Better sharing, part I (bugs)

Picking up from the main "Better sharing" topic, here:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/119385

Here's a place to enter bugs. (New-comers should know that bugs usually get a full post in "Bug collectors," but when a big, new feature is introduced we try to gang them up in one thread.)

Caveat: I know there are other bugs out there. I am particularly worried about a handful of New Talk bugs (eg., touchstones on IE9). They aren't abandoned. But I had to get this out BEFORE I went to ALA in New Orleans.

Bugs I know

1. Your data isn't backfilled.

2. There are some lingering problems linking and posting to Facebook. They seems to be fixed by un-linking and linking from Your Profile > Sites/apps. The problem is that it isn't my code. Dan has responsibility over it, but it isn't his code either. Dan is on vacation until Thursday. Rather than try to learn and rewrite huge amounts of code (impossible) or delay this another week (argh) I made the choice to go forward with something slightly buggy for some users.

3. The sharing options on reviews aren't hooked up to this yet.

About the backfilling - is that a bug that can/will be fixed, or something that's too much of a pain to tackle?

When sharing on Twitter, if you change a character in the preview the available character-count changes wildly.

>2 DaynaRT: - It will be backfilled, it's just a monster of a process that will take some time to do, Tim says.

Well then, this feature just gets better and better.

The 400px narrow width is a bit annoying on a larger monitor. It'd be good to increase that.

About the backfilling - is that a bug that can/will be fixed, or something that's too much of a pain to tackle?

No, it's not too hard. A day's work.

In part we're not backfilling because I don't want to backfill and then discover I have to do it all again because of some bug found here!

When sharing on Twitter, if you change a character in the preview the available character-count changes wildly.

Fixed.

Dunno if it's a bug, but little after-the-fact edits to reviews appear on my feed as the date and time of the review itself (unlike the more mannerly behavior on the profile and reviews pages).

You mean of the edit or of the original?

when i try to add the app i just get a little box that says "more to come." is this normal? i thought that should have been cleared up.

Fixed:

1. Link on yourfeeds now goes to Talk thread.
2. New topics you start now have the image of the group, not nothing.

Where did you add the app from?

searched for it through FB.

Jeremy tweeted this, presumably from LT.

The link goes to http://www.librarything.com/work/book/74724802 *which, you'll notice doesn't have a work number.

*This is an abbreviated link for language site compatibility but is 'fleshed out' in the text part of an "a href = " link.

>15 justjim:

Not a bug, though. It's allowed.

> 10

My feed shows the time of the edit, and gives it as the time "Reviewed."

http://twitter.com/_dayner/status/83245406741471233
(https://twitter.com/#!/_dayner/status/83245406741471233)

http://www.librarything.com/work/book/74786825

Same thing, different user and work, with full links.

My feed shows the time of the edit, and gives it as the time "Reviewed."

Are you sure you edited it? It's showing up as a review, not an edit to a review.

to be clear, this should come through the "Libraything Books" app NOT the "Librarything" app... correct? (that was the idea i got from the screenshots you posted in the other thread)

>18 justjim:

Right. But it's not a bug. The book-only link is designed to work forever, even if the work number changes.

'K

>20 leahbird:

Yes. At present the LibraryThing app only posts things from LT to Facebook. It doesn't have its own, Facebook features.

> 19

Yes, I'm sure I just edited those two reviews: one of them I posted yesterday, and the other the day before. The correct dates show on my review page. All I did today was add two words to one of them and some italics to the other.

I am getting "Error: Could not authenticate you." when trying to share to Twitter.
When I authorized "access" a few minutes ago, Twitter seemed happy and it all looked to authenticate fine.

#23 by timspalding>

ok. the LibraryThing app is the one i've had up for a while. so i tried to add the LibrayThing Books app since that's what you had in your screenshots. that's the one that just says "more to come" and doesn't actually do anything or show up on my app list.

eta: linking my accounts via LT worked fine. it just didn't work if i was coming from FB and trying to connect. that seems like a problem, but not a huge one.

