Data disappearing when entering Common Knowledge fields

Steps to reproduce the problem:

1. Go to an author page.
2. Fill out in CK, say, the "Awards and honors" field with the following text: "Nobel Prize (Physics|1980)". Click Save.
3. Reload the page.
4. Notice that it now reads "Nobel Prize (Physics ∙ 1980)" (differences: pipe changed to dot, and the text is decorated in colors). All fine so far.
5. Click the pencil to edit it again. Notice that dot is there in editing mode instead of the pipe (kinda weird, since I would expect it to go back to a pipe for editing mode).
6. Click "Save" without making any changes.
7. Reload the page.
8. Notice that it now reads "Nobel Prize ( [1980])". The "Physics" part has disappeared completely! And random brackets were added.

Other important points:

• I don't think it has this problem if you only put words "Nobel Prize (Physics|Chemistry)" or numbers "Nobel Prize (1980|1982)" ... just if you have both words and numbers. I think (didn't want to add too much just history).
• I only tested "Awards and honors" and "Education", but I assume other fields probably work the same.

I've noticed this "( [1980])" formatting on a lot of author pages today, and thought it might be some weird remnant of a mass data import or something (I even went through and "corrected" some to remove the brackets), but now I see that it's a bug indicating data that was once there (and yes, I can look in the history, but if the award name is long, the lost data is truncated off).

Jeremy can you test?

A lot of other awards are done using commas rather than pipes. Presumably for this reason.

I've had this happen to me in the past when editing CK. My work around has been to delete everything and retype it all over again.

I just tried commas and they behave the same as pipes (they get converted to dots, and those dots remove data on subsequent saves).

Unfortunately, I think vpfluke's work-around only works if you're either the person to have written that bit of CK in the first place (and can remember it); or if you're willing to look up that information online (if it's even somewhere online) and re-enter it, being careful to replace dots with commas or pipes again; or if it's in the first line of that field's CK and the data was lost on the immediately last save (then it's probably still accessible in the history).

A bit more information. I've been updating awards recently. The behaviour described by omargosh only occurs on author pages and not work pages - if that helps.

Sorry I haven't weighed in here before, I could have sworn that I posted about this months ago (maybe some other bug? Dunno). Anyway.

The case outlined in #1 works perfectly as an example (and I've just confirmed it in a separate test), and as omargosh notes in #4, commas behave the same way as pipes on author pages in those fields. On work pages everything seems to be okay as far as this particular issue goes - is that your experience as well, andyl and omargosh?

Thank you for coming back to check on this bug. I've now done further testing (and some poor work and author now have an ugly CK history, but oh well).

On work pages, this bug happens on: Canonical title, Original title, Alternative titles, Original publication date, Important events, Blurbers
Somehow it doesn't seem to happen on "Related movies", even though that field does the special styling behavior with parentheses/pipes.

On author pages, this bug happens on every field except Gender, Relationships, Short Biography, and Disambiguation notice.

So "Related movies" seems to be the only one that does the special parens/pipe/comma conversion without botching data on subsequent saves, so therein might lie some clue as to how to fix this bug. I notice that when you open this field again to edit it (after the required reload, of course), it still has the comma or pipe you entered, instead of having converted it to the dot that gets displayed in reader mode (I believe the rest of them convert to the dot in editing mode). It also doesn't throw in or remove random spaces, which I believe the rest do (so it seems to convert only for display in reader mode, doing no conversion to the original data as entered behind the scenes).

Bump

Tim / conceptdawg,

Can I urge you to move this up the priority list.

It is very annoying.

I enter something like Nobel Prize (Physics, 1980) which gets converted to "Nobel Prize (Physics ∙ 1980)".

I (or someone else) comes along at a later date and adds another award to the same author. In the edit fields the Nobel Prize shows with the mid-dot. I leave that alone and add the new award. Hit save. All looks OK.

If you refresh the Nobel Prize line has been automatically changed to "Nobel Prize ( [1980])" and sometimes with no history entries.

This also occurs for organizations.

Also for awards (for authors) if I enter "Turing Award (1975)" and then later decide to edit / add a new award the edit line shows "Turing Award (1975)" (with two spaces between the Award and the open bracket). If I then save this without removing the extra space - it saves OK. However the order is now inconsistent when browsing CK. Of course the two spaces are collapsed to one on display (as is normal in HTML). You can see this at the following URL - http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?q=Internet+Hall+of+Fame&a... if you sort by value.

