Importer update

[mark]

Hi all --

Some have noticed that re-importing to get new comments hasn't been working for a while. This has been fixed; it was an operational issue (the importer cache wasn't being cleaned).

Anyway, if you have been having trouble getting recent comments to import onto DW, things should be working now. Please give it a shot.

Edited: Also, if you are still having importer troubles, please open a new request and let us know here:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/submit

Thanks and sorry for the trouble!

Comments

[benegenetriivir]

Thank You, Mark. Now my re-importing with new comments is OK.

[azurelunatic]

Yay fixed!

[kaberett]

Thank you!

[jae]

Thanks, mark! It's appreciated.

-J

[silvs_fiction2]

Thank you so much!

[pondhopper]

THANK YOU, MARK!!!!!!!!!!!
It worked!
:)

[evilsusan]

*whew* I feel so much better with my comments imported. Thank you for putting the work in to make the import possible.

[bluebellanon]

Didn't work for my community. :(

[falena]

Thank you so much, Mark!
This is brilliant. Dreamwidth rules!

[shirebound]

The comment importer still isn't working for me. I tried it this morning, and again just now (11 hours later). Both times, the comments "failed" to import. None of the entries in my Dreamwidth journal have successfully imported any comments from Livejournal.

[denise]

Can you open a support request along with any errors or messages that you get in your inbox when you try? Thanks!

[shirebound]

Hi, Denise. I did open a new support request (#24469), and I'll add the error message to it.
Thanks for the response.

[denise]

Awesome! It might take a bit until somebody can look into it, problems with the importer take extra troubleshooting and there aren't a whole lot of people who are qualified to do it, but we will keep on it no matter how long it takes to get fixed.

[shirebound]

That's great, Denise, thank you. The importer is such a great tool.

At least you folks don't have the thankless job of trying to fix the Affordable Care Act website!

[shirebound]

It worked!!!! All the comments seem to be importing okay now. Thanks for all your hard work! :)

[dickgrayson]

Thank you! :D

[jordannamorgan]

Off the topic here, but on links to DeviantArt accounts, Internet Explorer still shows me little blank boxes instead of the DA userhead thingies. (See a screencap here.)

I did put in a support request about this a long time ago. Not sure whatever happened with that.

[ninetydegrees]

Hi jordannamorgan!

This has been fixed actually but the fix isn't live yet.

Regards,
90d

P.S. I forgot to mention that you can see what got fixed or improved in our code tours.

[jordannamorgan]

Ah, good to know! I look forward to seeing the fix officially put in place. :)

[jae]

I'm very sorry to have to bring this to your attention, but after working successfully at least once, the same old problem has begun again. I tried to import comments today, and the message in my inbox said that they had been imported successfully, but they did not in fact import.

Here is a livejournal entry that has comments that did not import into the equivalent dreamwidth entry, followed by the equivalent dreamwidth entry:
http://therealjae.livejournal.com/1305022.html
http://jae.dreamwidth.org/1369328.html

-J

[denise]

Can you open a support request with that info?

[jae]

Do people actually read those? My experience is that it takes months for them to even be looked at.

-J

[denise]

Yes, it's the best way to gather data on complex problems such as this. The importer is a very complicated system with a lot of moving parts and very few people -- ultimately, the people with the experience in troubleshooting the entirety of the system and the system access for the necessary logs, which pretty much means just Mark -- can do the heavy diagnosis necessary. That means that a problem requiring lots of troubleshooting can take a lot of time, because it requires Mark to have the uninterrupted time necessary to do the investigation and it isn't the sort of thing you can say, going in, "this will take 2 hours to fix" -- it could be readily obvious to someone with that experience in troubleshooting, or it could be the sort of thing that takes dozens or even hundreds of person-hours to break down to component parts and figure out what's failing. Things not being solved immediately doesn't mean they aren't being worked on or won't ever be solved. We aren't always perfect at communicating that, but that doesn't mean we're ignoring the problem, just that we literally cannot give you a time estimate.

[jae]

Okay, thanks. This was helpful to hear.

For what it's worth, even the sort of acknowledgement comment that you gave me two comments back is helpful in making people like me feel like we're not just shouting into the ether. I updated my last support request with new information every few weeks for months and months, and heard nothing at all in response to any of those steps until this week. Even just "hi! support people do still exist, and an actual human being read this!" would have made me feel less despairing about it.

-J

[ninetydegrees]

I can only speak for me but I read every request, often multiple times to see if there's one I can answer I couldn't before (which is sadly rarely the case when it comes to things having to do with the arcane importer).

[jae]

Thank you for doing that!

I'll echo what I said to Denise, though--it would make me feel much better about things taking so long if there were someone who could a) say "I read this--I can't do anything about it yet, but someone is reading this and keeping track of its existence!" And then if it ends up going literally months and months again, just coming in and giving a short explanation for why it's taking so long would make us feel much more confident that support requests are still the active way to ask for help here at dreamwidth.

-J

[denise]

In the past, we've found that more people are annoyed by frequent "we haven't forgotten about this but there's nothing new we can add" style updates than find them helpful, but obviously that differs from person to person.

[mark]

We cache the comment imports for 24 hours. If you did it yesterday at 5PM and try it again today at 5PM, you won't get more comments. It has to be more than 24 hours since the last import.

Imports are heavy and take a lot of system resources, particularly comment imports. They're also heavy on the remote site. There's no way for us to say "give us only new comments" so we have to ask for every single comment ever posted, just in case anything has changed.

This is obviously not efficient and so we limit it. Please try every other day -- and if you still have issues, then let us know.

[jae]

Oh, I'm glad that's all it was! Thanks for letting me know.

-J

[bradygirl_12]

Thank you, Mark! I tried the re-import and the comments came through! :)

[lelooch]

Why you wiki is down?
I need instructions how to setup DW soft on my server.

[denise]

I'm not sure, but we'll look into that. Is there something you were looking for that I can help you with?