I made a second small edit to one of the books, so now my feed seems to show me reviewing it twice today.

If you upload a picture and then delete it, the entry remains in your feed but you get a "no picture" error when you click on it.

I saw that someone referred to this bug in the main thread. I'm posting it here to keep it with the other bugs:

When combining a work, it also shows the CK-combination (moving from one work# to the other) as being done by you, though it shouldn't.

I just did a little combining and for one of the works (out of 4 that I did) it reported that I had edited every (or nearly every) CK field and I hadn't.

When I followed the link 'works' in combined works (x and y) it took me to a blank white page.

I can share old reviews on Twitter (I did it via the little icon on the review on my reviews page. It just did it rather than giving me a preview of the message). However, if I try to share an update from the feed I get the "Your account is not currently linked to Twitter" message.

ETA - tried again from the feed WITHOUT relinking and it worked this time. Also worked with another book. Can't replicate it. Bother. (Or good, depending how you look at it.)

29-30. I also posted this on the other thread: That's what always happens with combining, in the CK history. If you combine something with something else that has CK, it shows the combiner as having added all the CK anew (lists it on the book history, counts it towards your contributions/badges, and, I think, lists your name on the "series"/"award"/place/etc page for that piece of CK info).

Whether it should happen or not is another question, but basically, that's how CK/combining works right now, and the new system is just consistent with that. I don't think it should work that way, either for tracking CK contributions or for the feed, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to fix either one. If I had to vote for one to fix, I'd say removing it from the feed is more important, but I wonder if that's possible without changing the underlying structure.

32> Somehow, I never realized it did that in the past. I guess it just became super obvious with the new feed. Sucks.

As I said in the other thread, I didn't know that happened. It's weird, and I don't think desirable. Will check with CH tomorrow on it, for sure.

I really don't think that's what's going on here. The code doesn't just doesn't have it in it. (The Feed isnt--like Connection News--grilled from looking at recently-stamped contents of other tables, but only adds elements when the function is explicitly called and new data is added to it.) But I'll look at it. For now, I celebrated the release of this with tacos and tequilas. So I'm going to bed.

Right, but if combination is triggering some sort of "redo" of CK data so that it appears to have come from the combiner rather than the original "enterer," it would pull it into the feed, right?

Possible example, from before:
http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/changelog.php?item=995217&type=1...

Not sure if this is a bug, but I did a little collection moving around just to get something to show up on my feed. I used the collections icon while viewing Your Books. I moved a book out of 1 collection and then selected 2 other collections to add the book to. If you look on my newsfeed it only shows the second of the two collections. I also tried adding it to a collection, then navigating off the page, and then back to Your Books and adding it to another one, and it overwrote the previous one in my feed and now only shows that I added it to the second collection. Not sure if there is a time delay or if it will only ever show the most recent collection. That would be kind of annoying, if I added it to both Currently Reading and eBooks at the same time and only eBooks showed up but really I only wanted to share that it was in Currently Reading.

Copying Common Knowledge.

When copying CK from one language to another, the feed shows that I've "edited" the data in CK. This is misleading, bacause

1) The data in it's current state was input by somebody else, I'm just making a copy (doing a manual replication, really).
2) The feed does not show which languages it was copied from/to.
3) The field names are always given in English, which make it seem all data is added to the Engish site.

Strongly suggest copying of data should not show up in newsfeed. If needs be, please identify the action as copying, not entering new information.

I haven't read all the posts so forgive me if this is a repeat. In order to score a book with half stars you have to click (say) 4 stars, then click the 4 again to get 3.5. The share feed shows that I rated a recent book 4 stars, then rated it 3.5 stars. Can it ignore the first rating, which wasn't really a thing?

39> Weird. That's one where I'd expect the secondary action to cancel the first, like happens with other things (adding books, I think?)

39> I added a book yesterday and rated it a half star by clicking the one star twice and my feed only, correctly, shows the half star rating.

