I know we have a thread about problems on the board, but I can't find it, so I'm going with my own discussion.
About an hour ago, I pulled up one of my older columns to reference, in order to answer a question on another site. To my horror---and accompanied by every swear word I learnt in twenty-seven years in the Navy---I discovered that the art in every column I posted from 08 July 2023 and before was gone, replaced by labels like this:
Now, I still have the art for each of those columns. Re-installing it won't be difficult, but it will be time consuming. But before I spend all that time in tedious effort, can anybody tell me what happened? And, more important, is there a way of bringing all the art back more easily? I thought I'd wait a couple of days to see if it comes back on its own, but I suspect it won't.
Any advice would be much appreciated, gang.
Replies
I genuinely appreciate the trouble to which you're going to get this fixed, Cap. Particularly, as I'm probably the one most ill-affected by this development.
Today's response:
"It seems they are still working on this. But we sent a request for updates and notify the Technical Team of the level of priority of the issue.
It's good news/bad news time, gang.
The good news: I'm a little over half finished restoring the art to the columns that lost it. As I said, it's an easy fix (except for the bad news part below), just time consuming. And the work does give me a chance to better size and position the art. I've also polished some of my writing, or added information that I didn't have before. I've restored and improved my multi-parters "Kryptonite---a Glowing Reference" and "Luthor vs. Superboy" (the civil-suit effort).
The bad news: I just discovered that, somehow, I've lost my notes to the articles that lost art from 08 July 2023 back to 24 November 2019. That's twenty-four articles to restore the hard way. I still have the art, of course, but I no longer have lists of the order in which the art appeared in the affected entries. (Fortunately, when I click on the "broken link" icon to restore the art, it informs me of the pixel size of the original art that was there, so that's one headache I dodge.) But, for those, I'm going to have to go by memory, as to what art goes where. When I get to those entries (I'm working from oldest to newest), it's going to go from a half-hour per restoration to probably two hours.
The Good Mrs. Benson informs me (she's the cyber-expert of the house) that there is a way for me to migrate all of my columns, art and all, to my own site. I'll do that as a back-up, once I've completed the restorations. I'll even move the oldest Deck Log entries from the Blog Archive. For some reason, they still retain their art. While checking those articles from the old site, I noticed that some of them are missing from the Blog Archive. That's not fatal---I still have them on Word Documents; I'll just rebuild them.
And I was wondering how I was going to spend my retirement, heh.
The good news: I'm a little over half finished restoring the art to the columns that lost it. As I said, it's an easy fix (except for the bad news part below), just time consuming.
My (late) contribution is to make sure that the restored JPGs all have 2024 date stamps to protect them in case Ning doesn’t solve the problem soon. The ones you resized or cropped probably already have new dates. The ones you copied and pasted without changes may still have the pre-2020 dates.
I agree with the Good Mrs Benson that copying the files to a site you control is very important.
Late it might be, Mr. WIllis, but it's a very helpful contribution. I think the best way to avoid that potential disaster is to go ahead and let the GMB set up a back-up site of my own presently, rather than wait until I'm done restoring.
Much obliged, sir!
-
1
-
2
-
3
-
4
of 4 Next