Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Book & Author Page Issues
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Edits reverting and books disappearing
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Mod
Rivka, it seems odd that most edits would work and then suddenly one would fail, and I'm a little wary of running around testing if I might accidentally delete the wrong book -- can you find that copy of "Panchatantra" anywhere? It had a cover with a brightly-colored elephant and the title in big letters across a solid color (maybe yellow) at the top.
Cait, When librarians delete editions of a book, that book is often temporarily unable to be found.Found these:
http://www.goodreads.com/search/searc...
But under that author I do find this coverless one:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65...
and this one:
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13...
Well, and it can't hurt to sign out and delete your cookies and sign back in to see if the problem persists. It does seem odd, but maybe it would do the trick. It's certainly an easy troubleshooting measure to try.
Does it disappear from the author's page, too? I'd never noticed that before. And I'm still only seeing two editions of the title under "Arthur W. Ryder", although it looks like Rivka uploaded the cover I recall to one of them -- Rivka, did you delete two editions of this book, or just one?[I'm a database programmer in my day job, and accidentally deleting customer data is a huge bugaboo. That's why I'm so freaked!]
Mod
I also re-merged the authors -- they had not stayed that way from your merge.
I've got another uneditable book -- Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle, or rather by Boyle, T.C., since that's what comes up in the author field every time I refresh the book page.If I edit the author "Boyle, T.C." to merge it with the proper "T.C. Boyle" the book will show up in T.C. Boyle's combine editions page and it will appear to combine with its other editions, but when I go back to the book page it's snapped right back to being a loner with the wrong author name.
I've tried logging out and logging back in and I've tried opening up a different browser (Firefox and IE7), and the same thing keeps happening.
This book would be due for superlibrarian deletion since it's a recent one with no ISBN number, but I'd really like for someone to take a look at the record as it's existing in the database to see if anything can be found -- it seems like the sort of error that might come from bad replication between database clusters, perhaps...? This isn't the sort of networking that I'm terribly familiar with.
Well, I repeated your steps and it worked for me. This does seem to happen every once in awhile...something that doesn't work for one librarian will work for another (or a super librarian, even though super status is not clearly necessary). Anyway, as I said, I changed the name, combined the books, then deleted the bad edition to merge the reviews.
Mod
Mod
Hmmm...I had the same problem. However, I've noticed sometimes that some of these oddities will go away if you save a change to a book, so I opened the edit screen and hit save and it returned an error because of the duplicate ISBN. I removed the duplicate ISBN saved the book, then combined and this time the combination stuck (allowing me to delete the duplicate).Not sure which piece fixed the problem, but it did work.
Mod
Glad it cooperated for you. Thanks.
Can anyone get this book's author to stay "C.M. Mayo" instead of "C. M. Mayo"? The rest of this author's books are under C.-no-space-M. Mayo, but I can't get this one to stick as a book edit or an author edit....
Augh! It happened again, and this time I deleted a book out from under two people. :( I still had one of them open in another tab so I could send a message apologizing and linking to the existing book, but the other one is lost unless someone can look at the backups and see who had "The Red Tent" by "Anita Diamont" (not Diamant, the correct spelling) on their shelves....Maybe we should ask for an additional confirmation required before deleting a book that's uncombined and has been shelved? Or force that to be a superlibrarian only ability so that in the handoff someone will notice that the book reverted?
Cait, I'll look at the log. I saw that edition too and was trying to change the author so I could combine it, but then GR told me it didn't exist.Actually, I realize: Simply deleting a book doesn't show up on the log.
Cait, I see where you combined it but nothing else around then. (You beat me to it by a very short amount of time.)
When librarians collide! Oh dear....p.s. I'm guessing I'm not the only bored librarian hanging around on the "explore recent reviews", eh? ;)
Cait. Drat. You gave away my "secret" method.Edit: I realized this is one time when this: ;-) would come in handy. (Actually, the very best way I've found is to go through the bookshelves of a non-librarian GR member.)
Just had the same problem with this book: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26...I changed the author to Anne Tyler, combined it with the other editions, and edited the title out of the all caps it was in. But I went back to it and everything reverted, including the combining. Yet my edits still show in the log. Can anyone else make it work?
Mod
I can get the author and title change to stick, but not only does it not appear on the combine page, I get the "Oops - we couldn't find that book" message when I try to look at its editions.
That's very weird. DB corruption, most likely.
it got messed up somehow, i fixed the work, is everything ok now?
Mod
I've got another twitchy one -- can anyone get poor John M., Ph.D. Ortiz to show up as plain old John M. Ortiz? (He's got a book that can be combined once that's done.)
Cait, I think I got that author/book to change. I'll let you do any combining:http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/...
Yup, that did it -- thank you, Lisa!(This bug is so annoying!)
1. Edited the arthur ryder author to "arthur w. ryder" to merge it with Arthur W. Ryder. At that time there were two books listed for "arthur ryder", both copies of "panchatantra". They appeared under "Arthur W. Ryder"'s profile.
2. Combined those two "panchatantra" with the two "Panchatantra" listed for Arthur W. Ryder". They combined.
3. Deleted this "panchatantra" because it had no ISBN and only a review as a description. It deleted and its 1 review was merged into the other editions.
4. Edited the second "panchatantra" that had been under "arthur ryder" to capitalize its title. This edition had publisher information and cover art. The title updated.
5. Noticed that the cover art appeared to have a subtitle, so I clicked on the cover. The page came up saying "no cover art", so I clicked on it again. It took me to this "panchatantra" instead of the one I'd been on, and that edition had reverted back to the author of "arthur ryder", been uncombined with the other editions, and been undeleted. The edition with the cover art that I'd been working on can't be found under "arthur ryder", "Arthur W. Ryder", or via search.
Help! I don't want to touch anything else in the database right now! (This happened to me just recently, too, although nothing disappeared that time.)