Running out of patience with the site. An hour.

deleted duplicate post.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2006 09:45PM by pmartzen.

Some additional information is necessary to help solve the problem. There is a bug trakker ticket about a similar problem that I experienced, but I can't tell if it is the same problem or completely different without some description of what happened.

What were you working on?
Were you still logged in when you tried to udate or save the work?
Did you lose just the work of that hour or was even previous work lost?
In my case, I lost not only the most recent work on a river page but all past work on the page being updated. It was wiped completely clean and I had to reconstruct it from the ground up. I have not heard of any one else having that disastrous an experience and I hope that is not what you experienced.

If you were working on a river page gauge descripton or river description, did you checkmark the text or html options. No change is the default and any edits are lost if that is left checked.

Even though you are really angry, the rest of us need you to describe step by step what you did, or else we have no idea if we are vulnerable as well.

In the past I have not been saving my work on my own harddrive before updating work to the AW website. But Matt and others do, so I am trying to get in that habit also. Might start a discussion on how best to save webpage work on our own computors so if the update does not take we still have the work on our own harddrive. Maybe just File/Save as/ html

Basically, I was typing a river description for a page in NC. I DID check the html box, as I have learned my lesson on that one. I typed for a solid hour, put alot of effort into it, and now I have nothing to show for it. Its enraging, and I am getting tired of it as this has happened in the past a handfull of times.

I guess I could have saved it on my hard drive first but I didn't, and now its gone.

Does anyone know how to find it on your compiter? I heard that nothing is ever really lost you just have to learn how to find it. I hope Ican because I really am not up for doing it again. I guess the Upper East Fork of the Tuckaseegee will just be descriptionless from now on.

Kirk

What i would do before submiting a large peice of information like that is highlight the whole section and paste it into a word document. but man that sucks u lost all that information.
-Jake

I assume you were typing in your browser? You might check your browser's page history and see if the info is still retained in the cache. I use Drazzle's strategy of copy and paste into another text app until I see the page has updated properly.

I empathize with your plight. There are two problems at work here.

The website needs a programming construct called transactions, which guarantees the data being deleted is replaced by the data that is overwriting it. The basis for the code that underlies the river editor for the Stream team is 10 years old and was developed before transactions existed in the open source database that website was developed against. It is my intention to replace the old code with transactional code when I rewrite gage processing later this year.

The other problem is that a browser makes a poor choice for a client in a database system. The Web simply was not developed for handling applications. Obviously it has been adapted to fit this purpose, but the lack of local storage, good security, and management of state make the task of developing a distributed database very difficult. To prevent problems as a user, I often have to type the document my word processor and paste it into the field on the web site. I also frequently save the source material so that it is available if the browser messes up.

I will do all I can to make the task of maintaining river data as pleasant as possible, but there's a lot of work to be done (like removing the stupid HTML or text radio box and modernizing the forms). Please bear with me over the next couple months as I try to improve the user experience.

Ryan

It is certainly frustrating to lose a lot of work. On the streampage where I lost the whole page, I lost it twice before I figured out how to work around the problem. My third version of the page lacked many features of my first and second versions, but eventually I will get back to it make it what I want. The problem it turned out was that the website was logging me off before I was finished typing. I didn't notice and I was logged out when I attempted to update the page. Why all data on the page was deleted, I will never know, but I make sure I am still logged in when I update a page. Now that cookies are working again, I am always logged in and it is not a problem.

If I had been working in a text editor or word processor as Ryan suggests, it would not have been a problem at all. I could do all the work offline, then copy and paste into the web editor in a minute or two. As well it would be easy to save a copy of my work as a text document.

If you work in a word processor (which I recommend, as well), you might want to switch off some of its fancy-pants features. MS Word will change "straight quotes" to “smart quotes,” which don't always display correctly in the river descriptions. (They'll sometimes be replaced by question marks.) So I recommend un-checking most of the "AutoCorrect" options in MS Word before you start typing.

Agreed that it makes a lot of sense to type everything out using a program on your computer and then cut and paste the information into the appropriate fields in the browser. I use an html editor and just write everything out in that and save a copy of all articles, river descriptions, etc. locally on my hard drive. Much of the content I submit to the site I write when I'm offline (e.g. riding on the bus).

Thomas O'Keefe
Pacific Northwest Stewardship Director
American Whitewater
3537 NE 87th St.
Seattle, WA 98115

425-417-9012
okeefe@amwhitewater.org