Where did I vanish to?

Clicking on the tab that says "Your Profile" takes me to an almost blank page that says "Problem: No such user. User has been deleted or never existed."

What?

Oh no, please don't do this. Now my profile only shows up if I enter the name "Melquiades" after /profile/ .

As an FYI, the handle Melquiades was my PREVIOUS choice; all my links are directed to the /Existanai account, the handle I have been using for more than a year now - if someone is physically changing names and it's not the system's fault, kindly retain the name Existanai and do not start using /Melquiades.

Unless someone is currently messing around with my profile in the background, I knew this would be a problem down the road. And I know that Tim explained this would take a while to fix, and I probably sound like a spoilt child, but I really don't think I should be having these problems at all.

Hmmm. It seems to be more complicated. I'm thinking that you had both accounts and moved it over from one to the other. They have different user numbers attached to them, which is how this is a problem.

I'm sorry, it's going to take some time to straighten out. I'll get to it tomorrow morning.

This is from the email I sent Abby on 31st Jan/1st Feb, 2007.

"I created an account with the user name "existanai" (small e). When I
tried to switch from the "small e" account to the capitalized user
name, I kept getting a "user name is already in use" message so I
aborted the (free) account and set up my current one (Melquiades)
instead. Now, I discovered tonight that "Existanai" (capitalized) is
valid too and I can log into it - but of course it's a separate, free
account, and I can't revert my paid-for user name to my previous
choice. So my request is - could you please delete the "Existanai"
account? That way I can change my user name back to Existanai, from
the current one - Melquiades."

Abby wrote back saying she deleted "Existanai", so I could change my handle to that. Which I did...

PS my email sounds pretty garbled, so if you want me to clarify it, I will.

I'm working through the issue now. Blech. Apologies.

Sending you an email now, with data to look at.

For the past two days I have been unable to add any authors to my "Favorites."

Also would like to change my librarything handle, but haven't been able to since I signed up (which, to be fair, was only four days ago).

Other than that, everything is great! Love the site (heard about you on NPR).

Existanai, I'm talking to Tim about your situation. I think that I may have caused it when updating some code last night. Your profile isn't lost or anything...it's a display problem on our end (finding the correct profile for you) that could be based on some caching schemes that we are using.

willkoku: What are the symptoms of your problem? Give us the exact steps that you do to try to add authors and what happens.

I go to the author page (Joseph Campbell and Yasunari Kawabata, specifically), scroll down to 'Favorites' on the right side of the site and click on '(add to your favorites)' and...nothing happens. I go back to my profile and not only do I not have the author listed under my favorites, now an irritating comma preceeds the whole list...its a lot like an itch you scratch and scratch until it gets red, then bleeds, gets infected....and well, then...then you start to think about creating a new profile, but since you've already paid to be a lifetime member under this moniker, you cringe at the unforeseen problems that will necessarily arise when you attempt to migrate your books...well, you get the point.

As to changing my handle, all that I see when I go to 'Change Something' is "This function temporarily disabled" under the Change user name option (I presume it will eventually be "enabled," so I'm not as concerned).

Chris: I think you might have caused the favorite thing too. Can you test for it?

Sure. It might be related. Checking.

I've fixed Existanai's problem with his profile (I think...his profile shows up, but I'm not sure of the whole story with the old username, etc.) and just pushed it to the live server.

Fixed the empty author problem (not related to the other problem, BTW). Still looking at the root issue of why you can't add a favorite.

Existanai needs to look at a summary document I sent him, since having two intertwined usernames has been strange for everyone concerned.

Fixed the favorites issue too. So we should be good to go on that one.
(muttering to self: I wonder why no one else mentioned the problem yesterday?)

Problem fixed: no "empty author problem" (sounds creepy!) and I can add favorites. Thanks!

#15: I didn't mentioned the bug about the favorite authors because:
1) it's diffcult for me to explain it in English
2) I don't want to seem always complaining about a bug or another.
(Please can you do something for the save tags button on the .fr site?)

I can have a look at it. I must admit to not using the international sites very often unless there are problems mentioned.

Thanks. An thanks to have fixed the favorite author bug, I just added the one I tried to add since yesterday and it works fine.

Which save tags button are you talking about?

Tim, I sent you an email.

And both you and ConceptDawg deserve a huge thank you for the fastest and best responses on the internet. I feel silly for having been so petulant, but as you can probably tell, I am addicted to this site and need to guard my Precious. :)

I think this issue is related to two other bugbears I've had over the past year. A) My tags were being attributed to () (a null ID) or to Melquiades, and B) all my tags would get deleted/overwritten when adding tags to multiple entries in P/E mode (documented here and here.) The latter resulting in a lot of time and work lost, and painful reconstruction.

If they're not related, please let me know, because I will have to be careful when editing in future.

Thanks nevertheless for working on this particular issue so quickly.

#20:
I mean this:
http://www.librarything.fr/talktopic.php?topic=32687
The "sauvegarder les mots-clés" (= save tags) on the add books page in French. And neither "cacher l'édition rapide" (= hide quick edit), neither "montrer l'édition rapide" (= show quick edit) work.
I translated those three some days ago, maybe I made a mistake, I don't know.

Probably a co-incidence but they all contain é

>10 KidSisyphus: Willkoku - actually, the change user name has been disabled for some time, and probably will stay that way. You can email Abby at abby@librarything.com and ask her to change your user name (hope it's simpler for you than for Existanai! Should be, though). There's some code weirdness about user names, because they started out as text IDs and then turned into numerical IDs with text references.

Thanks for the info, jjm.

#23 Hi Greyhead, I tried to change "sauvegarder les mots-clés" in "sauvegarder les mots-clefs" (clef is another correct spelling for clé), doesn't work. I put "save tags" to see if the English words work better, nothing. Then I wrote "sauvegarder les mots-clés" again and now I'll wait if Chris find time to correct this.

Re: #21

I guess these problems have not been fixed. Although I have my profile back, my tags, favourites, and miscellaneous contributions are still attributed to "Melquiades" or to "null". Any idea whether/when this will be fixed?

Would it be simpler if I created a new account, deleted these two old ones, and migrated all the data there?

I'll talk to Abby about it and see where we stand.

(obviously this is conceptDawg. I was masquerading as you while checking your tag data and made this post)

Existanai:
I talked to Abby and Tim. I hadn't realized that you were in email conversations with Tim about this. It would be better if you followed up with him via email so that we don't have too many people doing different things to solve the same problem. I have let him know about this post though.

Conceptdawg, I didn't see your message until now because these messages didn't show up as "unread" on my Talk page (since, I guess, you had been logged in as me.)

The last time that I wrote to Tim, I was thanking him and I mentioned I would take up the problems further on this thread. I am sorry if this caused confusion; Tim emailed me today as well and I have just replied.