Arrangement order of library

Frequently, my library is displayed in date order of entry rather than alphabetically by author. Clicking on the author heading doesn't make any difference. This is particularly noticeable whenever I make an addition to the library. Eventually it's always gone back to alphabetical by author but it takes a while. This seems to be a recent development since the long downtime a few weeks ago.

Could you give a few more details for the developers to help them hunt it down?

Operating system, browswer and version?

Also, what was the last book added that caused this issue?

Thanks!

MAC OS High Sierra. Browser is Firefox but I've also tried with Safari. It's behaving right now. I have two accounts and when one account is affected, so is the other one. I believe the last book I added in this account which caused it to switch to date added order was The Readers' Advisory Guide to Nonfiction by Neal Wyatt which was added on May 5th. I've added two or three books since then and everything has been fine. It's intermittent and, as I said, it's in alphabetical order by author right now. If it happens again, I'll do a screen shot.

I'm posting from my other account. The last book I added in this account which caused the library to change order was The Garden Plot by J. S. Borthwick. It was added on May 4th. Same computers used for both. I have two computers I use -- both are MAC High Sierra OS with latest version of Firefox.

I have discovered that this happens most often with Firefox. This afternoon I have opened this account (lizzy50usa) with Firefox, chrome and safari. Only Firefox had the library in the date acquired order. The other two were correct. I double-checked this several times.

I have seen this in the past, when I used to use Firefox, when it seemed to happen at random. I've not seen it so much since I've switched to Chrome. It mostly happens now if there's been some sort of system reset, such as an ISP outage (sadly not unknown with my ISP!) or a server reboot. I think it happened after the recent Great LT Outage, as well.

Can you look at the cookie_sort cookie from www.librarything.com in both browsers, and see whether the Firefox one has an expiration date set?

Instructions for viewing cookies here. I can't vouch for the correctness of anything other than Chrome.

Yeah, >7 lorax: is on the right track. This sounds like a cookies/browser caching issue. If you notice this happening again, try clearing your browsing data on Firefox, and let us know if that doesn't clear it up.

Aha, this is tied to data recovery we've been working on. Sorry for the confusion—I didn't realize this was part of the issue. Closing this report as it's covered here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/291217, and we're working on the issue and will post updates to that thread.

Wow, I never would have pegged a browser-dependent sort issue as being related to the data loss!

>9 lorannen:

No, this is definitely not related to the recovery. Her problem was announced on May 5. We only recovered the books on May 10-11. Some people are complaining about sorting of recovered books, but that's not what's going on here.

I think the core issue is simple:

* Date-entry order is the default order, when you have no cookies.

Something is either resetting the cookie, or preventing it from changing. That can't really have anything to do with downtimes, except insofar as the user may have quit their browser during it. It's also possible the user has a bookmark saved for their catalog which embeds the sort order--and therefore changes it when they use it.

I cleared my cache for Firefox (speaking for both lizzy50usa and dottyreader) and that seems to have worked. The next time I opened LibraryThing, it was still in date added order but I was able to reorder by clicking on author and have not had the problem since. Thanks for all your help.

Closing as fixed.