I just posted a review for the first time (added the book earlier today, hadn't had anything in the review field before I just posted) and the feed begins, for some reason, "Updated review."

Just checked my feed and found the same thing. New first time reviews were listed as "Updated review" in my feed.

A review I posted yesterday at 7pm says just "Reviewed."

In the title bar of the feed, it says:
span id = " tr235987234987 " class = "trans" Nieuws Feed / span

with html brackets around the span parts.

(those are random numbers, I don't think I need to copy them exactly)
(it's "Nieuws" as I was looking at the Dutch version of the site)

I added a tag to a book and in the news feed it said that I reviewed it. I had reviewed it but a few months ago.

Why would a book with a correct book cover on the work page show up on the feed with no cover (actually, the "generic" cover)?

For an example, see The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan.

> 43

New first time reviews were listed as "Updated review" in my feed.

Ditto.

Two separate problems, and possibly an example of the 'updated review' for a third.

- I edited the canonical titles on two MacGyver items. Note the 'name' on the second one...it's also not a link. The canonical title is still set as I put it. Hmmm... the history, however, has a different user and a different time (this may be the thing with CK assigning everything to the last editor - but it doesn't show my change at all). http://www.librarything.com/work/11428630 is the work in question.

Second - I wrote a review for The Doctor's Forever Family on (according to my feed) 6/23 at 4:54 am. That's marked as an Updated Review, though I hadn't put anything in there previously, again according to the feed (I know I hadn't put in a review before the feed existed). On 6/24 at 5:58 am, it says I updated the review - maybe I did, but I certainly don't remember doing so.

Many oddities!

I'm also getting the issue where clicking twice to get a half star creates two news stories.

Wandering error: Sometimes when I go in it says that I am not linked to Twitter. I am and have not changed it. I close out of the Share option and go back in, and it has the feed ready to post to twitter. Have not done any reviews lately, just been adding books, moving books between collections, rating.

Does not happen every time I go in. Haven't noticed if there is a common type of tweet it happens on.

I don't know what happened, but my feed suddenly says "Nothing in this feed yet".

There clearly should be something, since I even posted to this thread a few days ago about what I thought was a bug in it.

I had also had items added about rating a book and adding an author link.

Is it something to do with power editing? I had just power-edited the My Library collection to move all the books to a new "Books I Own" collection and deactivated My Library. When I came back to Talk, I noticed the feed icon was dark again and clicked it, only to see it telling me that there's nothing in the feed.

I'm not seeing the proper covers in my feed, just my default cover.

ETA: The two books in question seem to be having problems on my regular Connection News, too.

When I first review a book, the feed says "Updated review." When I update an existing review, it just says "Reviewed," with no indication of an update.

When I add a book, but then change the collection, the feed says I have added it to both collections.

Also getting the 'updated review' on new reviews, and not getting 'updated review' on the review I actually updated.

Don't think this has been reported before, and it's a borderline bug. But if I manually add a book and at the same time give it a rating before hitting save, it shows up in the feed with the Add occurring after the Rating in the list. Both have the same timestamp. It's a little odd from a UI point of view.

I'm not sure if this is a bug, but when I add a book to multiple collections, "Your Library" shows up with quotes around it but the other collections do not. Like this:

Added Moonwalking with Einstein : the art and science of remembering everything by Joshua Foer to Audiobooks, To read, "Your library"
Today, 8:28am | Share this

It looks awkward.

>57 norabelle414: - Not a bug, but not optimal either. We thought "Added X to Your library" looked funny (especially when shared), so put quotes around that collection to set it off. I agree though, it's rather odd.

How about, Added x to the collections, To read and Your Library.

A little bit longer. Are you afraid of the twits getting too long?

>58 jbd1: - Yes, exactly.

>60 jbd1: I'm glad you still agree with your previous statement ;)

Heh. Yes, I meant >59 jjwilson61:. Thanks :-)

Anybody else's feed empty this morning? Or is it just mine?

