Site Updates, Yay! · 1:43am Jun 6th, 2017
So as y’all have surely noticed, FimFic has a shiny new look!
Source (YouTube link)
(Remember the update when we had an interactive Rainbow Dash?)
Well, I’m not sure what to think about it yet--it’s different, that’s for sure, and I haven’t figured out how everything works on my mobile yet. I do like that the search bar is right there instead of having to jump through hoops to get to it. I’m not a huge fan of the new layout on mobile, though, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it and like it . . . it’s just one of those things where stuff isn’t where I’m used to it being, and so it takes longer to find what I want to.
Unfortunately, the update did cause one major issue for me.
Most of you surely remember Silver Glow’s Journal, and that I was updating daily. During that time period, something went wrong with the gDocs importer, due to a change in gDocs, IIRC. There was a blog post about it, in fact.
Now, I’m not the most tech-savvy person out there. Someone came up with a workaround (there was a blog post about that, too), and when I was running on the insane self-imposed deadlines of Silver Glow’s Journal, I didn’t have time to figure out how to use some new program to do whatever it was it was supposed to do.
Heck, I put off buying a new keyboard as long as I could, just because I knew that switching them was gonna change my typing somewhat, and slow me down a bit. Of course, broken is broken, and there came a point where I had no choice, and then there was a week of a rather high number of typos which I of course blame on the new tech and not anything else.
The point is, instead of using the shiny new makeshift importer, I took a different route--I simply deleted about half the formatting marks, ‘cause that’s what it took to make things show up properly on the old interface, and continued along as usual.
[It wasn’t the first time I’d had to deal with that, either; way back in the day there were also some problems, and I worked around them the same way.]
Which brings us to today: Every chapter of every one of my stories which was patched like that has lost all its line breaks. Let me give you an example.
Shining Armor Has an REDACTED Lasting More than Four Hours
Admiral Biscuit“Are you sure?” Shining Armor looked at the little bottle floating in his aura dubiously.“Red Fortera is the best natural male enhancement pill,” the salespony glanced down at his sample case briefly and then locked his eyes back on Shining. “Try it, you'll see. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a number of other appointments yet today. Some stallions wish to be the very best for their marefriends on Hearts and Hooves Day.”“Very well.” Shining gave the salespony a few bits and then picked the bottle back up to examine it. There was a lot of very small printing on the back of the label, and he squinted at it curiously. By the time he looked back up, the salespony was gone
(I had to redact one word, since it’s a quote from a mature story 
)
And it goes on like that, in one glorious, nearly unreadable wall ‘o text.
I don’t know how many things I’ll have to fix, but I bet it’s a lot. And it’s gonna take me a little while to get it done.
So I need you, my readers, to do me a favor: I already know about the last month and some of Silver Glow’s Journal--I don’t know where it starts, but I know that it goes all the way up to the end. But there are other stories of mine that likely have messed-up formatting now, and I don’t know what they all are. So if you happen to be reading along and find one that the formatting’s wrong on, either send me a PM or even better comment on this blog or my userpage, and I’ll add it to the list of things that need to be fixed.
And speaking of fixing, I’ve been doing a lot of work around the house. I was gonna post some pictures tonight, and give y’all a blog update on it, but now that’s gonna have to wait for a little bit, since I’ve got some major editing work ahead of me. The good news is that with practice, it’s gonna get pretty quick, I hope, and probably not take more than 10 or 15 minutes per chapter.
The bad news is that I bet there are at least 30 affected chapters, and probably more, and if you start to multiply that all together, you’re dealing with a goodly amount of time.
Oh yeah, I guess I want to leave you with a bit of other good news: Imgur links are working again (this predates the site update). So for anyone who didn’t know that, you can now put them in pictures again. To prove it, I’ll put one in right below:
Fuel pump doesn’t work, but gravity still does. Probably most of my readers are too young to know about gravity feeding a carb.
EDIT: Okay, so it seems that images are kinda broken right now. I’m gonna leave them in for posterity, though.
Also, the preview blog function appears to be missing.
EDIT EDIT: Okay, now the images work. Glad I didn’t delete them.
Busywork and going through and fixing things piecemeal can be fun. More fun than letting a script or automated system try to do it and break everything even worse, anyway.
Backup utilities and media library syncing are an abomination.
