I did a search for this, but couldnt find anything so hopefully someone can help.
I've set up my characters in all the categories and sub-categories (took ages) and when I go to Advanced search, there isnt even a box to select a character and nothing appears if I go through the cats...
Help?
Well first I've got to ask why you didn't use sitewide categories since your site has only one fandom? Having said that, it's a bug in the search script.
We didnt use sitewide because we wanted to set up some select sub categories with certain categories.
How do I fix the bug?
and while I'm here, how do I set the search to select Ctrl and click to select multiples or is that something that comes with using sitewide?
Actually, I have exactly the same problem as this - there is no search box for characters on the advanced search page. We don't have any sitewide characters because we originally set up all of the characters in version 1.1, when we set up the site, and such an option wasn't available.
I realise that you say that it's a bug, Tammy? Is it something that you're thinking of fixing in an update, or is it not a priority? I can imagine that there are lots of other things to do 🙂
If it's not, is there a way to set up site wide characters that will still show up in people's listings? i.e. if I set a site wide Rodney McKay, and delete all of the individual Rodney McKays from the categories, is there a way for anyone who has previously attached the category specific Rodney McKay to their stories to have the new site wide category Rodney McKay to automatically replace it? Or would all of our users have to edit their stories? Because I can imagine that would cause chaos and I think I'd rather wait for the bug fix, if it's coming 🙂
This has been addressed by one of my fellow admins, who, to quote her, ended up having to use custom, user-defined functions to replace the category specific characters with sitewide ones. She's done it on the test site, so we'll be rolling it out across our site some time this week.
Site information:
URL to your eFiction: http://www.wraithbait.com/
Version of eFiction: 3.2.1 (upgraded directly from 1.1)
Have you bridged eFiction, if so with what?: No.
Version of PHP: 4.4.2
Version of MySQL: 4.0.27
Have you searched for your problem: yes - it's how I found this thread
If so, what terms did you try: see above
Do you have a test account for us? Not needed as it's not member specific, but the advanced search page is http://www.wraithbait.com/search.php?searchtype=advanced
Thank you.
We don't have any sitewide characters because we originally set up all of the characters in version 1.1, when we set up the site, and such an option wasn't available.
You should have been able to set your characters up as sitewide simply by changing their category ID as -1 though something like phpMyAdmin.
Whoever said nothing is impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
url: https://www.potionsandsnitches.org/fanfiction
php: 7.4.33 msql: 5.6.51-community GPL
efic version: 3.5.5 latest patches: yes
bridges: none mods: challenges, tracker, story end, beta, word
You should have been able to set your characters up as sitewide simply by changing their category ID as -1 though something like phpMyAdmin.
Not when there's a separate version of each character in each subcategory (all 50+ of them) that need to be combined into one character each. You'd end up with multiple copies of all 50+ available sitewide, which is just as useless.
You can change that with phpMyAdmin as well. Change the extra ones to have the same ID as the main sitewide ones. Change them all in the story info first though.
Whoever said nothing is impossible never tried slamming a revolving door.
url: https://www.potionsandsnitches.org/fanfiction
php: 7.4.33 msql: 5.6.51-community GPL
efic version: 3.5.5 latest patches: yes
bridges: none mods: challenges, tracker, story end, beta, word
You can change that with phpMyAdmin as well. Change the extra ones to have the same ID as the main sitewide ones. Change them all in the story info first though.
Which we did, after I found two custom, user-defined mysql functions to use to update all 10,000+ stories and series directly in mysql so it didn't have to be done by hand--which, sure, could be done in phpmyadmin, but only if you despise the admin assigned to do all those changes.
The tables are not well-designed and, instead of using normalized tables that would make it a snap to make any site wide changes, use a datatype (SET) for categories, etc., that most mysql developers look askance at because it's useless 95% of time and misused the rest. So saying "it can be done in phpmyadmin" is a less-than-helpful response to 99% of the user base. PHP and mysql are two languages I use every day, so when it takes me a bit to figure out what the hell is supposed to be going on in undocumented code, it's abundantly clear that it's highly unlikely to make any sense at all to anyone who doesn't write code for a living.