>63 jbd1:

Mine appears to have everything it should, including stuff from earlier today.

63> Did you power edit anything recently?

I need to try to see if I can duplicate the feed-clearing that I got the other day after power-editing, but have been too distracted by a new job.

>65 keristars: - Hmm, no, but that's interesting. Tim's checking in to see what's up with it, too.

Mine has all the stuff I did last night; seems fine.

Yeah turns out it was because I was adding some behind-the-scenes stuff that was just overwhelming my feed (but not showing up as feed stuff since it's not live yet :-)

I hadn't noticed this before, but this morning - on every field in the catalog view, if I double-click I get a checkbox and two buttons: Save Review and Cancel. Hmmm. It does work just to save the field...but I wonder what would happen if I checked the Share: Twitter checkbox and saved, say, a reading date?

@69: Yeah, I just noticed that too.

Yesterday I added a works relation and then deleted it again (I just wanted to know what the string was in Swedish, because in the lightbox the localised strings are still not used, hrrmph), and the result was this bizarre entry in my feed:

'Lade till verksrelationen "" mellan dogshit och dogshit'

(That's 'Added the works relation "" between dogshit and dogshit' in English)

WTF? Is there a variable called dogshit that is displayed but shouldn't be?

I'm back on working on this and have effected:

1. Reviews system is now 100% transferred over to sharing system. Nothing is posted automatically now.
2. Rules for combining actions are tightened. If you do the same action to the same object within an hour, it will only show up once.
3. "Updated" status on reviews should now be fixed. It was flipped.

I have marked a number of messages here as things I have to look into. I have not forgotten about them.

Bug comments:


1) The data in it's current state was input by somebody else, I'm just making a copy (doing a manual replication, really).
2) The feed does not show which languages it was copied from/to.
3) The field names are always given in English, which make it seem all data is added to the Engish site.


We can't easily distinguish between edit and transfer. The other two are bugs and/or things that should improve.

Can it ignore the first rating, which wasn't really a thing?

Right. It should be doing that now.

In the title bar of the feed, it says: span id = " tr235987234987 " class = "trans" Nieuws Feed / span

Fixed.

It does work just to save the field...but I wonder what would happen if I checked the Share: Twitter checkbox and saved, say, a reading date?

No, it's just the review. There is no automatic bringing-up of sharing options except for reviews.

If you do the same action to the same object within an hour, it will only show up once.

This is awesome for most things, but now if you add a book to multiple collections at the same time, it only shows the one you clicked last.

Someone's reporting that the FB integration lets other people have access to the LT account. If that's happening it's a major problem/bug:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/120005

See reply there. We believe it is a misunderstanding.

Probably said by someone already, but I also got the dogshit :D

Edited Common Knowledge on dogshit under "Original publication date"

Also, I combined a few books and then it says, for example:

Edited Common Knowledge on The Worst Witch Saves the Day by Jill Murphy under "Last words"

even though I did not edit that CK field.

Yeah, someone's calling our books dogshit. Maybe they're right?

29-30, 32-36: About CK automatically attributing lots of edits to you if you combine...

Looking into this more, I think -- but am not 100% sure -- that this may only happen if both books being combined have CK. I looked into a combination I did recently (of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf) and I don't seem to be showing up in CK history for that work (and also didn't have any CK show up with that combination in my news feed).

Incidentally, here's another report of two bugs mentioned above:
-- the dogshit bug
-- the bug that attributes all existing CK to you when you combine

http://www.librarything.com/topic/120326

I found another problem with my news feed tonight. I edited the title of Chocky and saved my changes. When I checked my feed it said I updated my review (which I didn't):


Updated review Chocky by John Wyndham (***1/2)

"Chocky's a fine science fiction tale. In it, a boy named Matthew begins to have conversations with…"

Today, 8:13pm | Share this

Some observations about sharing while private:

I'm playing around with the Twitter part while writing a HelpThing page on Twitter integration, and I noticed some behavior with private libraries that might not be a bug per se, but might also not be optimal.

