We're Back! (Updated)

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We'll be working on problems here for most of the weekend it looks like, so be patient and be kind. :)

Here's a list of known problems.

  1. Site going up and down. Working on this, software optimizations will help but really, we are limping along on old hardware at this point. New iron is on order! UPDATE: we're limping a lot less now, thanks to Piper's efforts at optimization even with the wounded server we are still running.
  2. Garbage characters. This should be fixed now, let us know if it isn't. UPDATE: We found a few more and fixed those too.
  3. Missing stories. They aren't actually missing. A few dozen recent posts need to be moved to where they should be. Don't repost unless asked to, please. UPDATE: so far, only one story has had to be reposted. We're working on getting the rest of them properly indexed in the database. That's what happened to them, two of the index tables could not be restored affecting about 150 stories over a two or three week period in late Jan./early Feb. Progress is being made.
  4. Missing comment counts. A mystery, because some of them are there and it doesn't have apparent logic. We'll work on it when we can. UPDATE Some of these are back, we will be recovering more of them in the next few days.
  5. Missing tags, categories and author labels. This is a toughie, but we think it is fixable and we're working on it. This was one of the index tables mentioned above. We are doing what we can but at sometime we will probably have to ask authors to go back and retag the affected stories. Right now, we're concentrating on getting them associated with their authors and in their proper sequence in any series.
  6. Search is disabled due to slowing the site down. As a temporary fix, we've provided a Google Custom Search form which will do a Google search on BCTS as default. There's also Category Browser

Hugs,
Erin, Piper, Cat and the Crew

Author: 

Comments

Yah, So glad you have it up

gpoetx's picture

Yah, So glad you have it up and running. From now on I will remember to plant a little in the Server fund

Back

YAY BC is back but seems some of the stories may have been corupted as some of the words appear almost giberrish on my end is it just me or others see it too ?

Not corrupted, just rendering wrong

erin's picture

We can fix that for all stories at once. I think.

Hugs,
Erin

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

Yayness!

D. Eden's picture

Thanks for all the stupendous efforts put in getting the site back up! It is more greatly appreciated than I can even begin to express.

Having the site down was like losing all of my friends again.

Dallas

D. Eden

Dum Vivimus, Vivamus

Thanks for your work

Dahlia's picture

Thank you so very much for all the work you folks put in to get the site back up and running. I know it was expensive and time consuming. I am sure I speak for many others that visit this site who will not take the time to say thank you but from my heart I thank you. This is my favorite, if not the only site other than Maddy Bell's site, that I visit to read on. Thank you, thank you, and thank you for providing this site.

Dahlia

Welcome back

NoraAdrienne's picture

That said there's still issues to deal with. Every story that I've opened appears to have formatting problems.. all sorts of strange symbols in place of letters and ' marks.

Thanks

Hope Eternal Reigns's picture

Just ---- Thank You.

with love,

Hope

Once in a while I bare my soul, more often my soles bear me.

Yay!

I'd give you all a hug but I don't know where you live. So virtual hugs for everyone that worked on getting the site back up.

Woot!

Daniela Wolfe's picture

Glad to see the site back up! Kudos to everyone involved in getting everything running again!


Have delightfully devious day,

YES!

Podracer's picture

Well done all of the backroom folk, good to see you again :)
Big long distance hug..

Teri Ann
"Reach for the sun."

Thanks, everyone,

koala's picture

Thanks for all your hard work. It's great to see the site again!

Koala

Inside every older person is a young person wondering what the heck happened.

Thanks, everyone,

koala's picture

Thanks for all your hard work. It's great to see the site again!

Koala

Inside every older person is a young person wondering what the heck happened.

Back online

shiinaai's picture

Awesome! Thanks for getting it back online so soon. I'm sure you guys are still working on getting it to work like it used to. Just one tiny question, I noticed that one of my stories Butterfly Girlfriend is missing chapter 3. Is it gone forever? It's okay if it is, I have a copy, just that would prefer if I got the one posted here, since there's plenty of revisions since I copy pasted from my copy.

Anyhow, thanks a bunch for getting the site back up! Let's get our fingers crossed so it won't happen anytime soon ^_^

Hurrah!

And congratulations!

I hope you learned a lot from this trial, and you are all stronger as people, etc. etc.

Character-building stuff.

More hugs!

A.

Happytimes!

Melange's picture

This was such a wonderful surprise when I sneaked a peek this morning!

Everyone who helped with the recovery either directly or through support, thank you so much for bringing the Big Closet back to us :)

(puts on glasses) Now to get back to work filling the empty shelves with more pages!

strange characters

Well done for getting things back up and running again. I am sure you have been told that some stories are now showing strange characters A-hat, euro, vertical OR a-hat, euro tm.

IF at some stage you are looking at some of the sorting and searching options, i did like the Fictionmani options which allowed you to find well-read stories and so on. But you can't do it all and you can't copy all the best ideas - well done anyway.

Alys P

Search functionality?

D. Eden's picture

Have we lost the search functionality? If so, can I assume this is temporary?

Please don't misconstrue this as criticism! It most certainly is not and I am extremely happy just to see the site back up. I fully comprehend the massive amount of work that was involved in getting it back up and appreciate the efforts of those involved. This was a simple question and nothing more.

Thanks!

