From what I understand, as far as your stories go, you shouldn't need to copy and paste them. If you have access to MySQL/your MySQL database tables, then you should be able to backup those stories at least and restore them at a later time.
From what I understand, as far as your stories go, you shouldn't need to copy and paste them. If you have access to MySQL/your MySQL database tables, then you should be able to backup those stories at least and restore them at a later time.
oh my gosh! that worked! thanks Becca!
I ended up loading a new site and using the databases to restore everything (except the fanfiction_settings which seemed to be causing the trouble)
http://www.sinful-dreams.com/whispered/muse/index.php?skin=SpuffyHaunted
I wanted to ask one more question along the lines of what I just did.
We tried to do another update on one of the sites I host, and things went bad, I hadn't realized that I could upload the databases into new sites (and actually it took me a couple tries to get it right this time) but if we uploaded all her fics already to the new site, is it possible to restore her reviews for those fics? or will it not place them in the right spot?
No problem, I've had a similar situation 🙂
Hm how did you upload all of her fics to her new site? Did you do them manually like copy and paste or something? If so the reviews might not be in the right spots.
yeah, that's how i did it
what is we replaced all the files and stories too so that all she would lose is the newest chapters and reviews? she had so many reviews before it might be worth it for her to do that, I'd have to ask her.
thanks again, i would never have gotten it all put back together so fast without you, lol
Hm I still think there might be a way to do it, I'm just not sure of the database structure of reviews at the moment. If reviews are associated/grouped with reviews then maybe you'd be able to match the reviews to whichever one they belong to. It would be slightly faster than copying and pasting a bunch of reviews, that's for sure.
What you could do is look at your old db and see how the reviews are grouped/associated, if they are associated we might be able to hackup a mysql query to grab reviews for each story and then for each story take those reviews and manually add them (with an sql query) to the proper story in your new database. Now, this is just a theory as my webserver is down at the moment and I don't have access to my databases 🙁
I once had an author with a story of 92 chapters and ~1500 reviews (and who knows how many favorites) accidentally delete her story. So, from that I learned that this is possible, however, you will probably have some different numbers going on. I'm going to break this down to make it as understandable as I can, because it's a bit confusing.
So say Old Site (Site A) has a story called Coolest Story Ever, with one chapter, Coolest Chapter. That chapter will have a chapid associated with it, say 87. If you look in fanfiction_reviews, you'll find a field called chapid. This is how reviews are matched up with their chapters. (Also, the table fanfiction_chapters has a field 'sid', which is the story ID, so that it knows what story each chapter belongs to.)
So, here's where your situation is a little more complicated. With the method you used to replace the stories, at the new site (Site B) say Coolest Story Ever's Coolest Chapter now has a chapid of 17. It went from 87 to 17. What you'd have to do is export all the reviews with chapid 87 from the old site, import them into the fanfiction_reviews at the new site, and then change all of their chapids to 17. You'd have to do this for each separate chapter. Of course, since both are known by checking in the database, you could build a query/script to do this for you.
Does that make sense?
EDIT: Also, it just occurred to me that reviews have their own numbering system: reviewid. When I was replacing accidentally deleted data it didn't matter, but for you it could be problematic, unless you're getting a full set from the old site. By this I mean if there's 200 reviews, that they're all 1-200 as the reviewid. If there's chunks missing out of the sequence, I'm not sure how the script will react. I suspect it would probably be okay (reviews get deleted all the time). Exception: if your site already has reviews, then you could end up with two reviews with the same reviewid, which would be bad bad as the primary key is reviewid (hence I don't think it would be allowed).
And then, there's the problem of the reviewer. All the UIDs/names for the reviewers are probably going to be different as well.
(There's also a field 'item' which I am unsure of the purpose.)
(what happened for the 2nd question)
OK, what i ended up doing was just loading the reviews by hand (almost 1600 of them) it would have taken longer to search for each code for reviewid, review number, storyid and chapter id. It actually only took us (both working on it) about 2 days of random adding. It wasn't wonderful but it was doable. I had also tried making another site and uploading all the databases into it, but it errored out. It must have been because the databases were for an older version.
(original request for help)
I never got the original error solved, but once I made an eFiction site (with a different name) and just uploaded all the databases into it, minus the _fanfiction_settings database (since that appeared to have the problem) everything was wonderful with no problems. I just had to change all my links. Or if someone else had to do this they would delete the old one when it was done and change the new one to that name/url as long as they rememebered to change their settings once they had done that.
Thanks again to everyone who helped!
