Problem with story tags and image insert

[William King]

I have an existing story - Time May Change Me. 

I noticed that the story tag was child, which was not correct. When I changed the story tags and saved, the image disappeared amongst a lot of gobbledegook:

/applications/core/interface/imageproxy/imageproxy.php?img=http://i67.tinypic.com/19qr7t.jpg&key=2ed9f1c9e32a7ebedb7ffd71b1b53cb10cdca8cca1e5d518037c64c3c899f470" />

 

Trying to put back the image, it appeared correctly, but saved with the gobbledegook. Sometimes the tag reverted to child again and I had to repeat the whole process.

 

I can't figure out how to put the image back. The link is there in the gobbledegook, but all this extra stuff that gets added, I don't get what the system is doing. I don't know if it's because of your update or it's a forum thing you can't control.

 

Any Ideas? 

[Myr]

On the bug report updated last night:

 

• Story Table of Contents Images are being removed accidentally because of a fix to a different issue. Fix Target: Sunday 4/23

 

 

[Myr]

@William King Did the issue with the child tag reoccur after you fixed it?  The tag bug happened awhile back and should not be fixed.  If you replaced your tags and then they cleared again, we have more work to do on that bug.

Thanks

[Daddydavek]

Myr

 

I noticed when the site converted to the new format, that a picture I inserted in Chapter 1 of Abel III was replaced with a broken link.  So one day last week I edited the story to re-paste the picture from my album and it worked fine.   Today with the above notice I went back and checked it and the picture did not show, just another broken link.  The pic is the NASA  pic with annotations of the Milky Way Galaxy.  I'm hoping this is all related and we will be informed when we can go back in and put it back.    Dave

Edited April 22, 2017 by Daddydavek

[Myr]

Yes.  They are related.

[Cia]

9 hours ago, Daddydavek said:

Myr

 

I noticed when the site converted to the new format, that a picture I inserted in Chapter 1 of Abel III was replaced with a broken link.  So one day last week I edited the story to re-paste the picture from my album and it worked fine.   Today with the above notice I went back and checked it and the picture did not show, just another broken link.  The pic is the NASA  pic with annotations of the Milky Way Galaxy.  I'm hoping this is all related and we will be informed when we can go back in and put it back.    Dave

The key here is 'a picture I inserted in Chapter 1'. Pictures do not belong in chapters. Nothing but the actual chapter text goes in the chapter. All notes, copyrights, warnings, commentary by the author, links, etc... belong in the story meta data, notes, or chapter notes.

[Timothy M.]

23 minutes ago, Cia said:

The key here is 'a picture I inserted in Chapter 1'. Pictures do not belong in chapters. Nothing but the actual chapter text goes in the chapter. All notes, copyrights, warnings, commentary by the author, links, etc... belong in the story meta data, notes, or chapter notes.

 

@ColumbusGuy  you might want to see this reply, because I know you've also been struggling with the pictures in your chapters. Maybe the solution is to create a link to a post in your story topic and add the picture there.

Or could the picture be placed in a chapter comment, Cia?

Wait, I see you say things can be in the chapter notes - so could CG put his pics in the top note and end note?

Edited April 22, 2017 by Timothy M.

[ColumbusGuy]

Hey Tim, I use image links to get my pictures in the chapters where they need to be--in the same box where the text itself goes.  The problem I had recently was that the image galleries were moved, so I had to put the new location in for ones stored in my gallery here.  I tried the insert other media thing in the same field, and had problems getting it to do what I wanted, so fell back on the 'old reliable'.  You don't even need to say it's a link--if you copy the url in, it automatically shows up as the picture, then you CTRL right click to align it left right or center.

I had a different problem restoring my cover pics for stories; I put it first in the area it said, and it showed up all squashed...so I put it via a url into the Chapter Note section.  Shows up just fine there, so long as the url is the right one.  To insure that, either in the gallery or a web search, I click on the image to view it by itself, then right click and choose 'Copy Image location'...then paste that where it needs to be.

Hope this helps!

Okay, this is new since I looked at a chapter with pics again.  They were all showing up fne yesterday, and now aren't.  So this is something we'll see fixed on Sunday?

Is this meta data thing the dotted box below which says Insert other media?

