What's New / What's Broken

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This is a refrence blog of things that people have mentioned to us as being broken or different.

Item's that have been "fixed" or we have decided to not fix, are marked with a strike through.

  • My Inbox link was renamed Messages (My Inbox again).
  • Comments were in reverse/random order (Fixed).
  • Kudos are still flakey.
  • BUEditor Buttons don't work (Fixed).
  • My Inbox/Private Messages now use "Tagging" instead of "Folders (Not getting changed).
  • My Inbox/Private Messages don't have a "Forward" button (looking into fix).
  • Clicking on a Taxonomy Term brings you to a "Search" interface (Taxonomy Interception). Turned off till it works better.
  • My Stories page shows "Kudos" now.
  • Anonymous Users count doesn't work right (This is due to caching - can't change - please read "Caching and Why it's Good for you! :)").
  • Logo overlap on top of page is worse on some browsers (looking into fix).
  • Comments are now "Paginated" so that they aren't just one REALLY long list On further thought, we undid this.
  • Write to Author links replaced with "Send Private Message" or "Send author a message"
  • Signatures are missing from comments (Fixed).
  • Some comments have double Signatures (caused by incompatibilities with how signatures USED to work and how they DO work now - can't change).
  • My Blogs link Missing (Fixed).
  • "Body" is "required" when posting a comment (This IS NOT going to change).
  • Pictures (85x85) may be uploaded and added to your profile and is used on comments posting and in Private Messages. :)(See this nice Avatars Tutorial written by Mittfh)
  • Story Outlining works differently and can be applied from the ++fiction/add story pages.
  • WebLinks still borked (Database Corruption, it's on our todo list It was a conflicting module, not database corruption).
  • Sometimes when you preview a story/blog/forum submission it "loses" your "Author" and "Audience Rating" selections. Fixed. (manual code update to 3rd party module)
  • The "My Inbox" link in the navmenu no longer says how many new messages you have.(But a block above does).

If I left something off this list, or if you have found something that needs to be added, please comment below and we will add it to the list and decide the appropriate action based on priority.

-HuGgLeS-
-Piper, Erin, Catrina Lochley, and Samantha Jenkins

Comments

What's Old?

Andrea Lena's picture

I turn sixty-one in March. I suppose that's not too old, but like the kudos, I'm still somewhat flakey.

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

My Inbox

Hi

When you have a message in the inbox waiting it used to show the number of unread messages in parenthesis after "My Inbox". That doesn't appear to be working.

Regards

Karen

Scheduling - and thanks

I take it the Scheduling options are now gone for good?

Is this an appropriate place to thank you all for your hard work on providing this excellent site?

Regards

Louise

Amen!

Just to agree with Louise Anne, while there may be bugs, I just wanted to say that I appreciate your hard work on making things better for us. Thank you!

Wren

Not sure

erin's picture

We haven't even tried to use the scheduling module.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Bug to add

When accessing 'My Stories', the lists of hits, comments, dates etc used to be ordered by clicking on the heading - e.g. 'daily hits', 'total hits' etc.

These headings are still enabled even though alternative ordering system has been implemented. Clicking on them brings up a 'Contact Site Administrator' message.

Should the 'commands' within the headings not be disabled or the error message changed to tell the user to use the alternative method of ordering instead?

Just a thought.

Hugs

Nick

PS

The script for the signature is no longer editable in the comment, so unless I go to My Account > edit, I can no longer change the message that accompanies the picture - will this be replaced as was in the old system so that a witty rejoinder can be added along with my picture of Jessica, or will I have to add on the fly?

Hum?

erin's picture

Not sure why you're getting that message or why the headings are enabled. Cosmetic only, though so probably not worked on this weekend unless it particular bugs one of us. :)

The signature thing is the way the signature thing works, not a lot we can do about it without a hack or finding a new signature module.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

A few initial thoughts...

As you've said above, there are a few issues left to either resolve or give up on, but finding out the bits that are working elicited explanations of "Cool!" and "Yay!". Thanks to all four of you for your hard work on this.

Now, my reactions to a few bits from the list in more detail:

  • Flaky kudos - hasn't that been a little flaky since it was first added, over a year ago? As it's a third party module, you may not be able to get it working perfectly, but on the other hand you may be able to work out whether it's the module itself, the site design, or a combination and possibly even gather something concrete enough to feed back to the developer.
     
  • My Stories showing kudos - yay! Very useful to see at a glance how popular your stories have been - particularly for those of us who haven't posted much recently so have lost the total kudos count on our account page.
     
