Another new bug

[TheLobster]

I just tested the story in a browser that has never accessed Literotica before, and Page 7 displayed correctly, FWIW.

(I was trying to capture errors in the browser console, but there were none.)

--Rocco

This is a Javascript issue; you won’t see it on a fresh render of the story. Something is broken when fetching next page after you click on the navigation at the bottom. They probably tried making it so the switch happens without a full page reload, and introduced some discrepancy between server-side and client-side rendering.

In other words, they poked the plate of spaghetti, and it no longer wobbles as it should and some bits of bolognese beef are falling off.

 

[MillieDynamite]

RTF is the way to go.

I am still trying to be positive about the site, but it's hard when they screwed up displaying my story in such a way to make it almost unreadable. I would much rather have my story in purgatory -- I just suffered through one there for two months while staying positive. My last two bits of feedback on the story were roughly, I liked the story but it got too confusing at the end. Did you forget to put in section breaks?

No they were there but the site could not do the only fucking thing it has to absolutely do. RENDER THE DAMNED STORY AS THEY GOT IT! The one fucking unforgivable sin in my mind. I care about my ratings and I hate the 1-bombers, but I can live with that. It's infuriating to sit and wait to see if a story will ever appear. But I'm the only one who gets to screw up my story. I do enough of that myself without having the site screwup the single thing it needs to get right.

I am very close to going nuclear. What's next? Randomly not displaying paragraphs in the middle of your stories? Why should any of us risk letting them show some mangled form of our writing?

 

[Britva415]

No, everyone on the internet does that. There is no point sending extraneous whitespace, like line breaks, when the syntax of the languages that build the web (HTML, CSS, Javascript) ignore the vast majority of spaces.

There is even a name for this process, of taking a normally readable source code and smashing it into "compressed" form that's still readable to programs. It's called minification.


If Literotica ever gets this kind of bugs, then that's game over for the site.

brb trying to submit a story that reads ; DELETE TABLE stories;

@LittleBobbysMom, is that you?

 

[IWroteThis]

brb trying to submit a story that reads ; DELETE TABLE stories;

There's another story site out there that replaces every instance of "script" and "select" in stories, so you find things like "de******ion" instead of description and "******ion" instead of selection.

It would appear they are running some old code that they know is vulnerable to certain attacks and it's easier to filter those words than update the code.

 

[TheLobster]

There's another story site out there that replaces every instance of "script" and "select" in stories, so you find things like "de******ion" instead of description and "******ion" instead of selection.

The aptly named Scunthorpe effect.

 

[RocketGrunt]

It chokes on center-aligned text even if there's no html in the original document. It's causing me this problem on a story where it was simply a .doc file where the scene breaks are center-aligned ####.

When you load a page, the scene breaks are present. When you go from one page to the next from within Literotica, all the scene breaks vanish.

I checked the page source, and the center aligned text is there both times. It's just not displaying when you click to the next page. And then when the center aligned text doesn't get displayed, the white space is compacted so there's no break between the last paragraph before the hidden text and the first paragraph after.

This is a pretty bad bug and makes a lot of stories hard to read and understand.

 

[IWroteThis]

So, I took another look at the HTML source file. The story text is actually in there twice. The section where the < is replaced with \x3C is not what is being used by the browser. I missed it the first time, but that section doesn't have the paragraph tags added.

The second instance of the story, which does have the <p> and </p> that I see when I use the Inspect feature of my browser, so I'm sure that's the one it's using. That section does have all of the expected < symbols.

The code that is displayed when I do View Source did not match what Inspect was showing me, but the Debugger said I had to reload the page. After the reload, Inspect showed me the same code as I got with View Source, so it seems to be confirmed that it's a bug in what is sent when you click on the next page link as opposed to opening it any other way. Copying the link and pasting it into the URL bar displays the page correctly. I did notice that even when clicking on the link to the first page, it always loads correctly.

So, it's only the links that have ?page= in them that trigger the bug, and only if clicked on directly.

 

[iwatchus]

It chokes on center-aligned text even if there's no html in the original document. It's causing me this problem on a story where it was simply a .doc file where the scene breaks are center-aligned ####.

When you load a page, the scene breaks are present. When you go from one page to the next from within Literotica, all the scene breaks vanish.

I checked the page source, and the center aligned text is there both times. It's just not displaying when you click to the next page. And then when the center aligned text doesn't get displayed, the white space is compacted so there's no break between the last paragraph before the hidden text and the first paragraph after.

