Please Don't Repost Stories without talking to staff

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Here's a link to the list of "lost stories".

Lost Stories

See, they're not really lost! Most of these got mislaid by the recent drive failure and database rebuild but almost half have gotten losted by various transient problems at other times the server went down.

The list can be sorted in various ways with the little control panel in the upper left corner. If you are an author with stories on the list, you can click on your story and edit it to contain the proper categories. If you understand outlining and the story needs it, you can do that too. Please, it would be an enormous help to us, there are over 200 of these missing stories and we've already worked on fifty or more figuring out just what can be done.

Fixing the missing categories won't fix everything. Fixing the outlining may cause (harmless, but confusing) ghost entries in the outlining. Some stories may still not appear on the My Stories list on the author account page. We have fixes for all these problems but they are labor intense so a bit of help putting in missing categories will be enormous.

Thanks and hugs,
Erin, Piper, Cat, Sephy et al.

Comments

Story Fixed

littlerocksilver's picture

I re-edited Simoné and the Second Time Around, and redid the categories. I think it's ready to go.

Portia

Ok, I will edit my ones

But I confess I don't understand.

I have stories numbered from 000 to 018, arranged in two 'Anthologies'. And a number 999.

In your list you have my stories numbered from 000 to 016. You do not mention the Anthologies.

The one story I have a problem with is number 017.

This does not appear in the list when I select "My Stories".
All the others do appear there, 000 to 016 inclusive and 018 - and the Anthologies.
When I call up one these stories, then in the site's right hand column there appears a list of all these stories, and the anthologies, and 017 is duplicated in this list.
The only way I have to access #017 is to call up eithe #016 or #018, and use the effective' previous' or 'next' button at the bottom of it.

So you are telling me that YOUR list of missing stories includes all but one of those that appear under "My Stories", but the one missing from there is NOT in your list. And the one after that is not in your list.

I also noticed that some of the comments on either 000 or 001 still contain some of those strange dodgy characters.

Sorry to be being thick

Julia

Huh?

erin's picture

I understood not more than 1/4 of the explanation of what it was that you did not understand. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

It is simple .....

....

1) Your list of 'lost' stories includes some of mine. Seventeen of them to be precise.

ALL of these, every single one, are not lost to me when I log in. They are listed in 'My Stories'. As far as I am concerned they are NOT lost.

2) However, I have two more stories which do not appear on your list. And I must therefore conclude that you do not consider them to be lost.
As identification of what those stories are, I have provided you with a part of their title.

All my stories have a three-figure number in their titles. The 'list' mentioned in 1) above, goes from 000 up to and including 016 - making a total of seventeen stories in all - which you consider to be lost and which I do not.

As mentioned, I have 2 other stories - numbered 017 and 018.

018 also appears in my list under 'My Stories'. So this is not lost as far as both of us are concerned.

However ---------- 017 does NOT appear there in your list, nor does it appear under 'My Stories'.
So to me it IS 'lost' ---- and yet, to repeat, you do not mention it in your list.

The only way that I have to access this story of mine is to either load 016 or load 018, and then use the 'previous' or 'next' links created at the bottom of that story that I have successfully called up. I am unable to access it directly because it does NOT appear in my list of my stories.

3) Whenever anyone accesses one of my stories, then in the right-hand column of the site, a list of associated stories is presented. In THAT list, the one that appears in the right-hand column, then my story with '017' in the title appears TWICE. HUH???? How is that possible?

I trust this is now clear to you?

Cheers

Julia

Missing and Phantom

Piper's picture

The "basic" Description of what we are considering a lost story, are stories that for some reason, are stored in the database, without any Keywords, Categories, Author, Rating, etc.

In fact, what we did to create the "lost stories" page, was tell the system "Show us all stories that don't have any of these things" and it gives us the list you see.

We know there is a much smaller list of stories, that do not show up on an authors "My Stories" page. This is an error that we are working to correct as best we can as we find them. Thank you for taking a moment to point out the story that is missing from your My Stories page.

The fact that number 17 shows up in the "Book Outline" twice, is what we call a "Phantom" entry, and something that we again, need to edit manually out of the database as we find them, so thank you for taking a moment to point that one out to us.

-Piper


"She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them."
— Geraldine Brooks


Lost stories go back to 2008

I was looking through the list, out of curiosity, and was surprised that some of these stories go back to 2008. So don't assume you don't have a story on the list because you haven't submitted one recently.

This could be a new Julie O strory

Hallie Papademos and the Lost Big Closet stories. A mad scientist steals a gender changing potion from a BCTS author and begins changing unwittingly boys into young girls. Hallie stumbles onto the theft and the aftermath of the latest attacks and calls in the whole Co-Eds gang to retrieve the potion, restore the balance and find the missing BCTS stories.

Paula

Paula

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

The Coda
Chapterhouse: Dune

Great to see that the site is

Great to see that the site is being mended. Great work.

Now... my stories are back, but I can't edit them, I dont see the option as I used to, but when I look at them it is as if I'm reading someone else work. Not sure why, but as soon as I'm able to edit them I'll correct the categories and post chapter 4. (Working on following ones.)

Author status

erin's picture

You should be able to edit your stories now. The meltdown changed the Author bit on your account and I just changed it back.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

*HUGS*

Thank you Erin.

I'll start working right away! :)

And know that... you rock.

I think all of mine are taken care of.

littlerocksilver's picture

I noticed that at least one of Wren's was listed. Someone will have to take care of that. Are there any other deceased authors listed?

Portia

Stories.