Dallas

D. Eden

Dum Vivimus, Vivamus

Search is a killer

erin's picture

It is a resource hog and has been turned off because we are just barely limping along as it is. Sorry. Yes, we do intend to have it turned back on but it will probably have to wait for the new hardware on order, maybe two weeks.

Hugs,
Erin

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

Thanks......

D. Eden's picture

For the update and the timely response.

Dallas

D. Eden

Dum Vivimus, Vivamus

Your Return

Wonderful News !

It has been a desperate and miserable week without my daily dose of BCTS. It must have been a horrible job for you all there, sorting it all out.

I want to add my thanks and congratulations on your success in correcting the problem. I hope you will all treat yourselves to a feast as a reward.

Having had to fall back onto other story sites, I have, as I am sure many others have too, reinforced my opinion that BCTS is the best site for TS stories that there is.

Thank you all, and Bless you all, for your hard work and eventual success.

Briar

Contribution

Missed you. Thanks for all your work.

When you came back up I sent a $100 contribution through Amazon.

I did not receive the usual e-mail confirmation from you.

Jill

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

Some emails have been turned off

erin's picture

I'm not sure about that one, cause I think that is sent from Amazon. But we have had problems with email sent from BC and have turned off "notifications" which is the bulk of the emails BC sent out. Sign-up emails should still be going out.

Thanks for the donation. :)

Hugs,
Erin

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

Personal messages

Daniela Wolfe's picture

I don't really see that anyone has mentioned this, but I appear to be missing at least one personal message (the most recent one). Not really sure, which if any of the others are missing as I'm pretty bad about deleting older messages and don't exactly keep track of them.


Have delightfully devious day,

Personal messages

erin's picture

The connection between some PMs, mostly in the last two or three weeks, and the recipient has been lost. Probably not recoverable. Senders should still have those messages but the table with the message id and recipient id was trashed. Sorry.

Hugs,
Erin

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

Living with it.

Daniela Wolfe's picture

No, it's fine. I'm just happy to see the site back up. I main intent was to report the error. I can always send another message if the need arises.


Have delightfully devious day,

Lovely to be back here

Missed BC so much, and really happy to be back. Thanks for all the great work you have done. This is a happy place for me to be, and I want you all to know that I really, really appreciate the hard work you put in to keeping the site running.

Power Supply

erin's picture

A power supply failure took out the disk drive we had just bought last month. Ain't it a shit? The new server will have a redundant power supply.

Hugs,
Erin

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

Thank you!

Thank you all for your efforts. I'm sure most of us really appreciate it! I know I do.

Thanks,
Annette

Glad to have you back

Amethyst's picture

I know all about hardware problems. I'm afraid my laptop is going to die for good any time now. For now you're doing all you can and none of us can ask any more than that.

*hugs to the whole BCTS team*

Amethyst

ChibiMaker1.jpg

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

Arruugghh... trying to upload a story!

Glad to have the site back up, I have missed it. Thank you for everything you do.

Now for the part that sucks. I've been trying to upload a story and every time I hit preview or send, it pushes me to captcha security page. Now I understand why it should be there when you first go in, but does it really need to be there as you are navigating within your story to make sure it is viewing correctly? I saw a minor issue within my story, went back to fix it and while I was attempting to decipher the (horribly - might I add) curved text, it kicked me out and now I have to start all over!

Anon Allsop

Browser Cache and Captcha

erin's picture

Input is still in your browser cache if you don't navigate away in the same window and tab. Wait about 3 minutes to be sure the site is back up, use the back button on your browser and there it will be. :)

The captcha security comes up if you hit the preview button too many times in two short of a period as this resembles the behavior of some malicious bots. I'm trying to fine tune the reactions of CF so this is less annoying.

Hugs,
Erin

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

"Garbage" characters

Puddintane's picture

Big Closet uses what's called the UTF-8 character set, an international standard, whilst Windows machines generally use Windows-specific "code pages" which use what seems like very short nonsense strings of gibberish when non-ASCII characters are displayed in a UTF-8 environment. These characters include "curly-quotes," many "foreign-language" characters, and almost everything that requires special keystroke combinations to type on a normal keyboard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

The simplest way to avoid the problem is to tell your Windows/Vista/Other MS OS computer to use UTF-8 as the default, although of course most MS OS's manage to mess up a few characters in one way or another. This is the simplest, in that it makes Windows/Vista/MS Flavour of the Month behave like the rest of the world mattered.

The more elaborate variation is to use HTML W3C "named characters" (character entity references) or "numeric character references" for every such character.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_character_entity_references

These entities use pure ASCII characters to refer to essentially every character system in common use, including Russian, Hebrew, Chinese, Tamil, Georgian, you name it.

So "curly quotes,"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark_glyphs

“Stuff” are represented by “Stuff&amp#8221; for only one example.

-

Cheers,

Puddin'

A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style

Thanks for this excellent

Thanks for this excellent explanation, I have often wondered why some stories include some strange characters/symbols. Now I know why, although I hardly understood what a lot of the stuff referred to meant.

Also, thanks to the team for working so diligently to put things right. It’s a shame you can’t sue the power company for all the problems that the outage caused!

Chin up and stay safe!
T

Is it just me?

Edit: Nevermind, it seems to be the first thing listed. I'll just go over there...

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