URL to your eFiction: http://www.measi.net/fanfiction/
Version of eFiction: 3.4.3
Have you bridged eFiction, if so with what?: No
Version of PHP: 5.2.5
Version of MySQL: 5.0.45
Have you searched for your problem: Yes
If so, what terms did you try: Admin, co-author remove
State the nature of your problem: Site is randomly assigning my admin account as a co-author to stories I did not write
Do you have a test account for us? No, but can make if necessary.
Hi all-
My webhost recently transitioned its servers, and everything appeared to be running fine. Then this morning I noticed that my name (Measi) is being added as a co-author to over 100 stories that I did not write.
I have not adjusted any settings. Any recommendations on how to solve this?
Thanks,
Melissa
Is it still happening, or is it done? By that I mean have you noticed your name added to any stories since the move, or do you think it all happened during the move?
To get rid of them the easiest thing would be to go into PHPMyAdmin or similar, and search all instances of your uid in fanfiction_coauthors. If you really are a coauthor on any stories, delete all the records except for that one.
There is one other component to coauthors, and that is a field in fanfiction_stories called coauthors, which is set to 0 or 1 depending on whether or not the story is coauthored or not. You might want to check that out to see if that's been changed. Also, see this thread, though that might not affect you until you upgrade (I'm trying to gather more data).
It's a new development - I'm assuming it happened during the move, but can't be sure.
I'll try the suggestion to go into PHPAdmin and see if removing my name does the trick, and then update.
Update: I was unable to search the co-author field. (I've never allowed them, so I'm not surprised - there shouldn't be any information in there).
However- your second mention that the co-author field in the fanfiction_stories may have changed appears to be the issue. Some of them have a one, some have a zero. I've trial-tested changing a couple of the "1"s to "0"s, and that appears to be removing my name and leaving the correct author as it should be.
Thanks for the quick assistance - I'm going to leave this open just in case until I get them changed and make sure nothing else comes up, and then will update it as solved.
Hmm. Well, when you turn those 1s to 0s, it's telling the script "there are no coauthors, so don't even bother looking in fanfiction_coauthors to find out who they might be." I think you should still try to clean up fanfiction_coauthors. I'm not sure what you mean by being unable to search it. Were there no entries? When I had a bunch of 1s that shouldn't have existed, it wasn't throwing in random coauthor names (or I guess maybe uid=1?), which makes me think that the entries probably do exist in your fanfiction_coauthors.
There were no entries in fanfiction_coauthors. The option to search is greyed out completely.
My user ID is #1, so maybe that's why it's doing it?
But the script *should* be telling it to say there are no co-authors. There have never been any on the site. I've always had the co-author setting turned to "no."
Hmm. I wonder what the difference is, then? Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter too much. I think when you turn coauthors off, it must only make it so that the option to add coauthors disappears from the Add New Story form. Because for instance on my site I had it turned on for a little while, so there are two stories that are coauthored, but then I turned it off (because it doesn't quite work properly when trying to edit the story, or remove coauthors, it doesn't delete/modify all the database entries properly). Those two stories still appear with their coauthors, and that's fine that they do. But I guess if the authors edited them, the coauthor would disappear (halfway) and they couldn't put it back.
Try updating to 3.5.1. That sounds like one of the bugs fixed from 3.4.3 to 3.5
