I need some help tracking down a pesky bug in the Suggest A Story page. The page will occasionally return nothing when you preview and/or submit a story. I can’t reproduce the issue to save my life, so I need more people to bang on the page and send me the results when this error occurs.
To help me solve this problem I’m asking you to make up some stories, and attempt to submit them just like any real story. I’m hoping the page will fail for someone, and that someone can share with me the contents of the failure via the Contact Us form (or via email).
So take some time and Suggest A Story, or two, or three, or four. It doesn’t really matter what you submit. Here’s the important part: If it fails (look for an empty page), show me the problem code. I need to see the HTML of that blank page, view the source, and send it to me. It’s also important I know what browser and operating system you’re using.
Use the Contact Us form, or email it to blake at lisnews .com
Anyone who succeeds in failing and sends me the HTML can have an LISNews email account!
Just a quick clarification, the bug I’m looking for here returns a page that is blank in the middle. (There is another bug that will return the same thing again and again if you’ve already submitted a story in the past 5 minutes. It should return an error screen that says you’re submitting again too soon. Instead it just shows you your submission again and again, I’m looking for the blank page bug)
Update: 05/13 01:00 GMT by B :Still nothing! Keep those tests coming!
Update: 05/15 12:14 GMT by B :Carlos may have found something, but it needs testing. (more below)
Carlos noticed GregS*’s post that failed, so he played with the code and could reproduce the blank page bug. Carlos seems to think it’s the URL, or something close: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-bookscharticleapr30,0,2639137,full.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary
Here’s what GregS* had written that failed, maybe someone else can get it to fail as well.
From By The Numbers
“When Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins asked hundreds of British female academics, teachers, writers, publishers and literature students what book had changed their lives, many respondents wondered whether there would be a male version of the survey as well. Jardine and Watkins complied: The results were fascinating in their own right, and more intriguing when juxtaposed with the findings for women. Not only did men and women find different books to be meaningful, but they approached reading in divergent ways.”
Code problems
/sunday/commentary/la-op-bookscharticleapr30,0,263 9137,full.story?coll=la-sunday
It could be related to the spacing or enter codes copied and pasted from text as well. This is what the code that got the grey form looked like (Blake, if you saw my email in HTML take a look at it in plain text):
—
-commentary
By The Numbers:<p>
“When Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins asked hundreds of British female
academics, teachers, writers, publishers and literature students what book
had changed.
—
That was narrowed down from what Greg had posted. The code consistently got the grey screen, but strangely removing additional words, commas, and so on would go through. I can still generate the grey screen on my home machine, but nowhere else. However, if I copy directly from GregS*’s journal entry, I can get the grey screen on other computers as well.