h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Various errors seen in Ripley skins this morning. "Apologise for the Inconvenience", "No such page", "Server Error in '/dna/DnaPages' Application".

Possibly intermittent - some pages do occasionally load.

Suggest you do a technology healthcheck.

Icy

my pace maker is working just fine

Icy, you know as well as we all, that we cannot cure Ripley. Ripley is old and fragile, and not suited to this new world. And we have no way of correcting it.
It helps to know about the instability, true, but all we can do is try to bring Pliny better, and bring the Ripley skins into Pliny. Or the next rebuild.

Hi Milla,

Ever considered a career in customer support?

Seriously - Do we support h2g2 through the Ripley skins, or do we not?

If so (and I haven't heard anything that says we don't), then please would you ensure this request is passed to the relevant technicians to investigate. These pages were working fine before today.

If it helps, I'm getting more consistent failure on MP-pages. U-pages seem OK.

Love and kisses,

Icy

Icy, the only support for Ripley is that it is not removed. This is not news.

Icy, we've said many times before that we can't fix some things in Ripley. We're trying to keep it running but it's getting harder and harder.

You know this.

On the plus side... we're getting closer to bringing the older skins and functionality over to the newer framework, but as you also know the tech team is incredibly small and doing it outside of their (my) day job.

You're a tech person yourself, you know the problems we've got with Ripley better than most, cut us some slack eh?

I'm only asking you to clarify what you are and what you aren't supporting any more. Is that a problem?

I'm not sure if the errors we're seeing today are only in the Ripley skins (they appear to be, but then again they might be symptomatic of a problem which could affect the whole site - I can't tell from here)

Neither do I know if they're affecting site functionality (e.g. editorial functions) which can only be performed through Ripley (I'm not able to test it)

I'm dutifully reporting the errors I see, but I don't expect to be told that you're not going to investigate them as Ripley is no longer supported.

I'd rather you just humoured me, to be honest

I'm getting an increasing number of error messages in both Ripley and Pliny - both skins losing (or apparently losing) posts.

How do you suggest we post to the site, as it stands, in such a way as to avoid all this?

And why does my name intermittently disappear from the 'Who's Online' list (in Pliny)? And why doesn't the (shiny new) search facility (in Pliny) find Entries by A number alone, etc, etc...?

When the site starts to become user friendly, you are sure to get the plaudits you deserve. Until then, you should not be in the least surprised (as users yourselves) by the occasional outburst of frustration.

I am frustrated too. My dream too, is a user friendly system that holds together and doesn't throw errors at anyone. Ripley really can't be rescued. And it also generates zero income, that we might use to fix Pliny.

Do report problems in Pliny.
Please give the link to where the error shows up, so we can check if there is something wrong with the page.
Please tell me the steps that lead up to the error.
Please tell me Operative system and browser name/version.

I have so far only had one researcher reporting that their name disappears from Who's online - but it is *supposed* to disappear if you have been inactive more than 10 minutes. Please send a full bug report to this page with more details.

We are aware that the search isn't as excellent as it could be. Feature and bug requests are recorded. Details do give more help to troubleshoot - such as indeed: A-numbers can't be found. But on the other hand, if you know the A number, just put it after the slash in the h2g2.com/ hit enter and your'e set.

Meanwhile, help us out by using Pliny when you can, and report errors with details, as you find them.

Well, goo seems to working fine right now. Did tech do something or did it fix itself?

Hi Milla,

We have a situation where we have two different front-end technologies (Ripley & Pliny) accessing a single back-end (the database/servers/OS/networking etc).

When I see an error message, I cannot tell whether it is a problem with the front end or the back end. I only use the front end. Every problem I encounter will be manifested there. The error could be anywhere.

I will continue to report error messages until the h2g2 Communications Team tells me not to use Ripley at all (or indeed disables it).

I'm grateful for anything I can get from this site, so here's a

"it is *supposed* to disappear if you have been inactive more than 10 minutes"

That would explain it... thanks . But then, it's not 'who's online', but "who's posted within the last 10 minutes" - we are mostly active when not posting, aren't we, so why doesn't the system realise this?

"We are aware that the search isn't as excellent as it could be. Feature and bug requests are recorded."

So you'll know why the (super, shiny, new, search engine doesn't place an Entry at the top of the list of findings (sometimes it's far from the top) even when the exact Entry name is entered.... and why the search engine lists the same posting many times within the same list of findings? It's certainly better than the old one, but very far from 'excellent'.

Elf,

I'm sorry I don't know *why* it's not at the top... I'm not a programmer at all, just listing bugs. I hope it gets corrected when Pastey gets to it in his to-do list.

For Who's online, each click on a link counts as being active, so as long as you keep reading, you should be listed. It's not just posting that counts

Icy,
seriously?

I don't mind if you post error reports - with details as I asked for - because as you say, it could be the back end, and not Ripley/Pliny that's the problem.

But don't pretend that we will stop you using Ripley just because it's rather broken. You are welcome to use it, until it finally crumbles.

Again. The *only* support we *can* give for Ripley is to leave it live. No fixing.

If an error is reported that can be reproduced in Pliny, then yes, it's likely that the back end has a problem. If the error is *only* in Ripley, it might be useful for Pastey in troubleshooting, but most likely not. And it's not that we don't *want* to fix Ripley, it just *can't* be done.

Please try to accept these facts. And please don't give us too much grief for things we can't solve.

Two front ends and one back end, if only! There's a bit more to it than that, but it boils down to a single database, two separate levels of integration into that, one supporting Pliny and one (Ripley) supporting the older skins.

The database, whilst not ideal is rock solid and we've never had problems with that. Ripley has problems, as we know, but we've managed to stabalise a lot of those through various methods. We can't fix them properly, but we can spend what little time we have making sure that Pliny is running as best we can whilst we also try and build its replacement.

We need to know when any part of h2g2 falls over completely, because we need to keep it up and running. We also need to make sure that Pliny is properly usable. But considering the coding team consists of one person, me, I'm being rather brutal about what I fix and what I don't fix. If you're willing to do some PHP coding to help us get the next version up and running sooner, drop me an email and we can go through it. If you're pretty competent in XML/XSLT driven systems without being able to amend compiled .Net code, then we might be able to use your talents to fix a couple of the more important bugs in Ripley.

But as it is, I've got to focus my time getting all the back end tools running independently from any skin (which is progressing nicely) and build the new system.

I think the BBC saw you guys coming

When you did the deal, shook hands and left the meeting room, they probably all looked at each other for a moment before bursting into a

Maybe, but can you imagine a world where we didn't win the bid?

Yes, there is that

Not sure if that's the right place for it, but I'm having an issue with my PS - on Alabaster (my regular skin) it is completely gone, as you can see in the picture linked below. I was somewhat distressed about this, until I checked it out in the default skin (is that Pliny? I'm not so sure about the names, but I mean the one at http://www.h2g2.com/U250656 rather than my usual http://h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/alabaster/U250656 ), so obviously the information is still there, it's just having some kind of problem with Alabster.

Can you figure out what's going on with this (and hopefully, fix it)? And, if this is the wrong thread, can you let me know who to contact?

Whoops, forgot the picture link. Here:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-oXBIj0kNoOI/UNSK4xf8PII/AAAAAAAAA0M/ZcjhRBXSDao/s0/PS%2520problem%2520temp.png