Posted by Kim on August 6, 2010, 11:05pm
Every once in a blue moon, we would get a report of someone who couldn't edit their characters. They'd click on the edit link next to their character's name, and arrive at a completely blank page. Even the source files were missing. Server logs showed no errors. Everything appeared to be sending in one piece, it just wasn't arriving. There wasn't even a good way for us to run tests, because we couldn't recreate the error ourselves.Finally, today the lovely Experience volunteered hours of her time to reload on a test version of the site again and again as I crawled around making annoyingly tiny tweaks to the code in an attempt to figure out what was causing the page to appear and disappear.
Do you know what we found?
It wasn't the code at all. It was a single word, in the pop-up explanation of what the warning tags were for. Can you guess what the word was? Go on, guess. You have to guess, because I apparently can't type it without making the site disappear. It rhymes with "geography" and has to do with the sort of thing that happens when two people love each other very much. Or don't.
By asking people to put up warnings about that sort of thing, we were causing a whole section of our site to simply disappear for people on restricted networks. The offending word has been removed, and so far the edit page appears to be arriving intact again for the people who were having this issue. If you know someone who had this problem, please let them know to try again. And if they're still having this problem, please let them know how much we'd love it if they'd report it so that we can fix it for them.
In other news that will effect everyone, you can now change the order in which your gallery images display in exactly the same way you can reorder your widgets and vital stats. Just drag them around. You know the drill!
Private messages have also had a number of tiny but annoying bugs picked out of them, and some extra navigation links have been added to news pages.
And off in the distance, the rumble of approaching forums and a more streamlined system of adding new featured characters is getting louder.
Comments
... *Embarrassed* 
.
At least the "bug" (Because it's irritating... and scary!) has disappeared, and the error is resolved.
.At least the "bug" (Because it's irritating... and scary!) has disappeared, and the error is resolved
.
@Armaina It's a possibility that that could happen at some point in the future. It would require the existing gallery databases to be redone in a different structure, so not a minor change. I'll add it to the list of suggestions for consideration though! For now I would make use of the description or title of your images to let people know who the artist is. 
Ooh glad to hear about the new updates regarding galleries and stats. Any chance we may have the option for multiple gallery widgets? I'd kinda like to have two different galleries, one for my art and one for anything drawn by someone else. I mean I could put them all in the same widget I just worry about people getting the art mixed up, if that makes any sense.
Every page on the site is styled exclusively through CSS. I don't know why your system would be overriding it.
You should put in a CSS sheet because my system theme is over-riding your text to make it purple and I can barely see anything on the site with this background scheme.
Yeah! I'm not sure if it can even rightly be called a bug, since there wasn't actually anything wrong with the code. But what else do you call it? Glitch? Crazy interaction?
Whoa. That was a weird bug, and a rather weird solution. 
Well, I'm glad it's been solved.Huzzah! It's great news the gallery items can be re-ordered now!
Especially for the large galleries where the most recent images are shown first.
Kim
August 18, 2010
7:42pm