I know browsing CK is a bit clunky - it would be much nicer to have a proper author award and organization page (like the book award page) - but that is just a pony. The bug involving loss of data (and altering input data) is pretty serious though.

It's on my short list now.

>11 conceptDawg:

Any progress on this one?

bump.

shortlist in Apr 2014

recently reported on another thread

Experiencing this bug today while trying to edit/add series info:
1. via book page -> common knowledge
2. via work-only work page -> common knowledge
3. via double-click on field in books list

I type the series and click save. If using method 1 or 2 above, series shows in field until I refresh the page, then disappears. If using method 3, the series does not display at all and the field remains blank.

If I look at the history for the CK entry, it says I (my username) deleted the content. It does not record that I added any content first.

I've tried several different browsers (Opera, Firefox, Chrome) in case that might be the cause, but bug is the same in all.

I last successfully added CK info only 2-3 days ago, so seems to be a recent change.

>14 Hithlinel:

Your bug doesn't sound like the issue reported in this thread (see original post). It would be best to start another topic so it's looked at.

>12 BuiltByBooks: I should mention that conceptDawg is pretty tied up into a project this week, so he may not see this message until later. Hopefully he can give you an update soon!

Just to note: the original bug is a valid bug. Just reading the description I know what is causing it and, more or less, how to fix it.

I probably won't get to it for a couple of days because I'm tied up with doing some final stuff for the official iPhone app that's coming out in the next few days (yay!). But, a fix is coming.

I'll take a look at >14 Hithlinel: . It's different.

Thanks..

This is still a problem. Happened again to me today when moving CK from a newly disambiguated page to the appropriate division.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to get to it...still. My boss is working me hard this week for a big project release. After that. (fingers crossed)

>20 conceptDawg:
Tell your boss to get his priorities straight! Kidding. Thanks for the update.

I DO have this starred though, so it is always at the top of my list.

Now, where did I put that list?

Ok, TinyCat's been out for a while now. This bug managed to get me again today, despite being well aware of its existence. I don't want to think about all the CK inadvertently deleted by others because they weren't aware. (Even for those of who are aware, it's obnoxious to have to change every single bullet on every single line every time we want to make the smallest of changes.)

TinyCat is out but we shifted immediately to the Syndetics Unbound product that came out this week (never a dull moment for LT developers). Hoping to get back to LT.com ASAP but need to fix the inevitable small bugs, lost features, etc. that happen during any initial product rollout.

SOOOON.

Having been bitten yet again by this bug today (for the umpteenth time):

Bump.

What was the situation?

>26 timspalding:

Adding CK to Peter Davis (5), http://www.librarything.com/author/davispeter-5, including the first seven organisations, down to "British Trust for Ornithology (migration research officer|1963-1966)". Today I added another four organisations, down to "Welsh Kite Trust (trustee|1996-2012)", and saved, at which point the BTO entry turned into "British Trust for Ornithology ({square bracket}1963{square bracket}{space})". And similar with the bird observatory entries above.

Currently if you don't want that to happen when you save, you have to remember to change any preexisting {space dot space}'s back into pipes.

Thanks

*bump* can we have this longstanding issue fixed?

To investigate, CH.

Still happening. Bump.

All I want for Christmas is . . . bump.

Bump.

Despite attracting staff attention in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, it's still happening.

Bumping for this to receive attention.

A lot of helpers' research and hard work is being obscured by this bug. More and more as time goes by because it only takes one helper unaware of the bug, adding a single new line, and all the previous "(text ∙ year)" in that CK entry gets mangled into "( [year])".

Usually a trek into CK history can find the missing text, and some minutes of copy-pasting to restore, but it's not always possible (possibly truncates in history when it's a lengthy field? I can't exactly remember I just know I have had to go off-site to find missing info) so I urge you to move this one up in priority to fix, because it is causing valid CK to be lost.

Now also affecting Works CK as well as Authors CK. See:

Bug Collectors, "Awards and Honors field looks very strange", https://www.librarything.com/topic/335703

>34 Cynfelyn: It's a big problem for the Awards info, which can be detailed. The data remains intact, even if it doesn't look right. Once someone saves any changes, though, the bug kicks in.

We reworked this last year. I'm going to close this, as I think it was solved during that rework. Let me know if this still needs to be investigated.