Anyone else has crashes when editing notes ?

[Decapus]

Originally Posted by rob

So we're down to a single topic that crashes when loaded, which is a marked improvement. As long as you've submitted the crash reports for this problem, we'll be investigating it and working to get it resolved.

I did submit a crash report

[Strategon]

Rob, do you guys look at the crash logs that get sent via email, or would you rather we post detailed information here on the boards? I've probably sent 50 or so with a note attached to each crash log.

[rob]

Originally Posted by Strategon

Rob, do you guys look at the crash logs that get sent via email, or would you rather we post detailed information here on the boards? I've probably sent 50 or so with a note attached to each crash log.

The crash reports are our primary diagnostic tool for fixing the bugs that users have uncovered. If you've included detailed notes with those reports, that's immensely helpful.

The crash reports all go to one person on this end. He goes through them and forwards them to the person whose code appears to be involved with the problem. I'm NOT that point person, so I don't know any details about bugs that get reported here but haven't been forwarded to me. I simply do my best to help out with the details provided here.

As I've outlined in other threads, we've prioritized bugs based on the number of users impacted thus far, along with the perceived severity of the bugs. We often can't tell whether a particular crash is stopping a user in his tracks on everything or affecting a single topic that can be worked around temporarily, so we take our best guess.

We're now focused on bugs that are impacting only a small number of users (typically only one or two). It's quite possible that some of these bugs are different manifestations of the same underlying issue that's affecting multiple users, but we can't divine that information from the crash reports. If User1 crashes at point #1 and User2 crashes at point #2, they will appear to us as completely different issues. This ties back to my post up-thread where I describe how some bugs leaves landmine that manifest as differing crashes later. So that reality doesn't help us at all with our prioritization.

As other developers here on the forums will attest, finding and fixing bugs is two parts Sherlockian detective, one part creative inspiration, four parts dogged determination (maybe six?), and one part blind luck. It's a VERY time consuming process, and we're working through them as quickly as possible. And the more details we're given in the crash reports (or here on the forums), the more clues we have to help with the detective and inspiration components.

I hope that all makes sense!

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by rob

As other developers here on the forums will attest, finding and fixing bugs is two parts Sherlockian detective, one part creative inspiration, four parts dogged determination (maybe six?), and one part blind luck. It's a VERY time consuming process, and we're working through them as quickly as possible. And the more details we're given in the crash reports (or here on the forums), the more clues we have to help with the detective and inspiration components.

And don't forget the fractured nature of the different operating systems that you have to deal with. People on here have every variation of windows from XP to 10 and that has to be causing additional problems.

I feel very bad you guys. At least all my applications run on a server with a single OS that I am in direct control of.

[Volrath]

I have updated to the current release (205) and had no crashes since then, so I did not create a bug report so far.
Since the update I had 2 game sessions including session preparation with my Pathfinder realm. I hope (?) that I can send you some useful reports when I continue entering content for my Shadowrun realm. If I am unable to produce any future crashes, that is fine too :-)

[Asandir]

I've submitted a bunch of crash bugs tonight. All seem to be around linking to other topics that have either been previously created or were created via Ctrl Q process.

The big one that is affecting my other realm is it linked the entire paragraph and logging back in to it, automatically trying to save and crashes without giving me a chance to not link the item in the text.

[Lexin]

Originally Posted by Asandir

All seem to be around linking to other topics that have either been previously created or were created via Ctrl Q process.

I sent in a crash report around something similar. I'd been editing my realm, got to the end and then discovered that once I'd refused a link to its suggested topic, if I then tried to force a link to the proper topic it wouldn't have it and crashed. It did it repeatedly, but I only sent one crash report.

[cumber]

I'm getting a lot of crashes when link detection runs, to do with topics that contain the name of another topic. Like one topic about a character, another topic about a historical event centering Atkins that character (so their name appears in the event's title). Then when I write a timeline topic containing links to events in order, things get screwy unless I'm very careful.

I *think* what may be going on is to do with the underlying data storage inserting meta data around link text, identifying it as a link (or skid text that has already been ignored as a link). One of the failure modes I've seen is a lot of extra characters being inserted *around* the name-within-the-name, which looks like it could be such metadata.

So it seems like the presence of this extra data doesn't prevent link detection from finding the longer link, but does cause it to do something screwy. This often caused crashes when in later saved the topic.

So if the character's name was an auto accept link, the link is already there when the link detection dialog pops up for the longer name, and it either crashes our corrupts the link. If I "accept all instances" of an earlier detection of the character's name, same problem as if it was auto accept. If I've previously saved before the event topic existed (so the character's name is already linked and *possibly* even if I've ignored the character name link - less sure about the ignore car), same problem.

If I very carefully never have auto accept links and make sure only top save the event name text in the timeline article after I've saved the existence of the event topic, then I seem to be able to reliably avoid crashes or corrupted links. But it's easy to accidentally slip up.