Note to self: Don’t let your brain explode with trying to find spelling errors in walls of text.
nice. You made the layout changes in gdocs, I’m assuming? The importer (well, copy+paste) should work now, so if you still have the originals with proper formatting you could try that instead of manually linebreaking stuff. But that loses any of the typo corrections you only made in the live version, and...
Well, good luck. SGJ seems to start at Nov 15th to the end (unless you’ve already fixed some stuff in there.)
The site update was a shock this morning, I stopped partway through a chapter last night so when I hit the next chapter, everything changed.
Overall the mobile site is a big improvement (although the quote function could be slightly better, but i’m still figuring everything out).
I’ll keep an eye out for formatting stuff.
all of my bookshelves with pony emotes turned to normal ones...
Your picture brings back nostalgic warm fuzzies.
4560906
That will get fixed soon. Knighty went to sleep.
Gravity powerd fuel. Nuts.
Granted I drove around in this tiny toyota pickup with a gas can on the passenger side floorboards. It was the fuel tank. Yay fumes!
Damn, bummer about that carriage return issue. Does Knighty not have plans to fix that? Probably not...
Silver Glow's Journal from November 15 onward (as far as I can tell) is borked at random chapters. I also downloaded the epub, and it has the same problem. You probably already know this. (Edit: Yes you do)
Idea! Why not copy/paste from previous epubs if you can? I read primarily epubs, so I can give you Silver Glow's Journal pre-site-change, if needed.
So, Biscuit, was that truck at the bottom of the blog post the inspiration for Winston or Not-Winston?
Also, dat second blog post tag.
I like it for the most part but I cant seem to find the save button on my document editor in-site. Commenting here also doesn’t have any editing tools like the emotes or spoiler buttons.
4560848
Ctrl + del really sped things up, and luckily the majority of the bad formatting marks were at the beginning of paragraphs, so I could just cruise down the left margin. I got about 20 chapters of SGJ done tonight, so it won’t be as bad as I worried it might. Still a pain in the butt, though, and I know there’s at least one other story that’s messed up, plus probably various chapters of other stuff.
I know. That’s why I didn’t want to just pull in the gDocs, ‘cause there’s probably inline corrections I’d made, and I’d lose them.
4560850
Yeah . . . Actually, the whole reason I discovered the mess was the Red Fortera ad was on the radio again, and I was gonna re-read my masterpiece, and when I opened it up, I discovered what the update had done to the formatting.
Oh, you can? In that case, I’ll celebrate too!
i.imgur.com/8F6yq9l.jpg
Blue, blue, blue!
Worst pony’s color.
So far I don't really know what to think about the update. There were some features of the old site I liked a lot like the sort by most recently updated option under bookshelves but I like how it looks now
4560857
The formatting mistakes got added in in the old importer. So yes, I could import the old gDocs, but that would lose any corrections/changes I’d made since that draft, and I have no way of knowing what they were.
Turns out it went quicker than I’d worried it might (but still a rather large undertaking). I’ve fixed SJG from December 12 onwards, so I guess I’ve got to go back to Nov. 15.
4560864
Yeah, I wasn’t expecting it at all. Nor for it to be such a major change.
Probably in a couple of days, though, I’ll be used to it.
I don’t like the loss of the front page (it might still be there, and I just can’t find it), but otherwise everything I’ve seen on mobile is good. I don’t like the reply arrows on the desktop version, either--that may yet need a patch, or that might be the way they are gonna stay.
But overall, I think it’s gonna be a good update.
The ones I know are bad are SGJ from Nov. 15 on and one chapter of Not Another Clopfic. I haven’t looked at anything else, yet.
4560906
Yeah, mine did, too.
I don’t know if you noticed, but before they’d be normal emotes, and then change to ponies, so I think that perhaps there’s a little bit of coding that got missed, and it’ll probably be fixed in a patch.
4560929
Which one? Dr. Whooves? RD x Mouse Cursor? Or my old Chevy truck?
4560937
Yay! I already miss my Lyra bookshelf.
4561023
Gravity is always reliable. Of course, if it had leaked, there would have been no way to stop it, short of getting out and putting the fuel bottle below the carb.