  • Site logo overlap - seen it happening in both Firefox and Chrome. Although both the image and the purple masthead are both 120px high, it looks as though there's a bit of whitespace before the top of the image, pushing it down the page slightly. Perhaps experiment with scaling it to 67x100 (looks fine at that resolution when experimenting with the Image Zoom FF add-on)?
     
  • Signatures / Double signatures - I guessed double signatures was a consequence of the change from inline signatures inserted on a message-by-message basis to a site-wide signature added at time of posting. I don't suppose it's possible to have some kind of facility to automatically inject a block of text into a comment, for those that prefer their signatures to be dynamic rather than static? (Not that I'd use such a facility, but I know others here who would).
     
  • Body is required for comments - sounds logical enough - there's little point in posting a comment with a subject but no 'body' text!
     
  • Pictures - discovered and liked :) For the benefit of others, 85x85 is the maximum - mine's a 50x50 PNG with transparency.
     
  • Story outlining changed - sounds as though you can now outline the story before you publish it, instead of the previous system of publish then outline. Yay!
     

As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

Kudos et al

erin's picture

There's a replacement module for Kudos called PlusOne. We're going to experiment with it and figure out if we can move the Kudos data over with a script and if PlusOne is actually any better. But not this weekend.

The Site Logo thing seems fixed, are people still having problems? It's a CSS thing and that puppy is cached inside a cache that's wrapped in a cache so it's nuts making to remember to cancel or empty all the caches while working on it. And the results don't show up for everyone right away. Cosmetic tho, so probably not a weekend project.

See above reply about sigs.

And thanks for the likes of some of the minor things. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Missing views

The 3+Days | ThisWeek | New100 | 1-YrAgo | 2-YrsAgo | 3-YrsAgo | 4-YrsAgo views are still missing

Martina

Missing Views

erin's picture

Yes. I'll try to get those fixed this weekend. Minor but that's functional.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Missing Views

Thanks for bringing back the first of the missing views.
The "old" ThisWeek view had a column showing total and new comments.
Is this still somewhere down on your todo list, behind all the more urgent fixes?

Martina

Yes

erin's picture

It's still a learning process, using Views.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

That's computers for you

I started on mainframes in 1973 and computers have always been troublesome. 'Overgrown doorstop' is a polite term.

Still, if it wasn't for people like our brilliant team of minders, I'd be relegated to housework and large print books or I'd need half a million pounds and a room the size of my house for a machine with less power than my digital watch.

Susie.

Author list is ????

Used to display the full list of authors with posted stories below the who's online. Last night that changed to 100 Random Authors, this morning it is down to 20 Random Authors. Not of any use as what are the odds that the author you are looking for will be there?

Oh, the Post button now says 'Save', seems contradictory as I would save a comment if I wasn't ready to post it.


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

Author list

Immediately below the list of 20 random authors is an "Authors A-Z" link, which opens up a new page containing the full list (/authors). As we now have over 500 authors, it's probably getting increasingly impractical to list them all in a single sidebar - besides which, the shorter list may provide an incentive to people to check out an author whose stories they haven't read yet... :)

The 'Save' button does take a little getting used to, but since it's in the same position and forms the same function as the previous 'Post' button (plus there's never been an option to save a comment as draft!), it doesn't necessarily need to be changed if the text is hard coded.


As the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, then only left-handers are in their right mind!

Author list

erin's picture

Mittfh hit the nail on the head, over 500 authors made the list too long so it had to come off the front page. Been planning to do that for a long time. There will also be a link to the Authors A-Z list in the top and bottom menus. I didn't answer this right away because Mittfh had done so well at it.

As to why a list of random authors at all, well one is just to have a list of some authors on the front page to fill the gap left by taking out the long list and provide a place for the link to the long list, and two to serve as a reminder of authors a visitor may remember but not have re-read or looked for new installments lately. This is the usefulness of random things in general.

The Save button is kind of industry standard now, I think it's the wrong word too but it doesn't affect functionality so it's low priority for being changed.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Kudo's

Wendy Jean's picture

I'm looking at the early chapters of Easy as Falling off a Bike and still not seeing Kudo's. I'm I missing them or are they really not there?

early Kudos

The early chapters of Bike were written before the Kudo system was started. So the only way for earlier stories to get kudos is when someone now goes back to read them.