Edited April 22, 2017 by ColumbusGuy

[Cia]

@ColumbusGuy @Timothy M. Guys, pictures slow down the system and page loading speed. Stories are meant to inspire visuals in the imagination of the reader, so putting in images is counter to that anyway. If you really need to share an image, place it in a post in a story topic in the forums and link to it in the chapter notes. Just don't put images in stories. This information was in the FAQ, in several places, and always has been.

Quote

Are there any tips or tricks to using the GA text editor?

• Yes.  Only use the GA text editor to post clean, basically formatted text.  Do not resize text size since this will eliminate a reader’s ability to re-size the text.  Only chapter text should be in the chapter text box.  There are other areas for chapter titles, chapter notes, and copyright information.  Disclaimers should be placed in the story notes.   The text editor was chosen because of its compatibility with Word formatting.  While it offers a lot of options, not all of them work as expected.  Using ‘bold’ and ‘italics’ is okay.  Much more than that and the formatting from the editor conflicts with the formatting for the site and you get unintended consequences.

Quote

Can I include naked pictures in my story?

• No. No images of any kind can be included in the story text. You may use the My Media option to place an image on the story meta data page.

Quote

Story Text Box:  Copy your story from your processor and paste directly into the box.  This is for story text ONLY.  All notes should be in the chapter note boxes.

[Timothy M.]

7 minutes ago, Cia said:

@ColumbusGuy @Timothy M. Guys, pictures slow down the system and page loading speed. Stories are meant to inspire visuals in the imagination of the reader, so putting in images is counter to that anyway. If you really need to share an image, place it in a post in a story topic in the forums and link to it in the chapter notes. Just don't put images in stories. This information was in the FAQ, in several places, and always has been.

 

Thanks, Cia. I don't use pictures, so it's not a problem for me, I just knew CG has been struggling with his Jay&Miles story which has some small awesome pics of things from the seventies. Readers have liked those a lot, and I don't think they have slowed down the chapters.

But the solution to post the pics in the story discussion topic with links in the chapters is a good one, because that might also generate more activity there, CG. 

Edited April 22, 2017 by Timothy M.

[Myr]

@ColumbusGuy@Timothy M. This is the exact purpose of our Gallery.  The Gallery is intended to display images and drawings and maps related to the story content.

 

Keep in mind that images in the story may look fine in the browser on your desktop or laptop, but they tend to look horrible when on smartphones.  And roughly 50% of the site traffic is via smartphone.

 

We don't place these rules to be asses.  We put them in place so we can support the huge variety of devices that access the site.

 

There is a specific story bug preventing images from the Story Index/Table of Contents page.  This will be fixed.

[Timothy M.]

I hope @Mark Arbour and @C James can work out how to fix their Bridgemont and Circumnavigation chapters, which have many and large inserted pictures.

 

Like these chapters https://www.gayauthors.org/story/mark-arbour/hmsvaliant/33 and https://www.gayauthors.org/story/c-james/circumnavigationCJ/24

 

I would be sad to see those large illustrations disappear together with CG's much more modest pictures. 

 

As far as I can see from CG's answer, he does place his pics in the gallery and links to them there. This is supposed to be the correct method, right? So if the pics fail to show when done like that, it's a bug?

 

 

[Myr]

@Mark Arbour For the love of all that is holy, DO NOT EDIT your chapters right now.

 

[Timothy M.]

3 hours ago, Myr said:

For the love of all that is holy, DO NOT EDIT your chapters right now.

 

Ooops, sorry, Myr. Not to worry, though, Mark hasn't been posting for a while, so I don't think he's going to spend time editing at the moment. 

[ColumbusGuy]

Thanks Myr, for asking us not to edit our chapters yet.  I spent a week restoring my picture links, and was afraid I'd have to do it again.  Since this is part of the problem mentioned above, I hope we'll find out when it's fixed.

I did notice Saturday that song links in my chapters don't work either...and I've never had a problem with those before.  It's strange what things will crop up when you fix one thing...   

Edited April 24, 2017 by ColumbusGuy

[Wicked Witch]

On 21/04/2017 at 9:52 PM, William King said:

 

I noticed that the story tag was child, which was not correct. When I changed the story tags and saved, the image disappeared amongst a lot of gobbledegook:

 

 

Just to note, my story The Fragmented also randomly changed its tag to "child" and nothing else about a week back. I edited it and fixed tags and all is fine now. Just an odd glitch I guess.