That’s one crazy thing I haven’t done. I do recall in one of my old trucks, being able to look through the holes in the floorboard at the flames from occasional backfires through the rotted-out exhaust pipe, and sometimes if I drove down a dirt road, my legs and arms would get a little bit muddy.
4561029
That was a known issue with the gDocs update, and I suspect it’s why he’s now programmed it to be cut and paste, so you’re not relying on someone else’s program to stay the same in order for yours to work. It’s actually a problem that our software at work had, too, and they had to issue several patches for Windows updates, until they finally made it a standalone system.
Alright, good to know! I’ve fixed from Dec. 12 onwards already, so now I know where I’ve got to work back to. Thanks!
I could if I had them, but I don’t, and I also don’t know if they’re the latest version, since I have made several edits since the chapters first went live, fixing spelling errors and so on. It’s actually not as time-consuming to go fix the line breaks as I thought it would be, since the bad formatting is all at the beginning of paragraphs, so I can just zoom down the left margin. I got it down to about 3 minutes per chapter.
4561042
Well, half of it is the original Winston. The engine, transmission, front trim, and all of the interior are from the original Winston. Not-Winston was inspired by another truck I had, a ‘76 3/4 ton truck that only ran once while I owned it, and its only useful function was as a picnic table.i.imgur.com/Oa02waa.png
4561045
On the computer (Windows machine with Chrome), the Save button is on the left top of the text screen (it took me a moment to find, too). I would assume it’s about the same on other PCs; no idea where it is on mobile.
They’re across the top bar where they always were on my PC. I did notice the strikeout button was missing on my phone, but the BBC code still worked to get it. I know most of the emoticons and formatting text that I usually use, so if there’s something else missing, I haven’t noticed it yet.
4561089
it’s still there. There’s just tabs now. Continue (awesome idea by the way), featured, new, updated
The big thing for me on mobile is profile pics in comments, and mobile pages for groups and user pages, and now I can actually sort my libraries.
4561078
That looks more purple to me.
Be very careful with what you say; Silver Glow is a beautiful cerulean blue.
camo.derpicdn.net/94dae55c25b5d61531783737370ad6318e52bb96?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpre10.deviantart.net%2F6e44%2Fth%2Fpre%2Fi%2F2015%2F164%2Fa%2Fa%2Fsilverglow_g3_pony_by_2devils-d8x5ry3.png
4561080
I think in a couple of days we’ll get used to it and the major bugs will be fixed, and life will go on.
I miss colored story genre tags. The “color-coordinated” tags all look the same to me; I used to be able to tell at a glance what kind of story it was, but now no longer. Same goes for the character tags instead of the icon system, which admittedly had its flaws, but was otherwise a unique quirk/feature of FIMfic.
Only thing that really and truly bothers me to the point of not understanding the rationale? Circle Avatars.
Also, I can’t imagine gravity feeding a carb. Granted, the only cars I currently have access to that are carb-fed are air-cooled VWs, which would be akin to suicide trying to expect a proper gravity feed to work in a compartment that small and hot without spontaneously igniting gas fumes.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t started either car that way (gas directly into the carb jet), but I wouldn’t try it for long periods. I imagine hills and steep slopes become perilous very quickly...
4561126
Telling me like I’be never used the damn site :p it's not actually there. It's physically missing, just the separators show up on my web browser. I told Space about it as it may be because I'm plain and boring and use Internet Explorer.
If the missing line breaks are a common occurrence, they might make a fix for it. And then you’ll have gone through all that work for nothing.
Or they might just give you the finger.
Speaking of keyboards, I was trying to use a slim keyboard and it drove me insane. I went and got a nice full-stroke clicky keyboard.
Actually, she’s still around. You just have to go into the ‘settings’ tab, and manually activate the ‘interactive pony’ option.
Personally find it way, way to distracting, but it’s a cute way to get a chuckle now and then.
I’m... not totally pleased with some of the aesthetic changes. I liked the user name being next to the image in the news page, not at the bottom of the post. To many users change their image frequently, and many have similar looking ones.
Other than that, I really don’t like how the tags colors changed. It was easy to just glance for the color I was looking for when scrolling through stories to read... not I have to actually read the tags.
Not browsed around long enough to see other things really yet.
