Bugs & Maintenance Requests (Page 2 of 4)

I'm having to sign in a lot lately. Is there something you can do? Thanks.

I typically get kicked out after about 15-20 minutes.

Yup, Chrome. Is there a way for me to change that setting?

I dunno.  Chrome don't do that to me

Sol, I'm still getting error messages from Bitdefender and Chrome that the urls in the emails the site generates are unsafe. This evening, I received an email notification from TNBW that another member had posted a new chapter. When I clicked on it, first Google intercepted it, then Bitdefender, and then Google again. They must really not like your emails. LoL.

Will a fix for these email links be forthcoming? Again, this comes down to trying to give new members the confidence to remain on the site. See next post for more details.

Also, please see the discussion on forum timeouts earlier on this page. (Separate problem.)

Thanks
Dirk

Emails are actually quite hard. So many services are on the look-out for mass Emails with slightly similar bodies, you can land your server on RBLs within minutes. Same with SMS these days. My own phone company (Rogers) is on one which makes me laugh. Every time they try to text me their latest offer, my phone tosses it into junk without asking.

This will not be easy to solve, I fear

Sol, can the broken email links and overly short forum timeouts be fixed? See earlier posts/discussion for details.

I keep asking, but I haven't seen a reply.

Thanks
Dirk

I'll also take care of the cookie problems.

Sol, another issue that new users run into is that the Home/Portfolio screen, which is accessed via the Post Your Writing button along the top menu strip, causes confusion because of the big red Add New Content button on that screen. If someone is trying to add a second chapter to a recently created book, new users hit the red button and end up accidentally adding a second book rather than just a new chapter. This costs them even more points to correct it. I've seen new members add as many as three books before realizing their mistake.

Makes me wonder how many trial members we lost after they ran into this that we don't know about.

The fix ought to be easy:

Change the label on the red button to Create New Work and add a warning below the button something like: "To ADD A CHAPTER to an existing book, use the Action buttons below." ADD A CHAPTER really needs to stand out in some way because the red button draws most of the attention. Although not foolproof, this should stop most new members from doing it wrong (the ones who slow down long enough to read).

There is some online help that shows the "Add New Content" button that probably should be updated as well.

Thanks
Dirk

Create New Work is probably better than add, start, or new. When it's a smaller work (short story, poem, essay, article, etc.), you essentially create it and you're done. For a book, you create it and then can come back later to add more chapters (via the action buttons).

Looks like I found a bug with "epilogue" chapter numbering. I wrote an epilogue for one of my books and posted it as chapter 46. I then looked for and found that one of the chapter numbers you can set for a chapter is "epilogue", so I changed 46 to epilogue, and the chapter disappeared. I would have expected it to turn up as chapter 100, but after some trial and error, it turns out the system set the chapter number to 0, same as my prologue.

Since both chapters subsequently had the same chapter number and version number, I was unable to bring up the epilogue chapter, even though it showed in the pick list of all chapters on the posting view. Every time I picked it, the system would show the prologue, which was the first chapter numbered 0 in my book, whereas the epilogue was the second chapter numbered 0.

I was able to work around the problem by going into the EDIT wizard (the white button) and changing the chapter number of the epilogue to something unused (e.g., 100). Naturally, the workaround isn't going to be at all obvious if you don't know a bit about database records and how they're stored and retrieved. It actually appeared at first as if the epilogue had gone completely missing until I spotted it in the pick list following the prologue.

I assume the correct behavior is for the system to set the chapter number to 100, not 0. If so, then the fix should be fairly easy.