The bit.ly link back to the work (for books added) links to the book number, and thus to the member's own copy. However, if the account is private, what you see is book page that says "No title" at the top, is blank next to "Info," "Member," and "Collections," but also (only) shows the private member's tags next to "Tags." (This also happens, I believe, on the "recently added by other members" part of the Home page.)

Like I said, possibly not a bug proper, but would it make more sense to have such links to private members' books (or private books) just go/redirect to the work page, rather than show a "no title" page?

Also, just FYI if a private member shares a review on Twitter, and someone clicks on the bit.ly link, it won't show the other person the review. That seems correct to me, and consistent with how private accounts should work -- except in the case of LTER reviews, which are supposed to be public (but currently aren't; there's another bug post about that).

(Of course, it's possible that no one who's private would want to share their activity on Twitter. I'm not really a Twitter user, just testing things out for HelpThing purposes, so I don't know, but it's not that farfetched to imagine that some private member would want to share some things.)

It would make sense to me if Tim decided that private really means private and why would such a private person want to share things on Twitter or Facebook (and therefore just disallow private libraries from sharing).

82 - Most of what it's possible to share, though, is already public information even for private libraries. Here's a list of many of the things that can be shared (18 so far that I've counted):
http://www.librarything.com/topic/119385#2789666
Only 3 of those 18 are types of information that are (fully) hidden* for private libraries: adding books, reviewing books (except for LTER reviews which are supposed to be public) and rating books. All the other things it's possible to share are already public info for private libraries. So it doesn't make sense to turn off sharing altogether for private libraries.

Perhaps it might make sense to prevent sharing of the types of info that are hidden for private libraries, which is only cataloging info.

However, if private members want to share that they've added a particular book to their libraries, I don't see a problem with that, since it would be a conscious choice. I think it would be better, then, just to change the link back to LT so that it goes to a more functional page.

* There are some things that are partly hidden in some places but available in others: friends hidden from private members' profile, but the private member listed on their friends' profile; groups missing from private members' profile, but private member listed on groups page; favorite authors, venues, etc. listed on private members' profiles, but private members not listed on author or venue pages.

This has just happened twice; I added a book manually, and the action did not show up in my feed, though the collection assignment done during the add did show up. Very odd.

Since I wanted to post to FB that I had added the book, but not the collection assignment (not something anyone there would either understand or care about), this is a nuisance.

I've updated books with reviews recently (added new read dated/ added to a library), and they come up in my feed with an updated review entry:
The ones I've added to a library gets two entries:
- added to library
- updated review

The ones I've added new read dates to only have the updated review entry.

Two comments:
1) it is a bug that the edited books with reviews show up as "updated review" since the reviews weren't updated. I've seen this behaviour before somewhere else - maybe on the profile page.

2) As an avid rereader I would like books to show up in the feed when I add read dates - maybe only recent read dates ?
I would also like a currently reading entry when I add a started date and not an end date - as before, it could be restricted to recent dates.

ETA:

The similar behaviour is described in this bug report: http://www.librarything.com/topic/137908

First dumb question. My pediatrician said I'm allowed a dozen dumb ones.

"You can see the first stirrings of it the top of the site, a new icon that looks like . Click it or go there with: http://www.librarything.com/yourfeed.php"

The little symbol (which doesn't appear after like . and before Click it) shows up on which screen?

I can see my data when I click the URL above. I'll save it until you tell where it will show up on which screen.

This has been working for over eight years now. The icon is in the header of most, if not all pages. Top right. I don't have this icon in my keyboard, so I will use * instead. (I see the icon in the first post of the other topic.)

Membername | Share *| Sign out | Help

>86 ulmannc: The share icon was removed from the header with the site redesign in 2013. Now it's just the word "Share", with no icon.

>88 norabelle414: Thanks for the help. I only feel sort of dumb now!