Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Why Old Stories Are Being Bumped Up

For those of you with real lives, who don't spend every waking moment hanging out on the boards like the rest of us pathetic fools, this is just a reminder that you need to update the links to your stories on the boards in your TOCs.

The upgrade to the new boards inadvertently broke the within-board links, so they need replacing with new links to help people find stories and/or story parts easier. LabRat, with the help of Mike M, have been working diligently on the ones that LabRat herself added to the TOC forum. This is why you'll occasionally see an old FDK thread pop up in the Active Topics thread. Some people (such as myself) have noticed the TOC pop up, when someone bumped it, went to check out said old story, and made a comment. If you check out the TOC forum, you'll probably see the story, which belongs to the old FDK thread, near the top.

If you're one of those people who doesn't usually make up your own TOC thread to your stories, you might want to look for your stories and volunteer to update your own story TOCs. I'm sure LabRat (and Mike M.) would appreciate any extra help they can get. If they've already updated your story TOCs, you might want to add yourself as a follower to the FDK to be emailed should someone add a comment to your story's FDK. (To do this, just click on the Topic Options button when you have your FDK thread open and scroll down to "Add Topic to my Watched Topics". It's that easy. )

Many thanks to LabRat and Mike M. for all of their hard work in helping these authors.

***

By "Within-Board Links" I mean the links in a TOC (Table of Contents) thread that brings a reader to the story and/or FDK(Feedback)/Comments threads. For writers who have links from their story to their FDK threads (and vice versa) those links were also broken by the upgrade and should also be fixed.

Aha. Thanks for the heads up. I'll get around to this soon, but I haven't had much of a chance to explore the new format yet outside of reading a few chapters here and there. Hopefully things will slow down by June, and I can get around to updating, exploring, catching up and (hopefully) posting again!

Thanks, Virginia! And, yes, any help would be greatly appreciated.

We're currently having to go through every single story listed on the Fanfic Index alpha, one by one, check if they're okay or if they need fixed. If the latter, it can be time consuming as at times the search engine won't find specific links or even whole stories. Then we have to guesstimate roughly where they might be and start trawling page by page till we find it.

I should also thank the Index crew, who have also been hunting down TOCs/links and sending them to me for replacing. And, Mike, of course. You rock!

The upside is that this massive 'stocktaking' has let us identify other issues and fix them, too, along the way. So it'll be worth it.

Wow, you do have a lot of work ahead of you. Thank you for doing all of this.

I know it's just a drop in the bucket, but you don't need to look at the TOCs for my stories; I've verified that they are good.

Joy,
Lynn

That helps, Lynn - thanks! The more we can skip over in the list the faster we can go.

The most difficult thing has been when a TOC contains links to another source. It's been often impossible to track down the original challenge thread that prompted the story. Or in the case of Kae's Bozo story, I simply could not find the Tank story that inspired hers because basically there was no info to identify it. And FDK threads are often miles away from their story part. Those are really frustrating! So if anyone spots source links like those along the way do let us know! I hate puzzles with missing pieces.

I fixed mine already (luckily, I've only got two stories, both from within the last year).

Thanks, Annie. Noted.

I was looking up the second part of a fic last night (the link didn't work) and found a fairly easy way to search, even when the search feature was being uncooperative. I looked at the date on the TOC, then went to the last page of the forum and started going forward. Ex.:

http://www.lcficmbs.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php/forums/5/143/Fanfic_Related

The 143 is the page. By changing the page number, I could go through wide swaths of posts very quickly (for example, by changing 143 to 93, you can find out quickly if what you're looking for is that far back). I went by 50 page changes, then 20, then 10, until I found the general area where it would be. When I found the date, I found the topic and was able to read it.

(Hopefully this makes sense. I'm often better at show than tell.)

OK, I did a quick search and four of my older stories came up in the TOC. Does that mean older TOCs still need to be re-added? I guess I'm confused whether the (old) page for the TOC should be there and we need to go in and click on all the links, or whether we need to create a new TOC for old stories. I'm willing to go back and add mine, just making sure I'm doing the right thing.

Thanks for the helpful hint, Annie. The link you showed is for the FanFic Related forum. Here's a random page from the FanFic forum (the oldest current page being pg 674):

http://www.lcficmbs.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php/forums/1/373/Lois_and_Clark_Fanfic

I had to do some hen-pecking like that last night to find story links. I think it will discourage me from writing a story with two different endings and epilogues again. So much for my dream of writing a choose your own adventure style story (I know LLF wrote one at one point though).

