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And I also still get kicked off if I stay too long in the forums. Fyi, I don't believe this problem existed years ago because I've written long brainstorming posts since we cut over to this site. Back then it never happened. Not sure when it first started. I believe Kdot looked at some of the site cookies at one time and found some that may contribute to the timeouts. My memory is fuzzy on that, though. I'll try using Edge for a while to see if the problem is just with Chrome, then post an update here.

Thanks.
Dirk

You both had me digging through my reviews to be sure it wasn't me. :-)  My account still has a bug such that it doesn't show me all my past reviews without me jumping through hoops, but it looks like I'm caught up. Please let me know if that's not the case.

Hi Alan.

I'm very sorry to hear that Diana's life is coming to a close. Still, it's fair to say, we'd all kill for a caretaker like you when our time comes. I suspect she knows that too.

I'm sure everyone understands if your recips are a little slower than usual. Mine have been sluggish at best for some time.

Welcome back.
Dirk

If I wind up with 70-year-old memories, that'll mean I outlived most of my nearest male relatives. At that point, I'll throw myself a big going away party. Carpe diem!

Welcome to the site, Ironwolf. I had a quick look at your chapter. Please have a look at an article I posted in the Premium forum with tips on how to maximize the number of reviews you can receive. It's pinned near the top of the forum, so you can't miss it. One key piece of advice from that post is to always include the Premium group when posting any stories to the site. Most of the best reviewers aren't members of many other groups, if any, so they won't even see your chapter being posted unless you include Premium. Although posting to Premium requires you to use points, that means your reviewers will receive points for reviewing your chapter. Your reviewers need points to post their own work to Premium.

If you really want to fast track getting reviews, start reviewing the works of others. Begin with the works you see scrolling down your home page. Those writers are guaranteed to be active on the site at present. We have a lot of members who are only here part-time or come and go as life dictates, so not all are active. Since you write sci-fi, join the Fantasy/Magic/Sci-Fi group, if you haven't already. If you look at the stories/chapters posted to that group, the most recently posted are likely to be from active authors too. Check the date of their posts.

I'm drowning in Canadian income taxes this weekend but will try to have a look at your story as soon as you post it to Premium. I don't need points (I have a huge stash), but unless you start reviewing and posting with points (in Premium), you'd be wasting your time here during your trial period. Points are fairly easy to accumulate, made even easier with a recent change to the points system. Generally, for every 1000 words you want to post, you need to review 3000 words (or 3 x 1000, if you prefer) to get enough points to post your work. To get the maximum benefit from this site long term, you'll need reciprocal relationships with other writers with whom you can trade reviews. In general, if you regularly trade reviews with three other writers, you'll probably earn enough points to keep posting. Most of us have at least five such relationships, so gathering points is easy.

The best writers, including some regularly published authors, tend to be the best reviewers too, but they usually stick to Premium. By reviewing their work (they need feedback too), you learn from them how they write, and when they reciprocate, you'll get the most experienced feedback available on this site. Try to use inline reviews instead of regular ones; they usually require a little more time to do, but are more useful to most writers than regular reviews. Giving and receiving reviews usually leads to those long-term relationships with other writers that you need to benefit from this site.

Feel free to post here with any questions you may have. You can also send me a connection request if you like, so we can use private messages. I do volunteer user support on the site to help get new members up to speed as quickly as possible, so I'm happy to answer whatever questions I can.

Have fun!
Dirk

Thanks, Sol

Bill, does it happen with deleting the account too? I've been kicked out before as well, although I can't recall which operation I was trying to perform.

I had been suspending accounts because it looked from the list of accounts that that's what you were doing, but after you and I discussed it, I thought you were deleting them, which isn't what I saw, but I rolled with it, and resumed deleting accounts.

You usually get to them before I do, so I don't encounter this bug much, but it does get annoying.

You bet. :-)

Well done, Randy. Congrats.

Sol, thank you very much for the points changes.

For those who haven't already noticed, going forward, when you open someone's short story, chapter, or poem to read, the points you can earn is up by about 67%. So, something that once paid 1 point will now pay 1.67 points.

The points required to post that work has not gone up. Except for poems, we were paying 5 points to post a work that paid 1 point; we'll still pay 5 points to post that same work, but it will now pay 1.67 points (1/3 of what you paid to post it, instead of the 1/5 it used to pay).

If you're like me, who looks at the points a piece will pay to judge roughly how long it is, keep the points changes in mind. The following is for works other than poems:

1650 words - costs 5 to post, paid 1, now pays 1.67
2000 words - costs 6 to post, paid 1.2, now pays 2
2500 words - costs 7.5 to post, paid 1.5, now pays 2.5 -- Works up to 2500 words are fairly common; a reasonable length.
3000 words - costs 9 to post, paid 1.8, now pays 3
3300 words - costs 10 to post, paid 2, now pays 3.33 -- Still acceptable lengthwise, but please consider splitting works this long.
4150 words - costs 12.5 to post, paid 2.5, now pays 4.2 -- Definitely consider splitting works this long.
5000 words - costs 15 to post, paid 3, now pays 5 -- Please don't post stuff this long; it's tiring to review, especially in one sitting. Split it into parts, which is easy enough to do.

Note that if you multiply the number of points now being paid for a given work by 1000, you get the exact wordcount.

New Members: The shorter your posted work is, the easier it is for other members to squeeze it into their existing schedules. Long works require existing members to spend a lot more time reviewing just your work, which usually interferes with the time they have budgeted for writing and reviewing the works of their existing writing partners. As a result, you'll get fewer reviews, or it will take longer for others to review your work, or the reviews you get will be less helpful than they might otherwise be. But don't forget, the best way to get reviews is to give reviews of works from active members (i.e., the stuff scrolling by on your home page.)

I'll update this for poems later this week. The change was made there too, although poetry math was (and remains) different from other works since most poems tend to be quite short compared to other works like short stories and chapters.