System undoing manual changes?

[Cameo]

I'm noticing that the system seems to be undoing changes I've made. For instance, I've added expanded synopses to books, and then "ingram" overrides me and changes the synopses back to the brief, original ones.

Do the system updates from Ingrams reset fields to their original values? It's a little frustrating to make an improvement and then have it undone.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Edit: oops. Sorry, Brian's running a script that might be responsible.

[Jan]

It seems to be happening now.

While we're at it, could the ingram data Paperbound be changed to paperback automatically please? Importing data like that is really annoying.

[❂ Murder by Death]

Jan wrote: "It seems to be happening now.

While we're at it, could the ingram data Paperbound be changed to paperback automatically please? Importing data like that is really annoying."

Brian just posted here: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/8... that he's doing exactly that - changing imported formats to match librarian/GR conventions. :)

[Jan]

Awesome. Maybe the 'updating descriptions' imported from ingram' part of Brians message is what happening in the OP case?

[Cameo]

Thanks for your replies. Here is an example of what I mean (I added the full synopsis for this book on Feb 7th, and then Ingram changed it back to the short blurb two times since then):

http://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/1...

I just changed it back to the full synopsis again, but I'm going to watch and see if it changes back again. :(

[Cameo]

Just read the thread Jennifer E. directed me to. I don't understand all that was said about scripts, but hopefully that is what's going on and this is just a temporary thing. Thanks! :)

[Brian]

Please whenever you're trying to diagnose problems with data tracking, ALWAYS go to the "this edition" version (we'll make that the default one of these days).

when i go to the edits for the version you're pointing to (http://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/1...), what i see is this:

* on 1/31 ingram set the description
* on 2/7, throughaglassdarkly removed the description (set it to '') -- so now there's no updater set
* on 2/11 ingram set the description back (because it was blank after 2/7)
* today ingram set the description again (getting rid of the blank space at top)

[rivka, Former Moderator]

TGD, have all the ones you've seen this problem with had descriptions that started with HTML code? The example starts with the HTML for italics, for instance.

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Brian wrote: "we'll make that the default one of these days"

Pretty please.

[Brian]

Oh, wait, I wonder if this is related to the code that moves a book's description up to the parent work's default_description if nothing is set?...lemme look into that.

[Cameo]

This is the version (the MMP):

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...

When I changed the description, I added the FULL description. I did not add a blank space. I'm not sure why it would indicate that.

[Brian]

I think it's related to the code I mention above...and it may be a special case where if the book's description matches the work's default description that we just null out the book's description (so we don't duplicate content).

Can you try just making a slight tweak to the book's description and see if the librarian log still shows that you're setting it to '' ?

This is a bug though. I'll add a ticket for it.

[Cameo]

Okay, I changed the first sentence from italic to bold italic.

[Cameo]

And I see it showing up on the log.

[Brian]

If this works (the librarian log shows you as having set the description to something other than ''), then this can be the workaround for now...just make sure the book's description is different from the default description. :(

Sorry, I totally see the problem now and filed a ticket.

[Brian]

ThroughaGlassDarkly wrote: "And I see it showing up on the log."

Thanks for helping me track this one down!

[Cameo]

Just to clarify (I'm a little "slow"): What is it exactly that I need to do so that my changes are not undone in the future? Because the description I originally added to this particular book was completely different than the default description, but it was undone anyway. I'm just a little confused.

[Cameo]

Rivka, I'm sorry I forgot to answer you. I really don't know about the html code. Whenever I add a description, myself, I do add the code if necessary. Maybe I'm not understanding you correctly?

[rivka, Former Moderator]

Brian seems to think it's something else, and he actually understands code, so let's go with him. :)

[Cameo]

Sounds good. :)

[Brian]

ThroughaGlassDarkly wrote: "Just to clarify (I'm a little "slow"): What is it exactly that I need to do so that my changes are not undone in the future? Because the description I originally added to this particular book was c..."

Oh, maybe there's something else going on, but it does look like when you set the book's description to a string that happens to match the default description exactly, it's deleting your description (because it'll just default back to the default description for all editions in the work).

When you changed the italics to bold, you said that the librarian log showed you as having actually saved the description you entered (rather than setting it to ''). Your change made it different from the default description, so the description was actually saved on the book in that case.

Note that by "default description" I mean the text that shows up if you click the grey text link about default description at the bottom right of the description text area on the book#edit page.

So you should just need to make the description distinct from the default description till we fix the bug. I know, not an ideal workaround. :(

[Cameo]

Okay. Thanks for elaborating on that. I think I "get" it now! :)

[Cameo]

I'm sorry to have to bump this thread, but the system still seems to be reversing manual changes. It is REALLY frustrating.

I added the expanded synopsis for this book on March 13:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/edits/1...

(For the purposes of my explanation, I am not specifying the edits of one edition.)

You can see the description change on the right hand side of the page. If you click on the book title on the upper right hand side, it goes to the mass market paperback edition (the edition I edited). The system undid this change the next day (March 14.)

How in the world can I stop this from happening again?

[Cait]

I suspect that this particular case may be due to the use of the default description. If you have set the text of the default description and set a particular edition to use this default as its description, it may be that the edition is not registering "use the default" as user data. Most of the time, after all, an edition uses the default by default. I don't think there's any flag recording one particular instance of default use as purposeful! Which is a problem, since it leads to exactly this situation where user data is overwritten.

Can anyone think of a solution for this?

[Cameo]

Thanks for the reply, Cait.

I checked the box that says "use this as the default description" before I saved the expanded synopsis. I'm seeing that both the ebook and Kindle versions have retained my change.

I always thought that the system would not override a manual change. Now that I know that's not the case, I'm not sure how to prevent it from happening in the future.