We haven't changed any of the software that would cause it. Try signing in... then logging yourself out. then close the all the browsers and log in again.
This seems to be a small issue occurring with some small number of people. I can't repeat it on any combination of 4 different computers, a tablet and my phone...
Please try... Logging off when you are logged in. then clearing the cache and cookies on the browser. then closing the browser entirely. (no tabs or other windows of it) and then re open it, go to the site and log in. This is what I did to fix my problem when I experience it weeks ago.
I like the name KC as well. I will say that while the story overall is very good, this story does suffer from having the author politically soapboxing entirely too often.
Okay. I'll try to answer these in orders.
There is no need to ever unpublish a chapter in order to edit. Just hit the edit button.
This is by design in case an author unpublishes a middle chapter. We had far too many support requests of "I'm reading Story X and it goes from Chapter 9 to Chapter 11. What happened to Chapter 10?" In the off chance someone unpublished a chapter, all following chapters are automatically unpublished.
This is currently a bug. It slipped by in the previous mess and I've alerted the programmer.
I put a support request into the forums software folks and this is their reply:
This bug was fixed and appears to be broken again. The work around is to go to Advanced Search https://www.gayauthors.org/stories/browse/sort/
Select: complete, Sci-Fi and set Word Count to More Than 1000 (or any other number) and it will work. I've reported the bug to the programmer
Pretty sure they shouldn't no.
Don definitely subscribes to the Mercedes Lackey writing approach "Make the reader love the character... then drop a mountain on them."