My Computer Stories are Missing

[buster]

I wanted to check something on my 'published' computer stories, such as Adventures with an Old Desktop, and lo and behold they are gone!

Where did they go??? The replies to the story are still in place.

[Jason]

That's truly bizarre. I wish I knew, Buster. I'm sorry that it's happened.

Unfortunately, it's not something I can fix as I don't have backups that go back that far and even if I did, I'd have to figure out how to merge those posts with the existing ones. And that's not something I know how to do. I will check again though to see if I have a backup going back that far that might have them or at least before the great black hole of April where we lost a month of posts. Maybe that's when they were lost.

Do you have the original stories somewhere and can repost as attachments to the original post?

[buster]

And here's something even more bizarre. If I go to 'Modify' for the empty post, the story is there to be modified!!!!!!!

[buster]

When copy some of the story from the modify, there are no hits in google.

When I copy a comment made by someone else in the thread, I get two hits, one of which will not work because it's the beta forum.

And if I change a few words in the modify, the whole thing shows, but it has funny question marks all over it.

[Jason]

When copy some of the story from the modify, there are no hits in google.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If you're saying that you're afraid that Google won't catalogue it because you've changed the post, I'm not sure if that's the case. I believe Google will show a link to the topic itself, not just a post in it. And modifying it shouldn't change the listing anyway as it's still the same link to it. Is that you're talking about?

When I copy a comment made by someone else in the thread, I get two hits, one of which will not work because it's the beta forum.

Google doesn't spider the forum immediately. Well, it kind of does but the algorithm may take a few days to follow the other links which affect its ranking. But within a week, it should start showing up again. I never got around to setting up the forwarding so those beta links would go to the right place and not sure I will get to it. The priority is to get up a main page and I haven't even done that yet! Life has kept me busy with more interesting things and chores.

And if I change a few words in the modify, the whole thing shows, but it has funny question marks all over it.

That's really weird.

1. Are you able to remove the question marks?
2. And where do they appear?

You could copy and paste that into a text program and then do search and replace to remove the question marks. You can include a space or period within the search term so that you get the right result. And you can change it one at a time to make sure you're not removing important question marks i you have them.

Hopefully, I understood your comments correctly and gave you some useful help. If not, let me know.

[buster]

So I go into the modify part and copy part of the story. Then I paste that into google, and there are no hits. This is all old stuff from last year.

However, I copied one of Mike's comments from the same thread and google found it.

Your other comment about pasting into a word processor and manually fixing each chapter of 3 multi-chapter stories is not going to happen.

One last comment - only members who are actually signed in can see this thread. The category is limited.

[Jason]

Your other comment about pasting into a word processor and manually fixing each chapter of 3 multi-chapter stories is not going to happen.

I meant copying from the word process document or exporting as a text file.

You don't have to manually fix each chapter. That's what search and replace is for. You can just walk through it, at least at first or look through it to make sure you did the find/replace correctly. Then you can just tell search and replace to replace them all. Unless you see that as manually doing it.

The reason I asked about where the question marks appear is because if you copied and pasted directly from the word processor it may have also copied some symbols that went along for the ride. Copying to a text editor and then pasting from that into the forum will fix that issue. That may not be the issue but I know sometimes when I paste from a website into a word processor the formatting comes with it, unless you choose Paste Special and only paste text (I think that's how it's done). You can also use the remove formatting button on the post.

It'd be a shame to lose the chapters. Could you just attach them to the first post?

[buster]

What is really weird is that they were fine for over a year.

[Jason]

I opened each of your chapters with 'modify', selected all the text, pasted it into a text editor (Kate), did a find and replace by selecting one weird question mark symbol and pastng it in the 'find' field. And for 'replace' it looks like an apostrophe was likely for most (but maybe not all) of the symbols so I chose it. Then i just went through each chapter carefully by clicking 'Search' and then 'Next' and choosing 'Replace' for each one. There were some places where the symbol appeared that I didn't think were apostrophes so I left them in for you to fix. You could have just used 'find' and 'replace' and hit the 'Replace Checked' which would have done them all but may have had some errors. Or you could have just copied and pasted from the original files you had.

I can understand why you didn't want to do this. It was a lot of hard work. My hair was caked in sweat. I forgot to feed the cat. The sun came up. My wife left me. Time just blurred by. Yep, it was difficult. I'm not going to say you're lazy but...

I also fixed the problem with this board not appearing unless you were logged in.

[ssfc72]

Maybe someone stole the stories to make a movie out of them. :-)

I wanted to check something on my 'published' computer stories, such as Adventures with an Old Desktop, and lo and behold they are gone!

Where did they go??? The replies to the story are still in place.

[Jason]

Maybe someone stole the stories to make a movie out of them. :-)

That's it! Copyright infringement! Even despite Buster's copyright message.

[Jason]

Buster: Fixed another bunch of posts in an 'Adventures...' series (the one that has trilogy in the name) except for the question marks. You can fix those if you like. Find and Replace. Still bizarre that it happened. I wonder if some leading symbols were added that prevented the chapters from being rendered to the screen. But by modifying it, you could see it again because that was removed and then re-submit and it's fixed because that symbol error is gone. Other than the weird question marks which may be hard of how the data was mishandled. I suspect it was an error in the the way the database was restored back when it was. But I could have been related to an issue with the older server.

[buster]

I did two copy pastes in the test section. First one came from the original manuscript in LibreOffice. Worked really well, same as original postings over a year ago.

The second test was a paste from the 'modify' part of  blank chapter, which didn't work very well, which was expected.

So the forum handles my originals, but somewhere along the line through all the changes, the suppressed stuff in the old posts emerged and makes it weird.

Might be easier to re post the whole manuscript as one piece.

[Jason]

Yeah, it would be easier to do it that way. I had misinterpreted you as saying you didn't want to do any work or didn't have the original files. So this was a way of doing roundabout (i.e. find and replace).

[buster]

The first story is as far s I can see completely restored.