3 Jan 2020
Author
Norman Yarvin
Title

Old posts truncated

Body

I wanted recently to refer someone to my own patient story, and found that all the posts describing it were brutally truncated, to the point of being useless.  The replies to them seem to be all there and intact, but the initial post in each topic is truncated.  Since I hadn't looked at them in years, I'm not sure when this happened, but presumably in one of the website upgrades.

I have my own copies of the posts (and archive.org also has them), so they could be restored, but I wonder what other posts have been damaged too.

The posts in question:

Comments

Sarah

4 Jan 2020 12:27 pm

Norman, I have found that a couple of my new posts were truncated even before put up, so I managed to split them in two parts whilst posting.

As for your older posts though, Drupal themselves might have done it, if they are very old, because we are only allowed a certain amount of space for what we pay. I have two ideas: either we can give you editorial rights, at least until you have put them back, or you can send everything to me and I, Mac or Pinky will do it, but it being tax return month for me and having to do the VAT for a couple of friends, so time is a bit limited this month.

Completed Stratton/Wheldon regime for aggressive secondary progressive MS in June 2007, after four years, three of which intermittent.   Still improving bit by bit and no relapses since finishing treatment.

Norman Yarvin

5 Jan 2020 03:07 pm

Looking at archive.org, the truncation of the first-linked of the above posts happened sometime between Oct 5 2018 and Dec 25 2018.  That's around the time when the site went through its updates and then migrations, but I don't recall precisely what was going on then.

This really shouldn't be a storage space issue.  For one thing, text takes very little space to store.  Also, the normal response to not having enough space is to give an error message and stop accepting new posts, not to silently truncate old ones.  That's not to say that it isn't a storage space problem, just that even if it is, it's primarily a Drupal-being-demented problem.

(Like people, software has its lifecycle: infancy, maturity, then senescence.   In that last phase, the code has been hacked on by so many people that it has lost coherence; new programmers look at the code, try to figure it out, make a little progress, but eventually decide that it'd be easier to rewrite it from scratch than to put it in order.)

Sarah

5 Jan 2020 03:30 pm

Norman, neither do I recall, but I do know that Kent is gone and you have your missing pieces. I keep all the posts I want to keep and I presume most other people do.

So, will you replace them when you have time?  I don't have the time until next month and I haven't seen Pinky for over a week.

Completed Stratton/Wheldon regime for aggressive secondary progressive MS in June 2007, after four years, three of which intermittent.   Still improving bit by bit and no relapses since finishing treatment.

MacKintosh

6 Jan 2020 11:39 pm

Sadly, I do not keep all the posts I find of value. I expect to be able to search them. I lost a huge resource when the site switched over and just had to accept that.

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems. Mohandas Gandhi

Norman Yarvin

7 Jan 2020 03:12 pm

Sarah gave me editing permissions (only on my own posts; or maybe that "edit" tab was there all along and I hadn't noticed it), and I found something interesting: when I hit "edit", I can see the whole post is actually there; it just isn't getting displayed properly.  So it seems like the database is okay: it's just something wrong in the display code.  This applies not just to the four patient story posts but also the lead post on this page.

Sarah

7 Jan 2020 03:41 pm

I am going to find out from Sureserver what is going on!

Completed Stratton/Wheldon regime for aggressive secondary progressive MS in June 2007, after four years, three of which intermittent.   Still improving bit by bit and no relapses since finishing treatment.

3 Jan 2020
Norman Yarvin