FYI: LabRat, I've fixed almost all my stories with the exception of a couple of my earliest ones and my two longest ones (after Wrong Clark). Those will take a while. At least all the links in the Wrong Clark TOC are now completed. I'm still correcting all the links within story parts and FDK threads. Until I have fixed those, I have included a link to the Archive version of the stories within each TOC as a help to any readers. I know all of my stories always turned out better after one of your glorious G.E.'s have looked it over. Thanks again to you and your team for all of your help and hard work!

Yes, that can help, Annie. Or use the go to page feature. Either way seems just as quick. But, yes, that's what we're doing when the search engine won't bring up a story.

Mozartmaid, where possible we're fixing the links within an existing TOC. You need to find the links to each story part on the mbs and replace new with old. You can spot which links are bad - they'll be the ones with "cgi-bin" in them. You can ignore links which don't have this - they'll work fine.

What I do is click edit on the TOC, then hit 'find', put 'cgi' into the search feature in my browser and it'll highlight any cgi-bin links immediately. That speeds things up a tad.

The only time we're starting a brand new TOC is when there doesn't seem to be one already existing.


LabRat

Your comment reminded me of how I searched for all my old TOCs. It's a little more convoluted, but for some people who added their own TOCs it could be a help. I went to the TOC Forum and changed the view from "Subject/Poster" by clicking on the word "poster". This gave me an alphabetical listing (A-Z) of all the posts by author (or post creator). Then I clicked "Poster" again and got a reverse alphabetical listing (Z-A). This was helpful for me because my Display Name starts with V and I didn't have that far back to look to find myself. Then I created a new TOC page with links to all of my old TOCs (just to have them handy) and the date they were originally posted (mostly because I'm detailed oriented. I didn't realize at the time exactly how helpful that would be). Click here to see what I did: All of VirginiaR's TOCs.


FYI: MozartMaid, I just did a quick search of the TOC forum with a subject search "MozartMaid" without your name in the display name and the date search being empty and came up with 16 stories. Most of the TOCs were originally added by LabRat.

LabRat: A quick search of the Challenge Forum gave me these:

Haircut Challenge of 2007 issued by Tank

Then I found this thread by Bethany from 2003: Word of the Day: Haircut

Are those the ones you were looking for?

EDIT: Ooops. I guess you found them already.

Yes Lynn, I noticed that everyone I have seen of yours is up to date. What seems to have happened is that the numbering system of the articles got slightly modified during the upgrade some moved and some did not. I have no idea what would have made some move and other not but it seems to have happened because I see a lot of older TOCs that have not been touched in years that work fine and others that do not. I found one of Nan's that had 10 parts and all but Part 5 worked fine but 5 did not. All you can do is shake your head and keep plowing on.

Mike

Interesting, Mike. I thought all the old links were corrupted. I've just been leading with the assumption that all my story links don't work and fixing them all without checking. Maybe I'll luck out and all of the Missing Lois and Green-Eyed Monster links will work without me having to change a thing.

Virginia,

LabRat indicated in a post somewhere here in the last few minutes that it seems to depend upon the format the link url (something about cgi-bin in the url) took makes the thing work or not. I had not noticed that. I just check to see if the link goes where it is suppose to go or not then send LabRat the update if it does not. I am actually getting fairly good at creating search strings for the forum search that get me pretty much just what I want. Every so often someone uses a different naming format for FDK/Comments that trips me up but I adjust...

Anyway a personal thanks for getting your monster postings fixed, I was not looking forward to that

Mike

Thanks for figuring it out, Virginia! And thanks, LabRat, for doing the legwork!!

Unfortunately, for most of my stories, I'm not having good luck. I just went and checked "Just a Little Note" (one of my two short stories that I haven't yet updated). Out of the 8 links in the TOC, only one worked. I guess the board gods love Lynn's short stories better. I'll fix that one tonight. Sleep is overrated, right?

Oh boy, yes! Do check the links. You'll save yourself a deal of time. As Mike says there's no rhyme or reason to which links are broken at all. It's positively bizarre. I've had TOCs with 57 story parts that are fine, 2 that aren't. Or all the story parts are fine but all of the comments links are out.

The bad links have "cgi-bin" in the url. Those links that don't should work fine and won't need replacing. So it's perfectly feasible that you might find your story only needs 1 or 2 links fixed out of the whole TOC. Or...you could get really unlucky.

Virginia -yes, LOL! I tried to find that link all weekend and couldn't. Typically, soon as I posted.... . But you can have that gold star anyway. <g>

Labby,

You mentioned that it is more difficult to work with posts that have links to another source.

Since the main issue is to copy the link structure of the old page over to the new, is it possible to use a backup/Wayback Machine version of the old board to identify the link targets? Following the link in the old system should tell you what thread, post and author the old link connected to to help find and recreate the link in the new mbs.