Martina

Current Kudo's

Wendy Jean's picture

I am a late starter on this series, as in just before the New Year. I've tried to faithfully click Kudo's on every chapter, and leave a larger share of comments (call it a New Year's resolution, though it wasn't). It is something I will try to do more often for stories I like or writers I want to help improve. Angharad talked me into it actually.

It does explain the low numbers I had been seeing.

OK, I see what the problem is. In rearranging the screen layout you have put them on the bottom of the 1593 entries, effectively hiding them. It takes a substantial amount of scrolling just to get there.

In your copious free time you might want to move them back to the top of the screen somewhere. (Since this is text I'll state that was a joke)

It is true that with most writers it would not matter, and that Angharad stands out along with a few others. I like the kudo's system overall.

Story not on author page

Wanted to read Green Arrow last night Not on EOF's page had to use Google to find it (Didn't even think about the story being in the Comics Retcon Universe which is on Lilith's page)
It seems to be the same for all
Seems like a story by an author should be on their own page too

Fluffy

You're free to reprogram the outlining module :)

erin's picture

It works the way it works. I too would like to have the ability to put stuff in two places in the outline but it ain't there.

The authors in the CRU make their own decisions as to where to put their stories. An author could use ++Organizer to put a page linking to their stories in the RetconUni into their own outline but that's up to them or Lillith.

Have you noted the nifty new search facility on site? :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Um can I report stuff

Um can I report stuff here?

One problem is that the boudoir-book-picture tends to cover links at the top of the site. While it's not a real problem it's still ugly.

The other thing is, that unclosed embedded html-tags still affect the whole site. If someone forgets to close the embedded tag before the introduction of the story ends, the links after it are still in italic. Just look at the frontpage ;)

Picture problems

erin's picture

We need details, cause I ain't seeing this problem any more.

Bad html will continue to be a problem but there are things we can do to fix it somewhat. Compulsory HTML education anyone? :)

Really, I purposely use the most finicky browser, Safari, so I will see these problems and fix them, usually within an hour or six. We're also experimenting with a "tidy" module to detect and fix them automatically.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

You're mistaken

erin's picture

You couldn't use ++Bookmark on title pages before (I checked). You can use Add to favorites in the new version, same as the old.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Bookmarking Title Pages

You were able to bookmark title pages in the old system. You can look into my bookmarks to see, I have several title pages bookmarked (that I now can't un-bookmark).

The new way is fine though; bookmarking part one is just as functional, and while not being able to un-bookmark the ones I have is annoying it's fine and so far down the list of fixes that I don't expect a fix before 2014 or so.

Bookmarks

erin's picture

Last week on BC you could NOT bookmark title pages. Believe me, 99shoes is still there for us admins and I checked. It had been that way for some time because no one had any reason to change it.

What may have happened, and this is possibly ancient history, we added the bookmarks module then removed it when we added the favorites module then put the bookmarks module back when some people wanted one and some wanted the other because they have different functionality. During that mixup, which pages could have what done may have got out of sync. I can add the bookmarks back to the book pages and will probably do that today.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Features bar?

What purpose does the bar/divider labeled "Features" at the bottom of the blog page serve?

And is it possible to restore the links for home, etc. that were in the bottom of the page, where the Drupal logo is? I used the Home link frequently.


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

Features Bar and bottom menu

erin's picture

Yeah, I miss the menu at the bottom too. Will probably fix that today.

The features bar marks off an area where we intend to add more items. But you know, you can go to your account and turn off any of the blocks that annoy you. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Nah

Doesn't "annoy" me, just wondering if I'd turned something off I needed to turn back on. :-)

BTW, had you noticed that the Blue Marine skin still has the 99 shoes logo? Also some of the things you "fixed" on this skin do not show up on that skin? Are you going to have to rework every skin you put in place? That would sure make a good reason to trim the number of skins down to just a few. (And yes, I know I'm shooting myself in the foot by saying that.) :-)


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

Yeah

erin's picture

We're probably going to keep it down to three themes (or skins). BigCloset, Reversi, and Mobile. Blue Marine is temporarily available because we had to have a standard theme to do some of the installation things.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Skins

shiraz's picture

Only 3 skins? I wish I could remember the name of my favourite but it was simple & clean, very useful when using a 3g dongle with limited bandwidth, plus helps my poor eyes! It was about 3 from the bottom of the old list.

Topsy (getting used to the default!)

- - - -

Paperback cover Boat That Frocked.png

Skins

Topsy,

We are working on those still. When we are done, there will be three themes: BigCloset, Reversi, and a mobile theme.