This is a pretty bad bug and makes a lot of stories hard to read and understand.

Do the breaks come back if you refresh the page (I'm guessing so.) This actually means that submitting your story as .docx does not fix the problem.

It seems like centering was broken (intermittently) in the last week or so for all stories. As I have said repeatedly, I believe that not correctly rendering our stories is the one unforgivable sin.

 

[IWroteThis]

Do the breaks come back if you refresh the page (I'm guessing so.) This actually means that submitting your story as .docx does not fix the problem.

Yes. It's just when you click on a link with ?page= at the end that the bug appears. If you copy and paste it into the URL bar, it loads fine the first time. If you do View Source on the broken page, it actually gives you the source code for the correct page, not the buggy version. The only way to see that code is to use the Inspect tool in your browser.

 

[RocketGrunt]

So my latest chapter got comments from seven different people that specifically called out my inconsistent use of scene headers. Plus a few more who thought there were editing problems but didn't specify what they were. It's a genuine problem. Note that every one of those people saw the text as messed up and assumed that it was sloppiness on my part, rather than that the site is hiding my scene transitions from them because of a bizarre and inconsistent bug. That's almost one comment in three was just berating me for the editing "mistakes" that Literotica's bug put into my mouth.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I've actually sat down to read one story this weekend, and it had an author comment about broken scene breaks.

 

[iwatchus]

I sent a note to Laurel yesterday asking if I could get an immediate edit pushed through that only removed the center tags (I also submitted the edit with a note asking for expedited treatment). No response or action.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I sent a note to Laurel yesterday asking if I could get an immediate edit pushed through that only removed the center tags (I also submitted the edit with a note asking for expedited treatment). No response or action.

Every time I've ever asked for this kind of change, Laurel has directed me to submit an edit with the changes I want.

 

[iwatchus]

I did submit the edit as well, but nothing has happened with it yet,.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I did submit the edit as well, but nothing has happened with it yet,.

Did you include a note in the "NOTES TO THE ADMIN" section stating this edit is correcting for a rendering bug in the HTML code? Something like that might get Laurel's attention and push it to the top of the pile.

 

[iwatchus]

Did you include a note in the "NOTES TO THE ADMIN" section stating this edit is correcting for a rendering bug in the HTML code? Something like that might get Laurel's attention and push it to the top of the pile.

Yes I did. And pointed out that the only changes are i the tags whose behavior has changed.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Yes I did. And pointed out that the only changes are i the tags whose behavior has changed.

You have done everything you can reasonably do, within your control.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I did submit the edit as well, but nothing has happened with it yet,.

Edits are always slow.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Edits are always slow.

Not always, especially when there are mistakes and Laurel is aware of them. I've had edits be pushed through for display problems in short order.

That being said, my experience with this was under ideal circumstances where there were no large site-wide problems affecting publishing and edit queues.

 

[iwatchus]

Edits are always slow.

As @AwkwardMD said, I'm hoping she would do this out of order because of the situation. It's why I sent her a note as well as asking for the expedited consideration.

I'm trying to leave stories up. If they don't fix this soon, I feel I have little choice but to start pulling stories off the site, s move I do not want to make.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Don't misunderstand, please. I hope she already did the edit before I posted this. I hope Manu already fixed the bug, and it'll go live later today.

I just don't expect those things right now.

--Annie

 

[AwkwardlySet]

As @AwkwardMD said, I'm hoping she would do this out of order because of the situation. It's why I sent her a note as well as asking for the expedited consideration.

I'm trying to leave stories up. If they don't fix this soon, I feel I have little choice but to start pulling stories off the site, s move I do not want to make.

The irony is that, even if you decide to go for such a radical move, god only knows how long it will take for your delete request to go through.
The channels of communication simply don't work anymore.

 

[iwatchus]

Some good news. Laurel did push through the edit last night. I prefer my section breaks centered, but that is minimal compared to having them missing. Thank you @Laurel.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

On a positive note, I checked my profile and I now see that the manually created series now show up in the correct order when sorted alphabetically. For the longest time, the series were sorted in the position of the name of the first story in the series. Normally this wouldn't be an issue but I had a series that was named differently than any of the story titles included in it and it bugged me that the series was out of order.

 

[AwkwardMD]

Some good news. Laurel did push through the edit last night. I prefer my section breaks centered, but that is minimal compared to having them missing. Thank you @Laurel.

I'm really glad this got through.

Bugs are gonna happen, and when they happen they hit everyone. We're not immune to bugs just because we participate to a greater degree.