As for the formatting thing, Are you sure you have to take the bracket [ ‘] codes out? All of mine have those since I have a slightly convoluted way of putting things in since I type in MS Word first. Then I paste into Google so people can help edit, then copy/paste into FimFiction after edited. I did a quick scan and didn’t really notice anything other than the quote boxes are not there anymore as a color difference and instead just indented with a line next to it. Which kinda sucks since I used those as scrolls and such. Guess I will have to leave that as it is, or figure something else out.
and now that I say that I just went and looked, And the formatting on the one for Padlock’s promotion is messed up.
Edit: Just noticed my avatar looks cooler now since they turned to circles.
edit2: I like to click on documents with my mouse... now every time I do some yellow box highlights the entire paragraph and I have to make it go away. Any idea how to stop that? If its even possible?
4561091
The truck. Ah, childhood.
Carb cleaner tastes terrible.
And now, I keep my lips tightly closed when I stick that little red tube into the nooks and crannies of a 4-barrel Stromberg. Because you just know that one of those intricate passageways will turn back around and point right at your face.
This could be considered a bug in the update: it’s somehow not correctly identifying paragraph boundaries. Before doing all that work, you should ping knighty and have him look into it.
Is SG's journal down to 998k words just because of merged words from that many line breaks missing?
4561172
It looks like some of the colored tags have come back, at least. Not sure if they’re all the same colors as before, or if as many of them are colored.
Yeah, I did like those, although I’ve got to admit in some cases it was kinda hard to figure out who the tag was for. I guess if you were familiar with the pony, you’d be able to tell at a glance, but for me, some of the more obscure ones weren’t recognizable right away from the tags.
I wonder if that has to do with the somewhat improved mobile layout? It didn’t used to show avatars on comments on mobile and now it does.
Basically, you just need enough flow to fill the bowl, and then you’re good to go. The problem (well, one of them) is that you can’t stop gravity if you need to shut off the fuel system for some reason. And to get a good flow you’ve pretty much got to mount the fuel tank on the roof, or as near to it as you can.
Yeah, it’s an emergency procedure only, sort of like duct taping a radiator hose back together, or jamming a bunch of tire plugs in a sidewall hole--if you’ve got to do it to get somewhere you can, but it’s not a repair by any means.
4561312
Yeah, it certainly could be an issue with your browser. Last night I tried to load FimFic with Explorer to see how it would work and it wouldn’t load at all. The only thing I can attest to is that it works for me on Chrome.
4561331
The problem stemmed from a known problem with gDocs, and someone did make a workaround importer, I just never used it. So it’s on me, really.
Yeah, using a cheap keyboard instead of my Das Keyboard feels like typing on applesauce. I don’t like it very much at all. Sometimes I don’t have a choice, though.
4561335
Oh, really? I’m gonna have to do that.
Yeah, I think that’s why I turned her off the first time--she was fun for a while, but then got annoying.
4561386
That seems to be back to normalish on Chrome, although not on mobile. It looks like square pictures for group posts and round pictures for stories and blogs.
Some of them are in color again, although I don’t know if it’s the same colors as they were before.
Yeah, I do have to take them out. I just imported from gDocs (instead of cutting and pasting) and things got screwed up on a gDocs update. I did a workaround at the time (not the official one, which probably wouldn’t have led to this problem), and it cost me my paragraph breaks.
It’s not the hugest deal ever, but it is kinda annoying.
I’m lucky in one regard, because most of my stories don’t have extensive formatting in-chapter. Usually just italics.
I don’t know--it’s supposed to help make commenting easier or something. I haven’t noticed on my computer (but then I use the mouse, and I rarely computer edit). It does it on my phone, but then again my phone also likes to highlight whatever word I touch on the screen and suggests that I look it up with Google . . . so it’s no more annoying than what my phone already does.
4561470
Well, if you ever happen to be by, I’d be happy to put some more gas in the Powerade bottle and we can run it around the backyard.
It reminds me of my college days, ‘cause that’s what I drove in college.
4561533
Yes, it does. And don’t get it in your eyes, either. Or open wounds, for that matter.
I couldn’t even tell you the number of times I’ve accidentally sprayed myself with carb cleaner or brake cleaner. Or any other common automotive chemical, for that matter.
4562392
It was a previously known issue, and one that I worked around my own way, rather than learn to use the patched importer that some tech-savvy user wrote. That’s mostly because I’m a luddite about a lot of things, and in this case I’m kinda paying for it.
