I Can't Change My Avatar Image

[Apoc Golem]

Heyo! Dotting in to keep apprised of the situation. I was surprised to see how long it's been going on (I didn't even notice it until I tried to make a new alias yesterday for a PbP I'm running). It's a bummer, but I get prioritizing the shipping error (which I also had to deal with, since I put a purchase in on Wednesday only to have it essentially be deleted--yikes! But the CS peeps put it right as soon as I called in so thank you).

Here's hoping both problems are solved relatively soon!

[Tacticslion]

Joana wrote:

Afaik, what was "done in late January" was the update to charge state sales tax on shipments to certain states and is vitally necessary to Paizo selling products and keeping the lights on. (How it borked the avatars, etc., I have no idea, but I've been told that the Paizo site, due to its unique evolution from their magazine days, is a delicate ecosystem with everything connected to everything else.)

Not to mention that undoing it still requires time the tech team needs to be spending on shipping February orders and subscriptions that still haven't shipped due to software glitches.

As long as people are not getting products they have paid for, that has to be the priority over people using a free resource for personal entertainment. (And I say that as someone very involved in the PbP subforums here.)

Iow, it sucks, but we aren't paying for avatars.

I seriously hope I didn't somehow favorite so many things that I broke the system!

(I'm up to, like, 225k or so, and 4.5k or so pages. I might have a problem. What?! I like things, okay?!) :D

[Watery Soup]

Joana wrote:

How it borked the avatars, etc., I have no idea

That's the part I'm the most skeptical about.

That state sales tax is linked with a missing avatar page is an extraordinary claim, it certainly requires an extraordinary burden of explanation.

Someone also put in new avatars in late January (the thread is stickied). Isn't it more likely that someone named the file avatars.html instead of avatars.htm, and threw off all the referring pages? That would be a pretty ordinary claim that nobody would contest.

If the fix isn't simple, then it's not simple. I'm not volunteering to look through legacy code. But I am just wondering if anyone's done an Occam's Razor check on this.

[Ivicerus]

I believe we have two separate issues and keeping the payers is the first priority. I offered my services at no charge. 25 years IT in general with no response. It is what it is.

[Rysky]

Probably cause that's a legal can of worms right there.

[Ivicerus]

I tried and did offer. So covered up right now, do not need bleeders. All is good. They will get it fixed. Always did so, just a matter of when. My pbp folks are not so optimistic and have a backup site in place should paizo go belly up. That is the consensus in my observations.

[Rysky]

… you can't change avatars right now. That's it.

The company isn't going to shut down just because a portion of the forums are minorly inconvenienced at the moment.

[Ivicerus]

Just giving you the users perspective and reactions. I believe you are correct.

[Rei Ko]

Hi all, I really appreciate your patience. We've got a really small team here and I've been trying to balance priorities as best we can. That being said, we have found the root cause for this issue and are looking to deploy a fix soon, probably in the next couple days. I will update this thread once it is live.

[Governayle]

Much obliged for your diligence, Rei Ko!

[Allo Njalsune]

YESSS! Thank you!

[JohnnyBlack]

Rei Ko wrote:

That being said, we have found the root cause for this issue and are looking to deploy a fix soon, probably in the next couple days. I will update this thread once it is live.

Thank you for your hard work.

[The World's Most Interesting GM]

Tacticslion wrote:

I seriously hope I didn't somehow favorite so many things that I broke the system!

(I'm up to, like, 225k or so, and 4.5k or so pages. I might have a problem. What?! I like things, okay?!) :D

AH-HA! You're that guy whose used college text books I kept buying that had all those highlighter marks in them. Aren't you?

[Semicolon End Parenthesis]

Rei Ko wrote:

Hi all, I really appreciate your patience. We've got a really small team here and I've been trying to balance priorities as best we can. That being said, we have found the root cause for this issue and are looking to deploy a fix soon, probably in the next couple days. I will update this thread once it is live.

And maybe while you are there.... ;)

[Nefreet]

I like that "Iomedae" is a selectable gender.

[Rei Ko]

Semicolon End Parenthesis wrote:

Rei Ko wrote:

Hi all, I really appreciate your patience. We've got a really small team here and I've been trying to balance priorities as best we can. That being said, we have found the root cause for this issue and are looking to deploy a fix soon, probably in the next couple days. I will update this thread once it is live.

