Distant Shores mucked up; it's all my fault, I know, but how can I fix it?

[dgw]

Noes! In trying to add all the contributors for the Star Trek: Voyager Distant Shores anthology (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18...), I seem to have made it so the book won't even display. Goodreads also won't save the content of the main "author" field any more (Marco Palmieri belongs there as "Editor"). I've tried in both IE7 and FF3 to save.

Both the book's page and the librarian change log are now error pages. I can't even revert (not that I'm sure Goodreads has such a feature).

I will definitely not leave primary fields blank in the future; I guess it's not a quick, easy way to move a person from the top of the list to the bottom.

[Ravenskya]

I'll see if I can fix it at all

[Ravenskya]

I'm trying to re-import it from Amazon... I don't know if that will fix it, it says I have a loooong wait time for it to finish though. I hope I didn't make it worse.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

It's unlikely to help.

[Ravenskya]

Yeah... looks like it's locked up. Sorry, that was all I could think of to do.

[Michael]

Rivka sked me in pm:
And if you could let us know what not to do to avoid this, that would be good too!

Theoretically the code base shouldn't allow you guys to break anything, so don't worry about it. Just keep reporting when you do find/create a broken page.

[dgw]

Kristen wrote: "Yeah... looks like it's locked up. Sorry, that was all I could think of to do."

Thanks for trying, Kristen. I thought of resetting from Amazon, but decided against it when I read that author information will be left intact. I thought, "The problem is in the author info; that won't help." Unfortunately, it seems I was right. It's still broken.

MICHAEL wrote: "Rivka sked me in pm:
And if you could let us know what not to do to avoid this, that would be good too!

Theoretically the code base shouldn't allow you guys to break anything, so don't worry abou..."

Hopefully this will be fixed soon. Not only do I feel guilty about breaking other people's book lists, but I can't access my mobile home page because of this book, and I'm currently reading it - I can't update my current status, either.

[Michael]

OK, somehow the original author got removed, I fixed it. If anyone knows how to recreate this bug let me know.

[dgw]

It's fixed now; thanks, Michael! I think it happened because I was trying to move Marco to the bottom of the list; he's just the editor, not an author, and he's at the bottom of the cover.

I did this:

1. Add other authors
2. Rearrange everyone else
3. Add another author at the bottom, filling in Marco's name and role as Editor
4. Clear Marco's name and role from the primary fields at the top
5. PROFI-- Wait. GAH! It broke. :-(

As I said, I'm never leaving primary fields blank again. The software may not be supposed to let me break things like that, but I don't feel like tempting Fate to make it happen again. ;-)

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Yeah, books must have a primary author. When there is one editor and many authors, that actually is usually the editor.

Thanks, Michael! :)

[dgw]

I figured it was the empty field. I did try to put Marco back in there several times, though, without success. That was weird.

Anyway, thanks to Michael for fixing my stupid mistake, and to rivka for correcting my perception on editor/author ranking.

[Michael]

I think we used to not allow that, but it got muddled in the last few months. We'll have a fix in to prevent anyone else from doing the same thing in the next site release.