpage displaying the story.

Please please don't blame the volunteers here for something that isn't their fault!

All the best
VV

[shabbadew2002]

VeniVidi:
Not looking to assign blame; just looking to rectify problem. It's not clear from your post what I could do to correct problem. Please advise. Thanks for taking the time to post!
Shabbadew2002

[VeniVidi]

Hi great writer

I'm pretty sure that there is nothing you can do yourself, as the problem is within the "hidden" part of the webpage which is wrapped around your stories (in fact each part of each story).

This means that there is a mammoth task of adding the correct "hidden" instructions to each and every page containing a story (technically only those containing any special characters, but I doubt there's an easy way of identifying those). That's nearly 10,000 stories total having up to 100 pages/sections/chapters each (e.g. Karen and Michelle).

So its a question of waiting for Torq to magic up a genius solution, for example. I can imagine numerous possible problems such as interfering with the date/times of each story post when changing the pages; so would expect it to take some time simply to test precisely what needs doing.

The only thing I can think of is humbly begging for patience from any people frustrated by the mess that this change has caused. Its pro'lly down to those in the w3 consortium, so let's send all of them nasty messages to vent our feelings!!!!

All the best
VV

[shabbadew2002]

VeniVidi:

Thank you for your explanation as to why this is occurring. If you're correct, and there's nothing I can do myself, it would nullify the site administrator's suggestion to re-submit stories in .rtf format as a solution. For that, I'm grateful.
Again, thanks & cheers!
Shabbadew2002

[VeniVidi]

Its a pleasure to be able to help.

I can also give you an update on what's going on (by "peeking" at the "hidden" code on the webpages. I think Sir Torq has been busy trying to sort this out but is beating his head against a brick wall (and for a Master that's not funny).

If you list all the stories by size, the largest on the list is Karen and Michelle... - and there is a "?" character after Michelle. At the top in the hidden code is:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"></meta>

Now this is more-or less what was recommended in that article. BUT the question mark is still there on the webpage - and if you look at the "Encoding" per my browser (Internet Explorer 9) it still shows Unicode (UTF-8)??

If I create a simple webpage using the same "hidden" code at the beginning:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<body>
TEST
</body>
</html>

This displays correctly as Encoding Western European (ISO) [which is close enough to the Windows encoding to make little difference]. So WTF is happening - it's okay in this test page but not in "real"?

A bdsmlibrary webpage typically has hundreds of lines of code - poor Sir Torq will pro'lly have to go through each type in order to isolate where the "Encoding" is being changed to UTF-8 - and it's uncertain whether the problem isn't created outside the page even.

So I am crossing everything and hoping the Sir Torq is successful, wishing him as much luck as I can give in order that he sorts it out.

Hope this helps, or at least explains what is going on
VV