Nicholas said: Hey Gary M and Matt W. - I'm definitely still alive! Who says I'm not? <.< This is definitely on our radar
and, as mentioned before, we have an internal ticket going to further
investigate and take action on this issue however possible. At this time
though, I still don't have any specifics to share for when or how we
may address this. I know you guys have to prioritize stuff and this weird edge case of forum editing is likely not high on said list. These have been such weird and persistent bugs for us that we didn't realize that nobody else knew about them for the past half-decade. 1) Consistent re-editing of a
forum post is causing the post to "break" which prevents further editing
of the post. Editing a post is your preferred method instead of
deleting and recreating because you don’t want to have to go through and
fix the links in your other posts (I agree that this is definitely
preferred). This is correct. If you have anyone even casually interested in trying to duplicate this for themselves on the roll20 team, I would gladly give them GM in my game so they can gather their own data. I'm assuming folks with mod roles don't have this issue, even with editing the threads I linked above? (Any thread I linked can be safely messed with by anyone as far as I am concerned; all the critical info has been backed up.) Edit: We just had the first post in another thread break. Anyone from roll20 can feel free to mess around. 2)
When you click on various links in your forum, including breadcrumb
links, you are being timed out and the linked page/post will not load. Sometimes it's the pages on the forums but more often it is the forum directory itself that fails to load. In fact, it fails to load so frequently my browser history has the page saved as "Roll20 Error." I can usually get it on the third or fourth refresh. I'll post the screencap of the 504 error below, but my guess is that having 5+ years of forum posts occasionally may be too much for the site to handle in the request. Edit: The main issue with this consistent failure is that you must load the forum directory in order to make a new forum post. Thus, numerous times when people have typed out their new posts and hit "Post Topic," the 504 error pops up and all the writing is lost. Thus, every time we have to replace a forum post that has the "edit break" error, we also run into the 504 problem with the forum directory (and likely exacerbate it with the new threads we have to create). To answer the other part of your
question, unfortunately, I cannot give you a definitive
workaround/bandaid right now since we have not yet identified the root
cause. The best I can maybe recommend is what you mentioned; creating a
copy of your game without the forums included, recreate your baseline
posts, and try additional testing/editing using this new game. However,
again, I cannot guarantee that this will work. If you do try that
though, please let me know the results, as that type of info is always
extremely helpful to our dev team. Besides that, the only other
workable solution that comes to mind for this is for you to use a
different medium for posting this kind of stuff. Perhaps something like
your own Wiki or Reddit community or another 3rd party solution? We've been experimenting with a couple of different options. One of our Discord rooms is dedicated to providing basic information and another now lists all our upcoming sessions (after the forums failed us). We have several resources on Google Docs, such as our Reference Index and our list of Rule Clarifications , but those are more useful permissions-wise for information to be disseminated from a central source, rather than for community input (selling items player-to-player outside of sessions, crafting items for other players, posting new sheets to be checked, etc.). Reddit has kind of the opposite problem of being a smidge too open to people outside the community and it would also require every Guild member to have a roll20 account, a Discord account, and now additionally a Reddit account. While we recognize that many folks do have those, it's still an additional barrier to that sweet TTRPG action people come here for. If we need to, we'll probably settle for the less-than-ideal choice of migrating more posts to Discord chats... but that's not your problem. With Love, The Guild Roll20's Edgelord Edge-case
