Variations and comments in reviews disappearing

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I just spent a good 30 minutes on a review that was requested by a ddk on /r/baduk, clicked away for a few minutes, and went back to discover that all my variations and comments are gone. WTF? The same thing happened on the same review 2 days ago.

I’ve sometimes had this happen when I leave analysis open during a correspondence game as well, I will have looked at a bunch of variations, and suddenly they are all gone. It’s not bothered me much during the games, because the analysis always goes away after I play a move anyway.

But for reviews, this is atrocious buggy behavior! I want to be able to save and reread reviews of my games, and I’m sure the people I review for will want to do the same. Plus, if this keeps happening, I can’t even finish a detailed review. I have sometimes seen other player’s reviews be 100% blank, and this would explain that as well.

Is there a way to confirm saving your unfinished review (or a finished one?)

I often put a substantial amount of work into some of my reviews in the hopes of teaching new players something helpful. It’s very disheartening to have an hour or more of work disappear, and I seem to have no control over when and how this happens, nor am I able to save/backup my work against it.

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Just to be sure to separate the different issues from the start:

  • Analysis is not really stored anywhere and it is common that on even a short connection loss, the whole tree gets wiped as parts of the page reload when the client regains connection and well, the data is not really stored anywhere (at least as far as my understanding goes). It is still a bit annoying, but not a major worry currently, as analysis mode is not really meant for storing anything but rather for quickly trying out variations.

  • Reviews on the other hand, should be quite the opposite, and it is indeed troublesome if they would get lost regularly. Personally I have never had it happen so it might be hard to troubleshoot without being able to reproduce easily, so any additional information would be a big help. The way it should work is that any change in a review should be (pretty much immediately) synced and saved on the server. Even if the client goes offline the changes are stored locally and synced when connection is restored. The only possible trouble comes in if a client loses connection and it is not restored before leaving the session, that way data might get lost. If that could explain your experience it would not be that bad. Currently there is no indicator about the sync status, but it might be reasonably easy to add some. If there is another issue, that would be worse…

Sorry about the trouble, it indeed sounds extremely disheartening for the author and also shame for others :confused: any additional info that could help us track the problem would be very appreciated. And thank you for letting us know.

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Just to add that if you work with a demo board, not with the game itself, it will not be saved too until you do it yourself by naming variations. (Same behavior as analysis)

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Ok, so that makes sense for the analysis – I’ll lose the tree whenever my connection drops for too long, just like if I leave the game and go back.

that honestly rarely bothered me, but the same issue on a review seems like a much bigger deal.

So I have done a number of reivews before this, and these two (trying to do the same review) were the first times I’ve experienced this. But in both cases I put in a fair number of variations (30-40 added nodes) and comments/markings in 10-12 nodes, all of which was lost when I came back to the review. My internet connection is almost never perfect, and I wouldn’t be surprised to have it lose a little bit every so often, but this was everything. And each time, I was working on the review on and off for a good 30 minutes or more, while streaming music/video or flipping over to check/answer email, etc. It would hold the information in my open window, and then – the first time, I left it overnight and tried to go back in the morning, with the window for the review still open, and everything was gone. The second time, I flipped to another window for a few minutes, and when I came back it was gone.

It’s hard to believe in these last two cases, that I had no connection for the whole time I was working, and if so, why did everything stay in my window for so long, and then suddenly disappear? I would guess there was some problem either with my window/instance, or with the saving feature.

The only other time I noticed something like this was when I went to review a game, saw another review by someone who had posted on reddit that they had done a review, and when I went to look at it, it was completely blank! It’s possible, that they posted on reddit before doing anything and then never got to it, but it could also have been this same issue.

I hope you can reproduce the problem.

Ok, I was just about to link the review, and when I found it, it seems that some of the information has reappeared.

Anyway, the review that I’ve been struggling with is here: https://online-go.com/review/537053

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One thing I had happen to me infrequently was with either demo boards/reviews and sometimes it would add a whole branch of blank moves like passes.

I don’t think I’ve come across it deleting reviews apart from that one time I deleted the game variation and gave up reviewing Restore branch in review? :slight_smile:

Hopefully it gets fixed/resolved anyway!

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So this is a confirmation that I’ve watched stuff disappear again multiple times, but so far since my last post, I’ve refreshed it by going to original game and then clicking on my review, and everything that is supposed to be there is now there.

So this looks like it’s a display issue where something can happen that loses the connection between the browser window and the database, and it doesn’t get rectified until the whole instance is fully refreshed.

But not quite as bad as I thought originally. Although the comments from my initial issue did not get restored. I think that’s because I started new on the same (blank) review and they got written over.

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for the record I see this quite a lot too on reviews – branches disappearing - a refresh normally (but not always) restores it.

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That is an old problem in game analysis mode, going back many years, but I have never heard of it in review mode. It is apparently due to an unstable server connection or reset, usually on the player side, I think. It will typically happen if the analysis is left untouched for an extended time, or if it gets too voluminous.

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I’ve had a similar issue with autoplay. Sometimes a whole branch of the autoplay will suddenly disappear while I’m in the middle of programming moves, or a branch that I had previously cut-off will suddenly reappear while I’m programming moves.

Also in many cases, the opponent played a move that I’m sure I had programmed an autoplay response to, but no response is played automatically and it becomes my turn to make a move.

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I’ve noticed the same recently.

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Created a tracking task here: Branches disappearing during review · Issue #2392 · online-go/online-go.com · GitHub

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At least some versions of this bug are fixed as of today…

The root cause of the fixed bug was related to analysis being disabled for the game under review. It may have happened for some users on every review, if they had analysis disabled globally in their preferences.

Regardless, if someone is still seeing this, please report, since it’d be a new/different issue…

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