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