URL to your eFiction: http://fiction.tokiohotelfiction.com
Version of eFiction: 3.5
Have you bridged eFiction, if so with what?: no
Version of PHP: [can be found out from your host] latest
Version of MySQL: [can be found out from your host] latest
Have you searched for your problem: (yes/no) yes
If so, what terms did you try: story count, coauthors
Do you have a test account for us? yes
Name: tester
Password: 12345
State the nature of your problem: Copy and paste any errors you are receiving.
We're having two problems with our archive right now. The first problem, we've had this issue before and we fixed it, but we can't remember what we did. So we hope someone can remind us again how to fix this.
Our story counts are off, specifically in the authors' profiles. Some authors have around 30 stories, and it will say they only have 4. Tonight we attempted to recalc the stories by going into "Archive Maintenance" and selecting Recalculate Stories. However, when we did this, it actually made the problem more of a... problem. One author went from having 5 stories to 2. Is there anything we can do to recalc the number of stories correctly?
Our second problem is something new. We have quite a few authors contacting us saying that stories they haven't written are showing up in their profile. We were at a loss as to what was going on, but then we figured out what was happening. When an author posts a story and adds a coauthor, whether on accident or purposefully, if they try to remove this coauthor, the coauthor's name is taken off the story, but the story still remains in the coauthor's profile. A lot of our members are getting quite upset about this problem because people have similar pennames and they are accidentally adding the wrong people to their stories.
If this issue is explained somewhere on the forum, we'd really appreciate a link to it. We apologize if we've missed anything.
Thanks for your time. 🙂
Did you try using all of the re-calculate tools? Sometimes all of them need to be run in order for the mis-count to be fixed.
I noticed the same problem with coauthors on my test site, and I haven't yet figured out how to fix it. I'll try to take a look at that today and see if I can sort it out. It might just be something that has to be fixed in the database. For now I suggest turning off coauthors; it's a bit buggy with 3.5, it seems.
As for the other problems, running all the recalculation tools might help. I think one of them may be labeled incorrectly (or at least their descriptions are mixed around). I had issues with counting after I upgraded to 3.5 and when I ran all the tools it fixed it.
Is yours a fresh install or an update? If I'm remembering this right, the update adds the field stories to fanfiction_authorprefs, which is I think where the count gets pulled from in 3.5, so you should maybe check that the field was really added.
Thanks so much for the ideas. We just ran all the recalc tools and the numbers are still off... We really don't know what to do to fix it. Can we do anything in the database?
As for coauthors, we really can't turn off the function because coauthors are really huge on our site. Sooo many stories are coauthored. Our site is actually running the version before 3.5. We did upgrade but ran into a few problems with it, so we went back to the previous version. Our site still says we're running 3.5 though. I don't know if that gives any insight as to what's going on.
Does anybody have other ideas on how to maybe resolve some of these problems? I guess the story counts being off isn't really a huge deal but the members are getting upset over the coauthor thing.
Uh... forgive me for making wild-accusations here, but those skins looks and awful lot like my Jelly/Teal Deer skins. Did you use them as a base and then accidentally remove my credit links from the footer while you were editing?
Skins made by Kali are no longer supported!
So I've got an example of the coauthors thing:
http://efictiontest.verilyviridian.com/viewuser.php?action=storiesby&uid=14
But when you look here (second down) it doesn't have a coauthor:
http://efictiontest.verilyviridian.com/browse.php?type=categories&catid=1
I added elyaeru (Jenny, here) as a coauthor to that story when I was testing it out because of another problem, and even after I remove her the story still appears in her profile. In fanfiction_coauthors there is an entry that reads sid 26 and uid 14. That's the sid for the story and the uid for elyaeru.
I removed that entry from the database and the story no longer appears in her profile. (Then I re-applied her and deleted again so that it would still appear that way for the example above.)
What's actually happening is that the script isn't deleting that entry like it should. When I go to edit a story that has a coauthor, no coauthors are actually appearing at all on the list, not even the ones that have been applied before. So I change nothing on the form and submit it again. This probably explains why that entry in fanfiction_coauthors isn't being deleted, but there must be somewhere else in the database that makes the names appear in browse which IS overwritten when I re-submit the form.