And maybe while you are there.... ;)

I have asked the dev to take a look at this as well, but not sure it's as quick as a fix. Keeping it on the shortlist if we can't fix it with this next deployment, though. (I don't want to hold up the quicker fix if it's a more complex fix for the search.)

[Tacticslion]

The World's Most Interesting GM wrote:

Tacticslion wrote:

I seriously hope I didn't somehow favorite so many things that I broke the system!

(I'm up to, like, 225k or so, and 4.5k or so pages. I might have a problem. What?! I like things, okay?!) :D

AH-HA! You're that guy whose used college text books I kept buying that had all those highlighter marks in them. Aren't you?

Hah!

... but, no, I still have most of my college books.

... ... most of which were preowned.

... ... ... and were almost entirely covered in highlighter marks.

... ... ... ... and are still in my gara- HEY, casual change of topic, how would you like to buy a ton of college books on the cheap? I swear I've gone very easy on the highlighter because someone else marked them all up firs- er, I mean, because I'm a nice guy. Yeah.

>.>

*cough*

[Tacticslion]

Rei Ko wrote:

Hi all, I really appreciate your patience. We've got a really small team here and I've been trying to balance priorities as best we can. That being said, we have found the root cause for this issue and are looking to deploy a fix soon, probably in the next couple days. I will update this thread once it is live.

I know I've said it before, and I don't want to be repetitive, but I want to stress how much many of us appreciate you guys for all you do. It's a hard job, highly stressful, and you're trying to please a bunch of passionate nerds on the internet, which, as one, I can tell you isn't easy (as you well know, even more than I).

But thank you guys for your hard work.

And most importantly: take care of yourselves! We are waiting, and do want it fixed, but you need to keep yourselves safe, sane, and healthy! So thank you, and God bless you all, and take care of yourselves, too, please! Thanks!

[Governayle]

I see Avatars... at least for now...

[Redblade8]

Yeah I was finally able to put one on it new character.

As a user, I'd like to say thanks to the whole IT team that might have worked on this. It sounds like you had bigger fish to fry at the same time, and it's really appreciated.

[Mr. Hebeme]

Thanks!!

[Molos Sarazan]

Thank you !!!

[Rei Ko]

Looks like some of you have already discovered, but we fixed the avatar picking feature today. We were not able to fix the avatar search in this same go, but it will remain on the short list of things to look at.

Again, I appreciate everyone's patience while we sorted this one out.

[Theodric de LaMontagne]

Awesome! thanks!

I'm back baby! Disguise Self ran out!! :)

[Moppy]

Watery Soup wrote:

That's the part I'm the most skeptical about.

That state sales tax is linked with a missing avatar page is an extraordinary claim, it certainly requires an extraordinary burden of explanation.

The technical term is "the components of our site are tightly coupled in a way that makes it hard to consider them separate components"

The colloquial term is "spaghetti code".

You can think of it like a rulebook where the rules for doing damage are in 8 separate places, some of which are specific to certain conditions. You update one monster's special rules and suddenly all swords start working differently game-wide.

You shouldn't design a rulebook like that, the same way that you shouldn't write code like that. The programmers know this, but they are under-funded and have to build new features on top of a towering pile that slowly evolved from a forum as Paizo grew.

To make it worse, writing documentation (manuals that explain the design to other programmers) takes as long as writing code. It's rarely up-to-date, and sometimes the people that remember it have left the company.

Given the time and budget they would probably want to burn it all down and start again with a bespoke design that's designed from the start to do all the things modern Paizo needs, but they don't have the time and funding, especially as the bulk of Paizo's effort is devoted to rulebooks and not technology.

[JohnnyBlack]

Thank you very much!

[Tacticslion]

AWESOME! THANK YOU!

Please continue to take care of yourself and I appreciate all you've been doing!

[Teki Stronggut]

Thank you so much! Give yourselves some hot tea!

(By the way, does this look goblinish enough to you? I am having trouble finding friendly-looking goblins now that we're able to reform and join the Pathfinder Society!)

[Ryan Heck | Aqualith Media]

dotting.