Syntax/JSON parse error using site search.

Using site search (eventually) gives the pop-up error:
SyntaxError: JSON Parse error: Unrecognized token '<'

Tested on Safari/OS X 10.11.4. Site search (top right hand corner), term "Library of Souls" (no quotes). Search takes long time, and then gives this error.

Wasn't sure if it was just happening to me. :-)

And now it is fully down :)

Well that explains why touchstones aren't working. It's always good when I have proof it's not just my internet. :)

Aha! I thought the touchstone issue was just me.

Same problem here. Can't search, no touchstones.

Trying to test, and will get devs to take a look at it ASAP. So far, site search is just perpetually loading for me. Mostly just chiming in so you guys know staff are on the case!

ETA: Site search eventually stopped loading, after three minutes, and resulted in a blank page with just the nav bar at the top. Nothing else.

>7 lorannen:

Same here - It all started with the JSONs getting crazy, now it just does what it did for you.

Ah, good to know it's not just me. Good luck with the fix.

I suffered this, then it was okay for an hour or so and now it is it doing again, complete with JSON error and then timing out.

I just searched for a book that's been entered for years; no touchstone, and no results at all on site search.

ETA: it did turn up when I searched my catalog.

Site search immediately returns "no results." What is the statues of this problem?

We're working on it.

It looks like our search machine has broken memory chips. Unfortunately, we don't have a hot spare for it. Our sysadmin is working to transition it over to a new machine.

Pedro—new, unannounced sysadmin—says sitesearch will be back tomorrow if things go well, Wednesday if not.

I'll be on a little later to short-circuit search in the code. Sorry, but was is a "single point of failure" for us. We don't have the resources to maintain hot copies of everything.

>14 timspalding: Thanks for the update & for the effort. What a good way to welcome Pedro to the fold ;-) Belated Happy Easter!

Thanks.

Pedro will make his appearance shortly. We wanted to get him into SOTT, but he was too busy actually fixing stuff.

>17 timspalding: Which is good, right? Fixing stuff? Wait, no. Maybe that's bad?

But seriously, folks, we're excited to introduce Pedro for real, once we get this under control.

Hurrah Pedro!

>18 lorannen:

Fixing stuff is fantastic. There's never going to be any site with nothing that needs fixing, so having someone to actually do it is wonderful.

Okay, good.

New system in place and ingesting the updates MUCH faster than before. Maybe 12 hours before all 48m updates are processed and available.

Hooray

Yup, working. Thanks so much.

Any chance we'll be able to see touchstones for longer book lists in near future?

>24 Smiler69:

What do you mean by "touchstones for longer book lists"?

Everything caught up. Let me know if you see problems.

I think Smiler means that if you have a long list of books in one message the touchstones won't all go live. I've run into that a few times trying to keep a list in the dewey decimel and LoC challenges.

>27 varielle:

I haven't encountered that problem in a very long time, and have some fairly lengthy lists in my Dewey challenge thread. Still, it's an issue that has existed at some point in the past and which includes the concept of "touchstone" and "list", so you may be on to it.

I'm still getting 'no result' from Search. Is it fixed?

>29 humouress: Site search should be back up and running. What are you searching for that's returning no result?

>27 varielle: Yes thanks, that's exactly what I mean. I have several book lists on my current thread that won't 'go live' as you say. I don't know the correct lingo to use here, so anyone reading this, take it easy on me please. I know everyone hates the mention of the 75ers for some reason, but this seems to be a problem with several members in that group, not just me. Some people don't know where to mention those issues, which is why I thought I'd bring it up here.

Here's a link to my thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/220561. FYI, in messages 4-10 all the book titles should show links to the book pages, and they are not (with the exception of #6 & 9). Please, if you're upset at my phrasing or anything else, do NOT leave negative messages on my thread. No messages at all unless it's relevant to any of the content posted there. I'm just posting my link here to show an example where the touchstones are clearly not showing up.

eta: amended to "4-10"

All of the problematic messages were edited today, so that makes me think it's the general current broken-ness of search; have those touchstones in those messages been working in the past?

The only thing puzzles me about the 75ers is when they refer to each other by their real names outside the group and expect the rest of us to know who they're talking about, but that's the only thing I can think of.

>32 lorax: I can only speak of the issue as I've been experiencing it on my thread, and those touchstones have been out of order for quite a long time now, many months and well before the most recent troubles. I can confirm this because I carry over those lists to every new thread, and can provide links from 2015 threads if needed.

