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Hi All! Recently, site staff has been reviewing stories on GA, and we’ve come across a few things that we need your help to fix! Missing/Incomplete Story Descriptions: A good example of missing/incomplete story descriptions can be found in many of the earlier anthologies. Many of these stories simply have a description of “2006 Summer Anthology”. Incomplete descriptions do nothing to engage readers or entice them to read your story. When updating the story description, keep in mind: "I'm trying to get people to read this. How can I make this interesting enough for someone to want to read it?" (while being truthful and no spoilers, of course). Missing Tags: Tags are a great way to help readers find your stories. For example, if you are writing a paranormal vampire story, using these tags will allow anyone interested in that genre to simply click a tag and bring up all stories of that type. If your story is not tagged as such, no matter how good the story, a reader interested in the content you provide may miss out on reading it. Series Information: We’ve found some stories that are a part of a collection, but the series information is missing. We’ve also found instances where the series field is used incorrectly. When you post the first story in your series, you don’t use the series feature. When you post the second story in your series, you add in the series field the name of the series and what book in that series it is. Then you go back to the first story and add in the information, labeling it as book one of the series. Please do not use the series field until you have posted the second story in the series as the series field is meant to tell readers that there are more stories in that series that are ready to be read. Unpublished Stories: We’ve found a lot of stories that are unpublished for one reason or another. However, as staff, we don’t know the reason. It could be perhaps that the author no longer wishes the story to be available online, but since staff has to delete the story, they simply unpublish it and leave it. If you have unpublished stories, then please contact staff to let us know if you’d like the story deleted from the system or if you plan to republish it. How can you help? If you are an author, we ask you to revisit your stories and if any of the above applies to you, please update your stories. If the story in question is an Anthology, contact Renee Stevens. I can temporarily remove the story from the anthology to allow you to fix it, and then move it back. If you are a reader, and you come across a story with any of the above, please PM a moderator or an admin. You can find a list of all mods and Admins here. You can also provide suggestions, which will be extremely helpful if the author is no longer on GA. Thank you for your help!

This week is all about the tags. Every part of the system uses them. I bet most people kind of gloss over them if they notice them at all. Buy why are tags important? The honest truth is that the tags are there to help you group like material together. For example, I tag all of these type of blogs posts with Tech Tuesday. if you click on a tag, it pulls up the search engine and shows you everything that is tagged with that item: https://www.gayauthors.org/tags/tech tuesday/ The same thing applies to stories. Say you want to find all the stories tagged with Magic, well, just click on the tag on a story and you'll get your list: https://www.gayauthors.org/stories/browse/tag/magic/ With Stories, you can also go to the "Genre and Tags" page and see the list of all the Genres and All the Tags. Clicking on them will bring you to all the stories tagged accordingly. https://www.gayauthors.org/stories/browse/genre/ Using tags is easy. On every new topic, blog, gallery image, or story, or whatever content you're posting, be sure to place 1-3 of the most important keywords in the tag box. The tags will self-format when you hit the comma. So Tech Tuesday tags look like this: Please note here the item prefix. In some places, you are allowed to add this prefix and it shows up on the subject line ahead of the subject. This should be used sparingly as it is meant for emphasis. Usage of the prefix option does vary by by member group and which part of the site they are using. There are some pretty big search updates coming in the Forum 4.3.0 software that is entering beta test now at our forum vendor's site. Using tags not only helps our system now with searching, it'll make it better in the future. Speaking of future, we will be patching the site soon with some bug fixes and part of that will be that we are going to start tracking readers' stats on a weekly basis. Right now, when you look at a story, you see the total number of views over time. But that could have been 10,000 views four years ago or last week. There's no way to tell. With the new system we are implementing, authors will be able to tell what of their material is trending and when. Publicly, we plan on showing data on what people are reading by genre and by tags. This update will just begin the recording of the raw data. This way, when we get to the real update in a few months, we'll have a lot of data already on hand. For those concerned with privacy, there is no personal data recorded at all. For those wondering, why should I care? This data will be used to understand our market. Stories that get the most reads in a time frame will boost their tags and genres in popularity. Writers who are looking for a challenge, can then write stories that fit what people are looking for... or do that and twist it back to what you're looking for by hooking them good and proper. This ties back to tags. Make sure the tags on your story are useful and actually describe the story. Review your stories and make sure your tags make sense. We are also open to adding more tags that are currently not in the system if you make your case for them.

I'd like to remind every author here that you should be using the Stories Archive to the fullest in promoting your story. That means you need to have a good book blurb in your Description. You need to have the proper tags on your story. You need to have the proper genre(s) on your story. And for the love of all that is holy, if you have a story that is in a Series, use the series settings! If you have a story in a series, this is not optional. I've asked the moderation staff to assist in contacting authors or outright correcting it in the system. This blog will help if you are stuck. Now, if the stories are related, but not in a series, which is to say, they occur in the same story world, then you do not have to use series. We are working on a new feature "Worlds" that will be used to tie together stories that exist in the same story world but are not strictly a series. A lot of us that have multiple stories are in this boat, so the new feature should work to address that. Otherwise, please take the time to review all of your published works and make sure that all the metadata is filled out and updated. This can only help you. This will be especially true of older stuff. Since I've been repromoting a lot of the old anthologies, I've found that most of them are very poorly represented in the system. Now would be a great time to review all of your stories and make updates.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY IESHWAR : D!!! Hope it was sexcellent here have a fat cat: missed talking to you :'3