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

it keeps giving me an error message, all I was doing was writing a guide entry, that loaded fine, clicked the 'My Space' button and low and behold error message, Ive even signed back in and still get the error message

I swear I never pressed anything, even that big red button that says DO NOT PRESS!! Honest, I never

Hey,
sorry it took me long to spot your message... has it resolved itself, or shall we initate investigations?

No it's still doing it I've only been here two minutes and I've broken h2g2!

I'll rephrase that, it's acting like a mardie teenager, sometimes it will and sometimes it just C.B.A

What skin, browser and ISP are you using?

Firefox, bt, alabaster it's working most of the time now so I think it's ok

I'm afraid we don't support the old skins anymore. The older users who use them know their flaws and are able to work around them, but we don't recommend any new users taking them up.

The main flaw with the old skins is that you can edit and publish guide entries with them.

The main flaw with the old skins, is that if more than half a dozen people use them at once, that part of the site crashes.

A little bit bigger than having to keep your connection "active" every 40 minutes to not get timed out

*quickly switches to new skin*

I changed because when you write guide ml wrong in pliny it's most unhelpful on telling you what you did wrong whereas in alabaster it helpfully points it out in red I also don't know which are old and which are new skins

Unfortunately, Icy is right, and so is Pastey. We have two systems running h2g2.

The Ripley system, which supports the Classic, Alabaster and Brunel skins, has a working editor, but it crashes if too many people use it. The Pliny system, on the other hand, does not crash, but its editor is virtually unusable unless you want to type only plain text into it. Once you switch into GuideML, you run the risk of the Pliny editor mangling your entry, converting it into something unreadable or invisible, or worse still erasing everything you've written. All of these have happened to me on occasion when I made the mistake of forgetting to switch to Ripley before editing.

The developers are working on a new system that will actually work, but in the meantime, we're stuck with a Hitchhiker's Guide where it's not safe to edit anything.

I know that there are many things that drive potential authors away from this site, but I feel this must be a big one.

OK. That's the bad news. But we need to work out what can be done to remedy the situation. If you are going to write entries using Pliny, then remember the following rules:

1. Do your editing in Microsoft Notepad or Wordpad and save a copy on your computer before copying it into h2g2.

2. Don't leave too long a gap between starting to edit something in Pliny and clicking the Save button. If you wait too long, Pliny erases the contents of your entry.

3. If you do forget, leave a long break and then click Save, and the edit box is emptied, don't click Save a second time. Press the back button on your browser, and there's a chance that the text might appear again. Cut and paste it into notepad so you don't lose it.

4. If you're writing an entry for the Guide, don't bother with GuideML. It can be added later by the sub-editor.

That third one could be better worded:

3. If you do forget and work on your entry for a long time in the edit window and then click Save, you may find (depending on how long it was) that the entry isn't saved, but that you're left at the edit window and it has been emptied.

In this case, don't under any circumstances click Save again. Press the back button on your browser, and there's a chance that the text might appear again. If it does, cut and paste it into notepad so you don't lose it.

Thanks for all the info

I thought entries had to be written in guide ml. I always edit in alabaster now as pliny doesn't keep some of the tags when you edit, for instance it always does away with the guide and body tags.

You don't need the Guide and Body tags in Pliny.

If you use GuideML, it'll automatically put them in.

Actually I think it hides them but they're still stored in the entry. The real problems in Pliny start if you make a mistake in your GuideML.

If you need any advice on writing GuideML for the Guide, just give me a shout, I'm an expert.

Wish I'd known that before Gnomon. After losing my personal space several times I saved it into word. The guide didn't like the style of speach marks I was using and pliny was adding some gobbledygook to try and correct it. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Alongcomes my 10 year old and points out that the speach marks were different and that's what might be throwing it all out.

Thank heavens for clever kids

Notepad has the big advantage that it doesn't try to "correct" what you've written.