>30 lorannen: OK; Search is working again. But it wasn't returning books or members at that point.

>33 Smiler69:

Thanks for ruling out recent editing as a culprit! I must be just under the wire with some of my posts, then; the most touchstones I have in a single post is ~80.

(I want to clarify, since apparently you've had bad experiences with others insulting you or questioning your experience in the past, that I am not doubting your experience or trying to be dismissive; good debugging requires narrowing down exactly what could have caused the problem, so I wanted to rule out "recent broken nature of Search" as an explanation, in order to confirm that it is in fact the old and unloved "too many Touchstones" problem.)

Is there truly a limit to the number of touchstones in a single post?

>36 karenmarie:

Not an official one. People have in the past noticed that posts with very many touchstones will often lose them on editing, since LT effectively needs to re-create all of them every time; I personally haven't seen that in a long time, but as Smiler69's issue demonstrates, it's still apparently going on even before the current/recent Search problems.

Thank you, lorax!

Not to mention that with more than a few in a post it is very hard to check that they are all accurate after an edit.

>35 lorax: Yes, I think it's important to understand this issue has been around for a long time. I wish I could pinpoint when it started. All I know is there were some major improvements done to the site and search at some point and this somehow became a problem alongside said improvements. I have a very faulty memory at best, so can't be more precise than that I'm afraid. I sometimes 'force' the touchstones by indicating the work number in the brackets, especially when the touchstone defaults to the wrong title, but of course can't do that for every title, besides which those long booklists won't show the touchstone even when I do that but instead just show the number sequences alongside all the other 'dead' links.

I want to say you've been very polite and I have no complaints at all about our exchanges lorax. Simply put, I've mostly interacted with members of the 75ers group over the years I've been on LT, where there is a tacit agreement to keep communications pleasant and agreeable. I've found that when I wander out of the group into more general forums, such as this one, some members have responded to my comments in ways I found outright hostile. This hasn't happened very often thankfully, but enough so that I'm always a bit apprehensive about what I post here, lest it provoke someone to become snarky for no good reason.

That aside, I would of course love if we could figure out why so many of my booklists are now not showing touchstones as they should (especially given there shouldn't be a limit to how many books are listed, as I understand it), as I refer to several of those lists rather frequently. I also figure if it's happening to me, it must be an issue for other LT members as well.

The site search system recently underwent a rather major overhaul.

In particular, we discovered two ways that the old site search was "dropping" works from the index--(1) works with so many titles it triggered a too-much-text error and (2) occasional stray non-Latin characters triggering errors. Popular works were most commonly affected, not because they were popular per se, but because they tended to have more titles, and more weird titles.

These problems were fixed in code, but the fix required a massive re-index of so much content that the search system broke. That was what caused the recent, generalized search problems. Fortunately, we're on a new, and far more powerful, server.

If there are still problems there, we want to know about them as soon as possible. They can be fixed. So point us to book lists that have problems.

>41 timspalding: Hi Tim, I just tried to refresh some of my troublesome book lists to see if the recent fixes have helped, but the touchstones are still refusing to go live, even though they all show up eventually when in editing mode.

Here are links to those threads:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/220561#5526329
http://www.librarything.com/topic/220561#5526330
http://www.librarything.com/topic/220561#5526332
http://www.librarything.com/topic/220561#5526333
http://www.librarything.com/topic/220561#5526335

>42 Smiler69:

Nasty case. Something is going on there that has nothing to do with search. I think there's some sort of interaction between the links going on, perhaps together with the unusual unicode characters. I'll open a bug with just post #42 in it.

I started a thread on the 28th when search & touchstones weren't working. Once everything was fixed, the work touchstones in the thread worked, but the author touchstones that were already there did not, although I could add a new author to the existing list and the touchstone for the newly added author would work. I ended up deleting the touchstone brackets around the author names, saving the post, then editing it again to add brackets for the author touchstones. This worked. I thought I'd mention it in case it's relevant to @Smiler69's problem. I think we started our threads on the same day.

>43 timspalding: Thanks Tim. Maybe I'll try what @cbl_tn suggested above and see if that works. Will report back with results asap.

>44 cbl_tn: Will try doing that today, thanks for the tip!

Update: I tried removing the brackets, saving the post, then adding them in again just now, and though this has worked for me on occasion in the past for other book lists, it didn't work this time. This is the list I did the test on: http://www.librarything.com/topic/220561#5526329.