4562516
I doubt I took that many formatting marks out (although I might have). The other possibility is that it counted some punctuation as words (which I ran into when I was trying to publish a 0 word chapter because reasons), and there was something in one of the blog posts about the word counter now being more accurate and not counting things that weren’t words.
I’ll keep an eye on it when I do the next set of corrections and see what happens in terms of the word count--if it drops, then I know it was the formatting marks; if it doesn’t, then it’s the word counter being revised.
I’m also curious about seeing if re-saving a chapter of a story that’s right at the 1k minimum makes it go under.
Either way, that means that maybe I’ll have to add a few thousand words to Silver Glow’s Journal to get it back over the million mark.
4562743
Do you know I’ve never used FIMfiction’s mobile site? I always default to the desktop version of every website I go to, as much as is possible. Most of the time the reason for this is that I’ve never come across a website’s mobile version that I actually enjoyed using. Given that most websites are more than within the computing capabilities of most modern phones, even budget ones, the idea of a mobile site to me just makes zero sense, though I understand why they exist.
Still makes no sense to have circle avatars. All the pony avatars have truncated manes and hooves now. Even my avatar escapes unscathed only by virtue of encountering this on another site I frequent and having to already make the adaptation.
4562743I put it through to Knighty and Space Cowboy and Cowboy confirmed it was a bug. It’s since been fixed, as has the comment boxes. As far as I can tell, I’m now at 100%...well, almost. A few of the new editing options on the comment box here are floating off the box XD
Is it just me, or has the comments system gotten completely buggered in the new system? I read on mobile, and I can’t use the ‘Quick Comment’ button at the bottom of each chapter anymore, it just places me halfway through the chapter instead.
4563043
It seems to be working for me on my Android phone...
Kinda disappointed that Silver Glow's Journal no longer has a million words.
Probably should fix that.
4563052
I got a windows phone.
4563092
I know. I’ll have to see if I can fix that.
4563481
That could be the issue, maybe? I dunno--there’s a link somewhere to report bugs, although I don’t know where.
I’ll be having a BBQ with one of the mods later tonight, so I’ll ask him if he knows anything, at least assuming that I don’t drink so much that I forget.
4562924
I noticed the thing with the options floating off the comment box just today--trying to insert a picture, and I had to turn my phone and then find the extra drop-down menu. Ah well, I’m sure that’ll probably get fixed in the next couple of days . . . hopefully. . . .
4562800
I always thought that the mobile site was alright for reading, which is pretty much how I used it. Occasionally commenting, too, but that was kind of wonky. Most of the other stuff I do, I do on my desktop (there are apparently writers out there who write their stories on mobile, but I can’t imagine having to do that).
I do kinda like the option of a stripped-down version of the site for people who either have limited service plans, or limited connectivity. Sometimes when my internet is being stupid, I can’t load anything on the page. I run into that with YouTube a lot, too--until recently, I generally watched YouTube at 360p or less.
Yeah, I’m not overly fond of the round ones, although I will say that it’s nice to have them on comments in the mobile version--it didn’t used to, and some readers I remember more by avatar than username.
4563503
Thanks muchly!
4563518 It was a huge update done by someone who does this on the side. I’m perfectly fine with Knighty doing as he likes and fixing things on his own time, especially now that I don’t have any breaking bugs.
4563917
Honestly, for all the complainers (and there have been update features I didn’t particularly care for), this site is about a thousand times better than fanfiction.net. Sure, it’s got some flaws, but like you say, it hasn’t got a team of hundreds of coders or a million dollar budget. And it’s not like I could do better anyways.
I think it got a little bit more usable on mobile, and the computer page seems more or less the same as it always was, although with more features now. Sure, there were some bugs especially right after rollout, but I think that’s to be expected, especially for such a small operation--how could they have tested every possible hardware and software combination?
Well, Asylum is borked, in exactly the same way as the Shining Armor example you used.
4572141
Thanks!
I have now fixed it.
SG's journal has now gone from 998k to 996k (did you do something?)
So now you need to write 4K more horse words :)
4573223
Yeah, I finished fixing the formatting errors. All except for one chapter, that is.
I'm still considering the best way to fix the word count to get it back to where it was.