Silmarillion Writers' Guild

This month, I have received multiple reports about the long-standing "preview" bug on the SWG archive. First of all, I do not ever mind receiving bug reports. I would rather receive one hundred reports of the same problem than be unaware of the problem. However, this particular bug seems to cause a lot of unnecessary angst for authors who encounter it, so I wanted to post specifically about it in hopes that I could defuse some of that angst in the future.

When adding a story to the SWG archive, at present, if you click the Preview button, the Preview screen will show that the story has been assigned to a series. The story is not actually assigned to a series. Adding a story and placing that story in a series are completely separate steps, and it is impossible, from the Add Story screen, to place a story in a series. If you click Add, the story will be posted to the archive with no series assignment.

This bug has been around for years. It is essentially harmless but extremely annoying, as it prevents people from posting or causes people to make multiple attempts to add a story, thinking they are doing something wrong.

Whenever you encounter a problem on the archive, the best place to look first is the main archive page: http://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/archive/home/index.php. Here, we maintain a list of any current bugs of which we are aware and the steps to take to work around that bug until we can fix it. If you don't see your problem there, please please please contact me or my comods (moderator AT silmarillionwritersguild DOT org) so that we can try to solve the problem.

The developer of our software is working on a new version of the software. It is currently in beta phase, which I hope means will see an update soon. Because she's been working on a complete do-over, she hasn't made any updates to the current software for more than two years now. As a result, the preview bug has been plaguing us for at least that long.

As always, if you have any questions or ever encounter problems using the archive, please let me or my comods know. We're happy to help.