David

That's an interesting idea, Shallowford. It might even work. I'll check that out on my next 'shift'. Thanks!

LabRat

Thank you so much for letting me know what the problem was for the broken links. I was able to fix all the broken links in the "Missing Lois" TOC (all 203 of them) in less than five minutes. Here's how:

I opened the TOC file.

I copied the entire TOC contents over into MS WORD.

I did a Find/Replace search:

Find: http://www.lcficmbs.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=

Replace: http://www.lcficmbs.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=

Copied the file back over to the TOC page.

Clicked Submit.

Checked my results.



I still have to go back through the individual posts and FDK threads, though (adding Blue Arrows, fixing any internal broken links, and adding all my FDK threads to my watched topics). At least, my TOCs are correct now. I wish I had known this when I did Wrong Clark, line by line by line by line, the other night. I thought I'd pass along this technique for anyone else who writes long fics (or is fixing them).

Silly question... does the search only go back 5 years? If so, updating my stuff is gonna be... fun. Haha. Oh well.

Sara

Since I found a Haircut Challenge from back in 2003... does math in head... I'm going to say 'no'. It's best when using the "search" function to remove all dates (leave it blank) to get best results, unless specifically looking for something within a certain time frame.

Before Annie showed how to browse years by page numbers (above), I tried to find one of my stories posted in Oct. 2011. It had a generic enough name that the name search didn't work, so I did a search of every one of my posts putting in a time limit: 2 years was too short. 3 years was too long. I actually found it by plugging in 2.5 years.

I was concerned about that myself but as Virginia says it seems to work with blanking out the dates totally. Now the keyword indexing on the Subject line seems to be somewhat hit and miss. I found parts to SQD's Everywhere by searching for stopquitdont in the author line but if I put "Everywhere" in the subject search, zilch. This is making the TOC updates a bit more of a challenge and just when I was thinking I was getting good at finding things...

I am unsure whether to raise this as a ticket as it is tricky to reproduce as some stuff works and some doesn't. It seems as though the more unique the words the better it works. It found every part "Gawain the Black Knight" by Deja Vu but nothing of "Getting It Together" by Antonia.

Of course some of the authors may have just submitted to the archive and never posted anything in the boards. This place likes to keep you on your toes

Bewildering...

Mike

Mike, if you can find the TOC, can't you just do a universal Find/Replace to correct the broken links (as I described above), so you don't have to search for the individual links themselves? Or is it that you don't have management powers to open the TOC to access the links? If you "quick quote" the TOC, shouldn't that give you access to the links, which you then can copy and paste over in WORD and do the Find/Replace option?

Thanks Virginia!!! I understand better now.
regards
Artemis

Virginia,

Probably was not clear (my wife will tell you I am NEVER clear...). A lot of what I was working on was attempting to create TOCs for posts that never had them before. Also the issue with the keywords exist in the TOC forum also (2120 threads and counting). However it IS easier to find there than in the fanfic forum

That said I currently have no privs to open up the TOC and make changes but that seems to be in the works. My approach was working just fine until I began getting into fics with titles like "Going home now", none of those words seem to be indexed.

The additional problem is that things seem to be pretty (very?) dynamic. LabRat sent me a message saying she could not get "Vampire Murders" to find anything but "The Vampire Murders" would. I turned around this morning and searched "Vampire Murders" and found the parts. However the same holds true for me, I would not be able to find something but Labby could find it immediately. It MIGHT have something to do with when we are doing the work as the mind sometimes does not work properly or consistently at 3AM .

Some authors seem to like to use pretty novel titles to their fics(Sue comes to mind) which makes the search work well, others more generic and those can be problematic. However we just have to work through them.

Thanks

Mike

Yikes! There are stories floating on the boards which never got a TOC?! More power to you, Mike. That seems like a daunting task to fix.

EDIT: Mike, are you sure about "Everywhere" not having a TOC? I just did a quick TOC of StopQuitDont's work (as I did for MozartMaid, yesterday with TOC Forum highlighted, StopQuitDont in the Subject line, and no dates indicated) and it came up as well as a bunch of her other stories.

I suspect it is (a daunting task that is). LabRat and I have not discussed how to decide what to make TOCs for and when. I have been searching for parts for some of the longer ones and I suspect they would be more useful but mostly I was just trying out different things trying to make sense of the search...

