BUG REPORT (2) - IMPORTANT: Contribution form is seriously messing with the entries

Hi, @Peter_pbn :

Yes, you're right. Here it is: 240807-151858-638200

Hi @ljdoncel,

Thank you for your patience whilst our team looked into this issue.

Unfortunately it looks like the underlying data changed while you were making incremental audits to the miscellaneous company credits, and as a result, some of the audit changes are now being applied to different items than was originally intended. You can recover manually by changing each of the existing credits being "Corrected" or "Deleted" back to "Keep" mode, re-check the updates, and it should refresh all of the items to the latest data state. You do not need to remove any newly added credits. Once re-loaded, you should be able to move them back into "Correct" or "Delete" mode accordingly.

The risk of this happening unfortunately increases the longer you keep a long-running contribution in flight, through the "Save" and "Load" process. If you can make full submissions more frequently the risk can be alleviated.

I hope this helps!

We usually see a message in the form in such cases, it is something like "Unfortunately the data in this section has changed since you started ..." and the edits need to be checked or redone. If this doesn't appear, or if errors happen anyway, I guess it's a bug.

Edit:

Even now, the misc company data looks like it did in the "before" part of ldjoncel's first screenshot from last week, so I wonder if your explanation is correct, unless ldjoncel missed something.

Hi @Peter_pbn,

Our team will continue to investigate the form's behavior here, and explore options on how to remove what appears to be a bug, yes. Unfortunately we cannot provide an exact timeline on when this investigation is likely to be resolved. As such, we recommend following the above advice in the meantime.

Thanks!

Hi, Ozzy:

I agree with Peter. We're usually shown the message informing us that the data in a section has changed. Moreover, the "tips" at the beginning of each and every section of the form reappear, even if there have been no changes in them.

In any case, entries modified during the audit still referred to their original item, not to another. It was only recently that I started to notice this behavior of the form.

You can recover manually by changing each of the existing credits being "Corrected" or "Deleted" back to "Keep" mode, re-check the updates, and it should refresh all of the items to the latest data state.

That can be a huge amount of work, particularly when some of the entries disappear, so everything needs to be reconciled again against the credits. Not an ideal solution...

If you can make full submissions more frequently the risk can be alleviated.

I don't know if you audit full film credits frequently, but, again, this is an impractical solution. Usually the items of the same department are not all in the same section of the credits, but are usually spread over several portions (second units, local units, additional photography, main vs. secondary positions, etc.) and it is not until the end of the audit that you, for example, can identify the persons to which the attribute (uncredited) has to be added. We would have to keep a separate record of what has been updated and what has not in order to keep track of the items that are truly pending evaluation. Unfeasible.

Besides, the complete audit of a film like The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) takes several days (counting the above unsubmitted update I have added/changed 1,733 entries to that film only). Imagine what it would be like if, in addition to that time, you had to wait for successive updates of partial contributions. And if, as icing on the cake, we take into account the bug reported in this thread, doing full audits of a movie can become a discouraging task.

Our team will continue to investigate the form's behavior here, and explore options on how to remove what appears to be a bug, yes

Thank you very much!  It is about time to have a contribution system according to the new times...

Hi @ljdoncel,

Thank you for your patience whilst our team investigated this issue.

We have now deployed a fix for this bug, whereby the form should now go back to showing the message @Peter_pbn describes above: "Unfortunately the data in this section has changed since you started(...)" more visibly, and disabling things as it used to. We realize this is not an ideal experience, and will therefore will begin considerations to deploy a more sufficient fix when possible.

I hope this helps in the meantime!

Hi @ljdoncel and others,

I just wanted to provide a further update to this thread, to say that our team have implemented an improved fix that shouldn't disable or undo edits for more than is minimally necessary when underlying data is changed in the form. We hope this improves the experience when making contributions as significant as those described above.

However, please do let us know if you experience any further related issues going forward. 

Cheers!

Thank you very, much, Ozzy (and the whole technical team)!

I will test it as soon as possible and report here if I see any issues.

Cheers!