[Myr]

Images on the Story Table of Contents page should be working again.

 

[ColumbusGuy]

I'm a little confused now...the story tags seem to be fixed, or at least to me, but all the links in my chapters don't go anywhere--I know the urls behind the text are right, because I tested them on my copies.

Is this a different bug?

Thanks for fixing so many of the stubborn ones!  It's the second-generation ones that you don't suspect until you fix a major one. 

[Cia]

@ColumbusGuy Please be more specific. Link to the story and tell us exactly what links. For instance, I went to your stories, clicked on Jay & Miles, tested the first link in the story description to the forum post about the characters as well as the story prompt link in the chapter end notes in chapter one. (They both worked just fine) I used my laptop with Windows 10 and Edge.

 

So... what links do you mean? What stories? How were you trying to access them?

[ColumbusGuy]

43 minutes ago, Cia said:

@ColumbusGuy Please be more specific. Link to the story and tell us exactly what links. For instance, I went to your stories, clicked on Jay & Miles, tested the first link in the story description to the forum post about the characters as well as the story prompt link in the chapter end notes in chapter one. (They both worked just fine) I used my laptop with Windows 10 and Edge.

 

So... what links do you mean? What stories? How were you trying to access them?

The links, in all my chapters that don't work are in the chapter itself, not the Notes or Description page.  In the 1st chapter of Jay & Miles, there's one to a Bicentennial Minute from 1976, and one to the trailer for the Helter Skelter movie--neither of them work, nor does the link in chapter 2 for Foghat's Slow Ride, just to start.  They all worked fine until the 'tag' problem, then not at all since. 

Do I need to delete cookies again for GA, or what?  I'm using a desktop pc a year old, running Windows 10, and the latest version of Firefox, which had all these things working a month ago.  Nothing's changed on my end that I'm aware of.

I tried activating them by clicking on them, as usual.

Thanks for the reply.

Edited May 4, 2017 by ColumbusGuy

[Cia]

Again, nothing should be in the chapter text but chapter text. Links belong in the chapter notes.

[Timothy M.]

4 hours ago, Cia said:

Again, nothing should be in the chapter text but chapter text. Links belong in the chapter notes.

 

I checked out the link to a wiki page I have in this chapter: https://www.gayauthors.org/story/timothy-m/thecardmakerandthecaretaker/2

As expected, it did not work. Fair enough.

 

I redid the link in the chapter end note. It still did not work.  

The link I added (laptop, Google Chrome) was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schmeichel

When I click on the link I get this: https://en.%20wikipedia.%20org/wiki/Peter_Schmeichel 

I don't know why it adds %20 in two places.

 

Same problem here https://www.gayauthors.org/story/timothy-m/thecardmakerandthecaretaker/13 

where the link was already in the chapter end note.

It was meant to be this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pun3jaMVJk  and that's what I see when I press the small chain link icon.

But comes out as this https://www.%20youtube.%20com/watch?v=4Pun3jaMVJkut

 

 

Any suggestions ?

Edited May 4, 2017 by Timothy M.
added another example

[William King]

The programing code in the website is adding a space to Web addresses: this shows in the code %20 which means - a blank space.

 

So no links work - inside the story text, in the notes, the links don't work because a blank space is added after the dot. 

 

Type a Web address into the notes, example: https://test.test.com and it will save as https://test. test. com

When you enter the address using the editor it is exactly the same except the space shows as the the code %20 the ASCII code for space.

 

This is a programing error in how Web address links are captured - it has nothing to do with being in the story text or in the story notice box at the start - which, by the way, also has a problem with the 500 character limit not working, but that's a different error.

 

Short story - get the programmer to look at the code for rendering Web links.

Edited May 6, 2017 by William King

[A.J.]

@William King

 

Can you tell me if it is fixed now?

[Timothy M.]

30 minutes ago, A.J. said:

Can you tell me if it is fixed now?

 

It certainly is for those two chapters I mentioned.   to both of you for devising a solution.

Edited May 6, 2017 by Timothy M.