Speaking of not worthy, I am so glad that you are handling things like "Wrong Clark", my god how much more is there of that monster? I would like to start reading it but prefer the e-book stuff and I am so far behind now that it would take me over a year to catch up

Mike

For myself, I'm creating a new TOC when:

a/ the link to the TOC in the Fanfic Index is broken.
b/ the mbs search engine doesn't find a TOC.
c/ some searching around the TOC folder around the same dates as the story posts doesn't find it either.


LabRat

Virginia,

I believe LabRat was updating the TOC. She just could not find Parts 1 and 2 which I provided. I just checked and she had updated it this morning after fixing the broken links.

Mike

Virginia,

Thanks for the technique. I had to modify it a bit due to the fact that some of the parameters are different on some of the TOCs than your format.

I went with
Replace: cgi-bin/boards/ultimatebb.cgi
With: ubb/ultimatebb.php

which leaves all of the other parameters the same.

Thanks again.

Mike

Thank you so much for your interest in my little vignette. This summer, when I take a hiatus from writing Wrong Clark (well... posting it, at least. I can't stop myself from writing it...) besides taking a family vacation, cleaning and repainting my office (and hopefully finding my wedding ring, which I lost 5 years ago), I have promised LabRat to prepare Sections I & II of Wrong Clark for G.E. Section I is roughly the first 100 parts on the boards, and Section II will be slightly less than that (she says crossing her fingers and knocking on wood). Both those sections will be complete on the boards before I take a pause in posting, (she says crossing her fingers AGAIN and knocking on wood AGAIN) even if it means I have to up my posting schedule to make it so. I'm also hoping to catch up on my cushion and make it more comfortable than the current 5 parts it is at now. (I had a 20 part cushion when I started posting in 2012.) That will give many people time to catch up with the story, should they wish. I have made it (and will fix the links, so they can do so again) as easy to read as possible. Firstly, I've broken the story up into smaller story arcs (See TOC for more details) and, secondly, I've added a link to the next part at the end of each part.

You can see why updating all the links for this story is an arduous process. Each Part has at least 4 links in it: the *previous* part, the *next* part, the *TOC* link, and a link to FDK thread. I finished fixing all the broken links (and apparently the non-broken ones as well) in the TOC the other day and now I'm working on correcting all the broken links within each individual part and FDK thread. As of this morning, I've updated everything *after* Part 103. The Find/Replace method has been very helpful in this process. I wish I had stumbled across it a week ago.

I am no longer making predictions as to when I hope to be finished writing this story (and I'm just talking BOOK 2 here, people, there's still a BOOK 3 of the trilogy) and I've demolished all the limits I've set for myself. (That it wouldn't be longer than Missing Lois, that I would finish by the end of the first year, that I would finish by the end of LAST summer, that it wouldn't be longer than 150 parts). It is what it is. It is an outlined story and I'm approximately 2/3 of the way through it... believe it or not. Luckily for me, there is a lot of fun stuff coming up to write about, including an Nfic chapter or two which some Reader made me promise to write, so I'm hoping that means it will be easier and quicker to write. The darker (Lex POV, Lois and Clark fighting) scenes can be depressing, which doesn't inspire my muse. She loves fun banter to heavy angst. Don't get me wrong, there *will* be angst in Section III, just a different kind of angst than there was in the darker Section II. Although, I have to admit today's scene wrote itself much faster than I was expecting. Speaking of which, I better get back to it, if I'm going to post tomorrow night. Thanks again for your interest, Mike.

AND now you know what it takes to write an epic: a tendency to ramble like a babbling brook after a heavy week of rains, an inner editor on vacation, and the ability to type quickly.

I responded to some over in the other thread but at 3AM some of what you posted is just hitting me. So the second part of the TRILOGY will become a TRILOGY itself? This is amazing in itself.


At 2/3 through you have another year to go to complete this 2nd Part of the original Trilogy. I agree about the preference of banter to angst but with L&C you frequently get the banter due to the angst as it is kind of their defense mechanism...


No thank you for all of your work and dedication. I am quite amazed at people who can write fiction and absolutely blown away by people who can keep a story on track for over two years and probably closer to 3 eventually.

Mike

Mike M and LabRat:

THANK YOU!!!!

I was fully intending to help by updating my own TOCs, but I got distracted and frustrated (with searching) and busy with work and life...

Now I've checked, and everything's been done already! You guys are amazingly awesome!!!!

Sara

Sara,

No problem. I was just trying to make sure that LabRat was not stuck doing the entire job.

That just didn't seem fair.

Mike

You're welcome, Sara. Things went very much faster once Virginia came up with her trick of simply swapping out the urls with a global search & replace. I was even able to do a huge chunk after that on my Nexus instead of having to wait til I could get to the pc.

So, yes, all TOCs should be back to normal. If anyone finds differently - let me know.

LabRat