Storyline dropdown widget out of order

Thanks for catching this @sailorptah, this is definitely a bug. I’ll try to get it fixed in the 5.0.6 release!

Possibly related: Recent storylines aren’t being associated with some/all of their strips.

The problem starts with this storyline, which has all 14 strips when you browse the category:
https://leifandthorn.com/storyline/2018/23-level-up/

But if you open any strip and check the dropdown, it lists (3) after the storyline title.

The next storyline is this one, and again, the category has all 21 strips listed successfully:
https://leifandthorn.com/storyline/2018/24-the-show-must-grow-on-overture/

But the title doesn’t show up in the dropdown at all. On the back end it’s marked as having 0 strips. And it’s missing from the archive page:
https://leifandthorn.com/archive/

Oh…?that’s different. The wrong totals are showing up on the backend (e.g. the “comic storylines” page)? This might be an upgrade-related issues and (as you noticed) shouldn’t affect actual browsing (for the most part), but might be tricky to fix. I’ll look into this, thank you!

That’s right. Here’s a backend screenshot:

https://leifandthorn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Image27.png

Weirdly enough, there’s not a single stopping point after which it loses track of what’s being posted. The storylines in the screenshot were posted entirely in order, with the following totals:
– Level Up, 14 strips, it counts 3.
– Magical Thorn, 6 strips, it counts 5.
– The Show Must Grow On: Overture, 21 strips, it counts 0.
– The Show Must Grow On: Act I, strip #4 was published after I took the screenshot, but the storyline page still counts 3.

Update: Apparently if you make a minor change — un-assigning one strip from the affected storyline, saving, re-assigning it, saving again — the storylines get reindexed? I did that for each of them, and now they’re all displaying the correct totals, dropdown and backend alike.

So at least it’s surface-level fixable, as long as the siteadmin notices that the strips didn’t get indexed in the first place.

Huh, interesting; thanks for the update. I’m still trying to figure out what could’ve caused this to begin with. If you notice any other weirdness with storylines let me know!

Apologies for the extended delay; Webcomic 5.0.6 has just been released, and I believe the storyline dropdown has been corrected. Try it out and let me know!

Well, disheartening news…

I ran the upgrade on both sites (shine.erinptah.com and leifandthorn.com).

Both dropdowns still give the storylines in creation order. I tried rearranging and saving the Shine storylines a couple of times, hoping that would inspire the dropdown to reset itself, but no change.

On the actual widgets page, the dropdown is the Webcomic 4 widget. It now has a note saying to use the new Storylines List widget…but I can’t see any way to make that produce a matching dropdown, just a huge block of text.

The latest Leif & Thorn storyline also had the “says it has 17 strips even though 25 have been published” bug, and it didn’t re-count after the upgrade. I removed and re-added one of the strips, which is what finally made it reset itself to the correct number.

Ah, sorry about this @sailorptah. You should be able to to get a dropdown with the new Storyline Widget using the select format, but let me see if I can actualy get this fixed.

Ahh, that helps – I saw “select” and figured it had something to do with buttons or poll options, rather than a dropdown.

Swapped in the new widget on Shine, and now it has everything in the right order, so I can do the same on Leif & Thorn if all else fails.

While I’m here, any chance of getting the kind of collapsible dropdown that ComicGenesis had? It only shows the top-level parent storylines, except with the parent of whatever storyline the current strip is in, which expands to show all the other children. Looks a lot tidier for a comic that has a few years in its archive.