Samantha

We might do that one too

erin's picture

I can't remember the name of it but it is designed to be simple. Some of the blocks would just not be available.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Thanks and a couple of items

I want to join the chorus here and thank Piper, Erin, Catrina, and Samantha for all their hard work. The amount of effort you have put into this site boggles my mind. Thank you for everything you do!

The only things I’ve noticed relative to the old site:
1. The “random solos” link appears to be missing. It was there right after the site came back up, but I can’t find it now.
2. My persistent login appears to last less than a day. In fact, the first time I tried to post this comment it said I wasn’t authorized because I got logged out, even though I’d just logged in!

Thanks again,
GeekGirl

You're welcome :)

erin's picture

1. It's there, top of left hand column on main page. It's a little bit of filler and sometimes I move it to the right column. Because, it's like, you know, random. :)

2. Persistent login is not compatible with massive caching, so it breaks now and then. Sorry about that but not a lot we can do about it yet. We'll see if there is a hack or patch to make it more reliable.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

I can’t find it...

I’ve looked very carefully through both the left hand and right hand columns, and I still don’t see the random solos feature. I did see it for a while at the top of the left hand column, but not now. Now I just see an ad, and below that the forums area.

Random Solos

Piper's picture

1-22-2012 12-43-14 AM.png
If that's not showing your front page, then you need to go to "My Account" then click on "Edit" and go down to the bottom and make sure you have "View: Solos: Random" checked...
1-22-2012 12-49-24 AM.png


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


Not there...

I have the check box checked in my account, but I see an ad in the place where your screen shot shows Random Solo.

It's been fixed. Sorry for

Piper's picture

It's been fixed. Sorry for that, we were seeing it, but you weren't.

-HuGgLeS-
-P/KAF/PT


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


Preview Bug

erin's picture

The preview bug is related to a caching issue. It's a big bug, in the stegodon class. If you try to post at times when one of the two servers we are using is particularly busy, it's rhino time.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Preview Bug -- FIXED AT LAST!

Piper's picture

Preview bug was fixed, and had nothing to do with caching. It was a bug introduced by a bug-fix to a thrid party module that required manual patching to fix.

-Piper


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


oh the joy!

*giggles*

Sounds too too familiar!

Abigail Drew.

Search wierdness

When I click on an authors name it used to show me all the stories written by that author now it does a search of text for any occurances of the authors name.

Today I click on bruce to read about bruce's stories. Instead I got a complete listing of stories where bruce is mentioned.

Please make it so clicking on an author's name searches for stories by that author.

Thanks,
Dayna.

It's working the way it should...

Piper's picture

Actually, the only thing that is confusing you, is that the search you are getting, returns the "login" name of the person that posted the stories that are tagged with the author name of "Bruce". The 6 stories that show up when you click on the "Bruce" name are the correct stories you are looking for. All were posted by the user "sixftcommie".

I hope this helps.

-HuGgLeS-
-Piper/PiggilyTails/Kirstyn Amanda Fox

P.S. We hope to have proper "views" setup for the search in the coming weeks, so this confusion won't be there, but we are working on core "this is broken and stops the site from being usable" issues first.


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


Search Database Updating?

First off, thanks to everyone that's been working to make the site work better.

When I click on say Penny Lane or Louise Anne or any other authors I've tried, their recent stories (maybe since the site came back) aren't in the search results. Sorry if this has already been brought up and explained, but I haven't seen it.

Search Indexing/Taxonomy Interception

Piper's picture

The search database is about 84% complete at the moment. We were adding 200 items every 5 mins when we were still in "testing" mode before everyone had access to the site. When we let people onto the site, and got that sudden surge of users, we lowered it to 100 items, when that still caused problems we lowered it down to 5 items per 5 mins and there are still about 5000 items that need to be indexed. On our previous test sites, it took 2 weeks to index the entire site, so far it's only taken us 3 days to hit 84% and I'm quite happy with this progress :)

I am going to TEMPORARILY turn off taxonomy interception till the search database is complete and then I will turn it back on. I will also start working on a way to make the new taxonomy interception to work more like the old system.

I'm sitting @ dialysis today with Bill again, and working from here, so what I can and cant accomplish is slightly limited by not having my entire book library for reference.

-HuGgLeS-
-Piper/PiggilyTails/Kirstyn Amanda Fox


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


Thank You - I Understand

Now that you've explained it, I recall comments from Erin (I think) when the site first came back that said it would take time to complete the search database. I just wasn't able to connect the dots on my own.

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