Story text disappears when submitting

[turner41570]

I've tried posting a story recently and it's giving me trouble.

My first submittal was approved and posted in less than a week. My second submittal went into the queue (properly, as far as I can tell; it hasn't posted publicly yet though it's been a couple weeks).

I'm now trying to submit a third story. I paste unformatted text into the body box, give a title and a synopsis, pick a category, and click the box saying I've read the rules etc.

But when I click submit, the preview screen has no body text. The title and synopsis are there, but if I click the submit button again, I get an error saying I need at least 10 characters in the body. If I then click edit, when it returns to the edit screen, the body text is gone.

Is there a maximum character length? The story isn't getting truncated; it's just failing to transition from edit screen to preview screen.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

[turner41570]

Oh, also, as a side comment:

At least for me, the story and content rules links on the submittal page all just open another copy of the submittals page in a new tab. I found the rules once but it took some digging.

Thanks!

[turner41570]

OK, I've tried this on 2 different browsers on two different computers, with no luck.

Is submitting a new story suspended if one is already in the approval queue?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

[billie]

Hi!
My first suggestion is to logout, clear your browser cache AND then a device restart. You'd be amazed at what that fixes.
Then I'm wondering if you are perhaps hitting the don't submit vs. submit button on the review page. I almost did that.
To answer your question, there is no limit to the number of stories you can submit and have in the queue.
Please let me know if you continue to have any issues.

[turner41570]

Hi, and thanks very much for the quick reply!

I tried your suggestion and that didn't work, unfortunately. I'm definitely logged in, I definitely filled out all the input boxes and checked the "I have read..." box. It's not fiction so I didn't check that.

At the bottom of the compose page, I only see a button that says SUBMIT. Clicking that takes me to the review page, where I see the title, age, synopsis, and tags. But there is no body text to the post at all.

On the review page there are only an EDIT button and a SUBMIT button. Clicking SUBMIT gives me an error about an empty message. Clicking EDIT take me back to the compose page, where all the information is still there except the body text, which is empty.

I am browsing in private mode, but that didn't seem to be a problem with my first or second stories. I'm still hoping to see my second story appear in public, but it at least seemed to submit properly.

Thanks again for any help you can provide.

[turner41570]

OK, here's a new tidbit - it seems to work if I type directly into the body text box on the compose page. I will note that the preview page shows any the BBcode tags in plain text instead of interpreting them.

However, it doesn't work if I paste unformatted text in from Google docs. It appears on the compose page, but disappears before getting to the preview page.

I'm fairly certain that's how I did my first successful post, though. Thanks again.

[wanklover]

I have never had a story cut short but it happens all too often when I try to leave a comment to a story !!

I've tried posting a story recently and it's giving me trouble.

My first submittal was approved and posted in less than a week. My second submittal went into the queue (properly, as far as I can tell; it hasn't posted publicly yet though it's been a couple weeks).

I'm now trying to submit a third story. I paste unformatted text into the body box, give a title and a synopsis, pick a category, and click the box saying I've read the rules etc.

But when I click submit, the preview screen has no body text. The title and synopsis are there, but if I click the submit button again, I get an error saying I need at least 10 characters in the body. If I then click edit, when it returns to the edit screen, the body text is gone.

Is there a maximum character length? The story isn't getting truncated; it's just failing to transition from edit screen to preview screen.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

[billie]

To both of you:
1) Thank you for the detailed list of what you are doing to see this behavior. You have no idea how helpful that is.
2) Can you both please tell me the device and browser you are using (and incognito/private) or not or both?

Never fear, we'll get this sorted!

[turner41570]

Billie: Thanks for your attention and help.

Both my computers are Macs. One (OS 10.13.6) is running the current version of Firefox (115.30.0esr) and the other (OS 14.7.6) is running Chrome (v142.0.7444.162).

I am running in private/incognito mode on both.

[billie]

I think I know what the disappearing text in the story issue is. Often, word processing programs (like Word or Google docs) markup the text behind the scenes. There is a bunch of code there that tells the browser how to present your text. For example, use font x, size y px, add this header, make this bold and italic, etc.
Our system doesn't know what to do with that markup. And so it sounds to me like it is just getting flushed between the I agree page and review/submit page.

My suggestion is to either write in plain old notepad or to minimally paste your story from Google docs into notepad before pasting into the submission system at ST so that you can strip all the extra stuff out.


Regarding comments being cut short, that is simply a character limit. We have expanded that, but there are a variety of comment posting areas and it is possible that we missed an area or that we have not sufficiently expanded the number of characters allowed.
@wanklover, Could you please provide me an example of one of your comments that was cut short or minimally tell me the areas this is happening on? Ex: user wall, user wall comment on a comment, story comment, etc.
With this info, I can research better and implement fixes.

[turner41570]

Hi, Billie, and thanks again for following up.

I agree with your comment about hidden formatting. I tried both the “paste plain text” and “match destination formatting” options, but neither worked.

I did submit a third story successfully, but I did it by composing in the input box and then copying the text into my own document for record.

For some reason, the Preview page did not show the extra line breaks and did not interpret the bbcode markups, but it did submit.

Thanks!

[jpeters1985]

Something similar just happened to me.

I wrote a story, clicked submit, and it showed me how it was going to look. None of the paragraph spacing had been retained. So I click "edit" to see what I can do about it, and it goes back to the page where you write in the story, AND ALL THE TEXT WAS GONE. Nothing TO edit! Poof.

I should have copied it first, but who would think one would need to?

[binoculary]

It also appears that the encoding is pretty limited, possibly nothing other than ASCII will make it through. I go through and replace all curly quotes with straights, en- and em-dashes with play hyphens, ellipses with 3 periods, etc.