I'm going to try to find that part of the script and scope it out. In the meantime, as long as you know what the problem stories are you can delete the entries in fanfiction_coauthors manually.
Two things that should be changed: (this is mostly meant to be a note to self)
1) When a story is edited, the current coauthors need to appear on the coauthors list
2) Something like "check for coauthors for the story. if they exist and form is empty, drop entries from fanfiction_coauthors" of course "if they already exist, do nothing. if they don't, add" but that last part is definitely there already.
Uh... forgive me for making wild-accusations here, but those skins looks and awful lot like my Jelly/Teal Deer skins. Did you use them as a base and then accidentally remove my credit links from the footer while you were editing?
We did use your skins, but I don't remember taking your credit out. Was there ever a time when you didn't have your credit links in the footer? We're really sorry, it must be our mistake. We'll add your credit on immediately. Thanks for making these amazing skins. It definitely wasn't intentional to remove your credit links.
ETA: Well, we just figured out what happened with the Teal Deer layout. Your link is at the bottom, it's just that the links on our footer are all white, and so is the background, so your link was invisible at the bottom until hovering over it. We just didn't notice it, sorry. We fixed that one so that it's coloured.
We don't know what happened with the other layout. 🙁 Sorry. We added it in, because we definitely want to give credit to you. We'd be really upset if someone did that to us, so thanks for being cool about it. 🙂
So I've got an example of the coauthors thing:
http://efictiontest.verilyviridian.com/viewuser.php?action=storiesby&uid=14
But when you look here (second down) it doesn't have a coauthor:
http://efictiontest.verilyviridian.com/browse.php?type=categories&catid=1I added elyaeru (Jenny, here) as a coauthor to that story when I was testing it out because of another problem, and even after I remove her the story still appears in her profile. In fanfiction_coauthors there is an entry that reads sid 26 and uid 14. That's the sid for the story and the uid for elyaeru.
I removed that entry from the database and the story no longer appears in her profile. (Then I re-applied her and deleted again so that it would still appear that way for the example above.)
What's actually happening is that the script isn't deleting that entry like it should. When I go to edit a story that has a coauthor, no coauthors are actually appearing at all on the list, not even the ones that have been applied before. So I change nothing on the form and submit it again. This probably explains why that entry in fanfiction_coauthors isn't being deleted, but there must be somewhere else in the database that makes the names appear in browse which IS overwritten when I re-submit the form.
I'm going to try to find that part of the script and scope it out. In the meantime, as long as you know what the problem stories are you can delete the entries in fanfiction_coauthors manually.
Two things that should be changed: (this is mostly meant to be a note to self)
1) When a story is edited, the current coauthors need to appear on the coauthors list
2) Something like "check for coauthors for the story. if they exist and form is empty, drop entries from fanfiction_coauthors" of course "if they already exist, do nothing. if they don't, add" but that last part is definitely there already.
Hi,
We're a little confused. When we go into fanfiction_coathors, it only shows one user ID for each story ID. When we go in to edit, it just shows the UID of the person who posted it. There's no other way to take out other authors. Are we missing something?
Thanks so much for all of your help with this. I feel like we're getting to the bottom of it, but we're still confused. We'll reread your reply a few more times. 🙂
ETA: We figured it out! Thanks so much for your help. If you find a permanent solution for this where we don't have to manually go in and edit everything, that would be awesome. 🙂 Thanks again!!
Question: what are the exact version numbers of your PHP & MySQL? I haven't had a chance yet to start looking at this, but it would be helpful if it ends up being something because of the version of either (I am wondering if we have similar). I suspect that it is probably something that is affecting everyone, though.
Question: what are the exact version numbers of your PHP & MySQL? I haven't had a chance yet to start looking at this, but it would be helpful if it ends up being something because of the version of either (I am wondering if we have similar). I suspect that it is probably something that is affecting everyone, though.
Hey,
PHP Version 5.2.5
MySQL Version 4.0.21
🙂