All mine appear to be here, and orderly.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you appreciate my tales, please consider supporting me on Patreon so that I may continue:

https://www.patreon.com/Nagrij

Thank you for your efforts

I want to offer my sincere thanks for all the effort that you and the rest of the team have put in to dealing with the recent server problems. You are a bunch of true angels.

Thanks for making BCTS the wonderful site it is.

Hiker_JPG_1.jpg

Messed up

kristina l s's picture

I was going in today to clear up a few issues with a couple of stories, but they seem to have 'fixed themselves' overnight. One other thing that bothers me a little is that at least one of my stories a few comments have vanished. The count is higher than the actual 31 should be 28 in readable fact on one in particular, Fifteen Months.

I expect full deployment of resources to fix this disastrous situation...yeah, well if anything can be done it would be nice. That story matters to me, others less so, but.... you know...

Kris

Commentating

erin's picture

We'll try but missing comments and wrong comment counts have not yielded to an easy solution so far.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Common "Golden" Thread

The list of lost stories and their authors seems to indicate a common thread or two.

1.) All of the authors seemingly had something to say about the TG condition.

2.) All of the stories are lucky to have a place like BC where they can exist in peaceful harmony under a very few Golden Rules.

Some of the writers here are total crap . . . like me. Some of the writing here is garbage . . . like mine. Yet this refuse that would be eradicated in most settings works here.

Thanks Erin.

Jill

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

Minor Problems

I fixed up the categories on "Luck of the Draw" and it is no longer listed in the Lost Stories, which is good. But it's not under my "My Stories" either and I can't find it on the author page. When I fixed up the categories I couldn't find the 2014 Valentine's Day in the drop down but figured I'd fix it later. Now I can't seem to get to it at all.

Of course, I'm thankful for all the work you've done getting the site back up at all. We all appreciate that.

Thanks for any more help,

titania.jpg

Titania

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Fixed

I fixed it Titania.

Sephrena

Still missing I am afraid

We are aware that some of the stories from the lost list still do not appear on the "My Stories" page even after all of the normal fixes and work-arounds have been tried, we are still figuring out what is the underlying cause and associated fix for these.

Hugs
Cat

-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.

Fixed

Amethyst's picture

I fixed all twelve of mine on the list. Between my comp problems, crashing, and a short server outage it took me all of three hours, but it's done. I did Twice Removed... 8 as well. It wasn't on the list but had similar problems and like Titania I can't see it on my author page or in my stories.

Now to try to get some writing done again.

*hugs*

Amethyst

ChibiMaker1.jpg

Don't take me too seriously. I'm just kitten around. :3

Missing story

shiinaai's picture

Yay! My story is here! So let me confirm. I just need to fix the categories and outlines, right? If so, no problem! Thanks a lot.

Kinda wish

Kinda wish one or two of my stories were lost. :)

But I'm glad, seriously, that their fixing the problems.

A couple of nagging problems

You all are doing a fantastic job getting everything back to normal. So I thought I'd ask here before I did anything that would work against that. Seasons of Bailey: Winter - Part 5 was on the "lost" list, so I messed with the outline/keywords, and everything seems fine. Except it's not in the "My Stories" section. (Which I recall reading that's being fixed.) It's also listed twice in the outline; I just noticed.

However, when I went and looked at the other parts of the story, I noticed that all the tags were set to the same thing, and did not reflect what was there before. I don't mind going back to correct them all myself, if need be, but thought I would make sure first. I don't want to work you all into more problems. :P

~Taylor

~Taylor Ryan
My muse suffers from insomnia, and it keeps me up at night.

Tags and My Stories

erin's picture

Yes, go ahead and fix tags, when we do it, we just do a minimum that would fit any story because we don't have time to read the story or even think about have we read it.

As far as My Stories goes, we have not said that that is being fixed. We've said that it was being worked on. :) If we knew what to do to fix it, it would have been done already. Seriously, this is a mysterious problem and we have done several things to try to fix it and nothing has worked for all of the instances yet. The fact that some of the fixes have worked for some of the problems is crazy-making.

Being listed twice is called ghosting and we've worked on that, too. The last resort to solve ghosting is to hack the database and remove the ghost by hand. Since there are hundreds of them, and hacking the database that many times seems risky, we'd rather find another way so we keep looking. Last night, I found a way that got rid of a substantial number of ghosts, but not all.

Hope the comments here helped. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Just bang your head on it

It worked for the DeLorean. :P

~Taylor

~Taylor Ryan
My muse suffers from insomnia, and it keeps me up at night.

Going There and Back Again

thliwent's picture

Going There and Back Again 7-9 don't show up on my stories. Also don't show up in my outline despite being in the sidebar portion.

Outline ghost entries

What you were seeing in the sidebar is what is described elsewhere in this thread as ghost entries, I've put 7-9 back in but that means the sidebar currently shows two entries for each, this will be dealt with later. As for "My Stories" we are still working on a solution.

Hugs
Cat

-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.

Check again

You should see that 7 is now in your "My Stories" list, 8 and 9 should follow within the next day or two, it'll take some time because the process is only partially automated and what's left is 100% manual. You, and everyone else affected will have a blank for the last comment details until a fresh comment is posted.

Hugs
Cat

-
You can't choose your relatives but you can choose your family.

My story

I took care of the categories on my story. However, I notice that the read count and kudos were reset to zero.
It's not that big a deal for me as I'm not getting a lot of hits, but it might be more important to some of the others.

Thank you for all of your hard work.
Monica.

Nothing we can do

erin's picture

Nothing we can do about read counts and kudos, those are lost. Sorry.

We've been working all day on recovering comment counts and MyStories listing which we may have solved in the next couple days. Also, there are only 40 something stories on the Lost Stories list now and we will probably have all those found and put in the right places by the weekend. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.