Custom Lists: Beta Testing

@Flicker. Can you do me a quick favor? Can you take one of the ones whose count is wrong and go into it, and just move a couple around (or add a film, or remove one and add it back, whatever) and make sure it saves? Wanna see if that fixes it.

Did it a bit, both for the "counting" issue and for the "line break" issue. But no effect. For instance, adding a film to cinefix's 50 keeps the "and 5 more" intact, and also keeps "the kid" as the first poster on the line.

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Get working on your custom lists, people !

Okay, thanks, just wanted to rule some things out.

This is a little more involved than I expected, so I'm gonna have to sit down tomorrow and throw together some scripts to test things on a more focused level. Very likely it'll be sorted out then.

Ok, as ever, no urgency for the cosmetic aspect. Just pointing it out for exhaustivity and drama sake. But also these things always make me fear cascading database corruption or stuff like that, so I prefer notifying them early and let you assess the danger.

I appreciate that.

Thankfully, I'm pretty good about the integrity of the data itself, so almost all these issues are display/presentation issues. Any time it's more than that, yeah, definitely top priority.

@Flicker how about now? Both the display issue and the improper count fixed?

Yes, they are. Congratulations. You found a design flaw, or was it just a one-time bug that needed manual cleansing ?

Also, just to be sure : the "list order" only affect the order of display of the lists on the edit page, not the order of display of lists on the public profile. That's how it's supposed to be ?

Just the wrong field in the GROUP BY part of the query. It was grouping but film rather than by the linking table. I'm not entirely clear on how that led to the weird flow/design problem, since I was going to tackle that after the first bit. Looks like I did 'em in the right order.

I'll check, but I think so. "Supposed to" in the sense of "not done yet," though, rather than "will not be able to do that in the future."

Eek. My "Under the boot" list has "doubled" (in its display on the list's list).

Trying to think of anything that could have triggered that. I'm 100% certain there has been no hiccup during the addition of entries, so no "fast double entry" issue. The only possible cause would be related... to... having too many MoFo tabs simultaneously open ? A tab on a post's "advanced" redaction opened while still in "list edit" mode ?

Don't know if it's possible, but I really don't see any other sort of possible cause.

Was the page where you were adding to the list duplicated in any of them?

You mean, did I have two tabs opened with that list ? I'm quite sure I didn't. But I'll try experimenting with that a bit, to see if I can re-create this effect that way.

I don't think that's it but it's just one of the first things that comes to mind. There are two oddities about this that have me very suspicious, though:

1) The IDs in the table are sequential, strongly suggesting each entry is being logged twice on the client side before submission.
2) I've yet to see this happen with any other user.

Do you have any VPNs, or maybe browser plugins, like maybe an ad blocker? Ad blockers are very aggressive and tend to think lots of benign custom JavaScript (of which there is much in this feature) could be an ad.

For the record, I think it's something about #1, but I'm just running through my best guesses at the moment.

Oh, one more thing: are you usually/always/never using the TMDB/IMDB method? It might help narrow things down considerably if I have a sense that the issue is coming from that, or from the "normal" method of adding.

I didn't manage to break a list through double tags. But I have several plugins, including an adblocker. No VPN though. Opera's own protection, tampermonkey, an old plugin designed for a different website (aHA! maybe that one interferes?), ddict translate...

I should probably remove tampermonkey and that other plugin, given that I barely visit that other website anymore. But it will take time for an effect to be inferred (either by bugging out despite of it, or by never bugging out ever again ever ever, ever, ever - which is a long time).

Ah. I sometimes use it, it's pretty rare. But I had just used it.

I only use IMDB URLs. I don't use TMDB at all.

They very often work on second attempt only. First try, they don't find it, I click try again, and they find it.

Hmmm. That might be significant, especially if you'd used it just before noticing this happening. Off the top of your head, does that sound like it might have plausibly coincided with the issue in the past?

Oh dear, this sounds like a promising avenue for sure. There's no reason it should work one time but not the other. Can you elaborate on not working? Which stage of the process fails, what happens to indicate it has not worked, etc.

Caught it, after many tries on random movies. Usually happens with obscure titles. Clicked on "movie you want not showing up", pasted an imdb link, clicked "get ID" and got this :



Clicked on "try again", back to the window where I pasted the (still present) imdb link, and, without changing anything, just clicked once more on "get ID". And it works perfectly, presents the film's poster, asks me to validate.

Next time I try to find the film through that same imdb link, it finds it on the first go.

But : It happens often (has probably happened several times on each one of my lists, bugged or not), and the "doubling" bug is much more rare.

Okay, thanks. Sounds like it's not finding them copied in our system and giving you an error, even though in theory it's supposed to add them on the fly when that happens. Probably one little logic/flow oversight in there. I'll look into it.

As for the other stuff: I'll be surprised (but not shocked!) if it's the adblocker. It's plausible enough that I think it's worth a shot. If you don't want to turn it off or on (and because you'd ideally have to disable all plugins to avoid a false negative anyway), it might do to just use an unmodified browser you don't normally use just for list editing for a bit. Again, I don't think that's it, but it's plausible enough to be worth a shot, if it doesn't put you out too much.

Of course, it's also plausible it's only happened with you because you're using this a ton and also dutifully reporting bugs (for which I am very grateful, by the way). But I can't know for sure.

Heads-up, I just deleted the duplicates manually again, and I just uploaded a tiny little patch that searches for duplicates before adding each linking entry. I'm not sure why that would be necessary (though I'm starting to formulate a guess, though it's occasionally hard to keep the entire interlinking process in my head at once ), but we'll see if that helps. Please go back to doing what you do and let me know if it happens again!

To be honest, I like it. I've enjoyed it each time it happened, because it felt so much not digital, but mechanical, material, like forcing it in, like fiddling with a key in a key hole. Boom, kicking it in. So it's a bug I'll miss. It wasn't a bug that felt "unsafe", because it consistently worked on the second try. It was just a nice flavor.

But if it can be related to the list doubling, it's an issue (also, I understand a bug is a bug, fundamentally unsatisfactory from the coder's point of view).

Now, for that doubling thing, I still encounter that bug too rarely for it to feel worth disabling adblockers or switching browsers. I mean : for how long would that be ? I'm (shocking news, brace yourselves) not custom listing a huge lot lately, so it could take a while until we'd decide "okay, it's not happening anymore". It's a bit of the proof-of-no-invisible-man paradox, I don't think it's really worth it.

Mid-redaction update :
And now I saw your latest post. Thanks. I'll keep trying to be attentive to what I do, in case a clue emerges from the context of a new occurrence, but again, it'll probably take a while if it ever does. Also, thank you for the delete. Actually, as the bug is rare, I was thinking of just re-doing the list myself if it ever happens again instead of having you going through all the manual deletes (I don't think it'd be more work for me than for you). I'll keep you updated, for the website's sake, but don't interpret it as me going "could you please clean after me once more". It would make me feel more embarrassed each time...

Anyway, got rid the the tampermonkey things at least. That's one more potential narrowing if it happens again.