Sparating leads to blank pagespages

After separating books I often get links to them in this form : http://www.librarything.com/work/ and/or http://www.librarything.com/work//editions - just that, no numbers.

Ehr, I meant separating.

Do you get this, Jeremy?

>1 - Are you getting these links at the "Separated!" page, after the separation has gone through?

i.e. would the links at



be giving the weird links?

I've gotten weirdness like that before, but I'll be damned if I can reliably reproduce it. And yes, it was on that page.

Yeah, I have too. I just want to make sure we're all talking about same thing/place. And then see if we can figure out how to make it happen :-)

A big part of the problem is that separation is by definition not a reproducible action. You can try to track down the books and combine them back together and separate again, but by that point you've probably shaken the system up so much that it's a different ball game.

Right, exactly.

Yes. Sorry for apparently not making myself sufficiently clear. It's not always, but frequent enough to be irritating. Can't see any pattern to how / why this is happening myself. Mostly (but not always) it fixes itself at 4th or 5th try though.

I don't know for sure that it will help, but next time anybody gets this, try and provide the specific examples here (the separated books and the links you're getting) ... maybe it'll tell us something. I don't do a ton of separating but I'll keep an eye out for it too.

Of course, since you aren't given the links to the separated books, that can get a bit tricky.

I know, I know ... :-)

I have one for you to try, Jeremy. It's one I posted about in another bug reports long ago that basically got marked as "too much trouble, low priority". But it's an example that could potentially cause the problem. So here it is for you to try separating:

http://www.librarything.com/combine.php?work=2514

Look for the one with the title "[Title Missing]"

The ISBN-less "Title Missing" one under "Thames: Sacred River", presumably?

Yes.

Actually, try both of them.

Heh. The ISBN-less one gives "Error number 2" (I haven't the foggiest idea what that is) - but it's no longer in the list.

Haha. I got that, too, when I tried separating another "Title missing" one on a different work right after posting that example. Time for a new bug report!

Which will probably be considered "low priority" again. ;)

I'd forgotten about this one. I noticed something a while ago - the links, before you click them, are good (i.e. they do have a work number in them). I remember suspecting that it was caused by some slowness in the database: one of the links has a new work number, but whatever actually resolves that link to something doesn't know about the new work number.

That the link to newly separated works (either the workpage or its editions page) lead to blank pages happens to me often, but it seems to be more a delay thing than an outright bug, going back and forth and insisting in following them will bring up the page eventually.

>19/20 - Ahhhh, interesting ...

My experience is similar to the above. If I set up a bunch of separations in different tags and run through very quickly clicking on the separate button and then "Separated work" link, some of the links will go to blank pages with no work number. If I hit the back button and try again I get the correct link.

The problem is very intermittent. I doubt I could reproduce it.

Happened just now, when I separated http://www.librarything.com/work/13165608 from http://www.librarything.com/work/2465689

Obviously it now already has a work number again.

I experience what message 22 says all the time, too. But I do not consider it an LT bug at all. Maybe it's slowness on LT's part, but I don't consider that a bug. It's just something I deal with by giving the system a few seconds before I click the "Separated work" link. If you give it time to actually "make" the page you want before you click for it, it's always there.

Hm, well, I've had them still coming up empty after - roughly - five tries. Sooner or later I'll give up on those.

But never mind. It's just somewhat frustrating, not hugely prominently bad.

I would be calling it a bug if after that many tries it still didn't load. Carry on.