The AH Coffee Shop and Reading Room 09

[NotWise]

I believe that you shouldn't depend on typography, but the center tag issue wasn't a typographical problem. It removed text, not just formatting. Each time it occurred, two full lines, one with text and one without, were struck from the piece. Had it just been a broken tag with the text inside the tag still extant on the page, it wouldn't have caused so much confusion.


Could be. The toplist score and the score on the category page, series page and dashboard track each other; it's just that the toplist has been consistently 0.04 lower for the last month at least with the same number of ratings.

I have a very low-votes story where I was able to track all of the votes as they came in. There were months when the score shown by the site was higher than the score I calculated. I never understood why, but the difference eventually went away.

There be a few demons in the woodwork, and there always have been.

 

[NotWise]

That was not the case that I had. I (and many others include Wanda) had simply centered our section breaks (for me a series of +'s).

Some of the section breaks disappeared when stepping page by page through a story. Reloading the page brought them back. My complaint is not a visual one. The section breaks were wholy omitted from the rendered story, making changes in place and time unclear. This is not a case of typography. This is a case of the site not rendering text that is part of the story. Completely omitting pieces. As far as I can tell from the bug, it could just have easily been omitting italicized words at random from a story (not as the bug manifested, but a closely related bug).

They have the authority to change the typography of stories. Omitting text from the story is one hundred percent unacceptable and is where I draw the line.

It continues to be hard to get the idea across to writers. If you hadn't used centering to start with, you wouldn't have a problem.

I don't know why you have an on-going problem when I don't. There's nothing that you can do about it now, but you can avoid it in the future.

 

[iwatchus]

So I used a feature that the site says works to make my story look better. And they shit the bed unrelievedly badly and somehow this is my fault? It would have been fine if they simply ignored the center tag. I would have grumbled but the story stays readable. Dropping pieces of text from a story is beyond the pale unacceptable. This is THE one thing the site should get correct. Everything else is peanuts. Drop the formatting if you can't get it right sure. If that was my complaint, I would agree with you. But they actually deleted text from my story. Not for editorial reasons. Through sheer utter incompetence and unprofessionalism.

 

[Z_TheWriter]

So when you say don't rely on typography, do you mean don't use html tags? If so, does that mean you also don't use bold or itallic? Or do you literally mean no typography other than characters, spaces and line breaks? Like you won't have chapter headlines or some kind of separator between sections?

Genuine question, just trying to gauge what the advice is.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Have I ever told you guys I don't like cold weather? I don't. In the middle of the night, our heat and air unit went down. I'm here waiting on them to show up and make work again. Fortunately, it warmed a bit today. Still, I have every little hater we have turned on, two in my office. The other one is in the living room. It's 58 outside today. But it was down at 30ish when it went out last night. Irish coffee, anyone?

 

[NotWise]

So I used a feature that the site says works to make my story look better. And they shit the bed unrelievedly badly and somehow this is my fault? It would have been fine if they simply ignored the center tag. I would have grumbled but the story stays readable. Dropping pieces of text from a story is beyond the pale unacceptable. This is THE one thing the site should get correct. Everything else is peanuts. Drop the formatting if you can't get it right sure. If that was my complaint, I would agree with you. But they actually deleted text from my story. Not for editorial reasons. Through sheer utter incompetence and unprofessionalism.

It isn't your fault, but it's a problem you can avoid. There have always been problems with the site rendering some html tags. KeithD's advice to avoid typography was in part because using typography is a cheap trick that can be used in place of better writing, and in part because knowing the tags that can be used and getting those tags rendered correctly are long standing, on and off problem that you can avoid by not using them.

It would not be within the site's intent to drop any text from a published story. I can't say that with authority, but I can say it with a little familiarity with the site. Doing so was a mistake that I imagine they'll correct when they understand the problem and have time to fix it.

I can't tell from here what their task list is, how they prioritize it, or how much time/effort/staff they can commit to solving your problem. Neither can you. You can fix the problem by submitting an edit, or you can wait.

Complaining is the new most-popular thing to do on AH.