Lightnin wrote:

technoboy10 wrote:

Neat story! It'd be cool if this was in project form, too.

I had the same thought! Would you (or anyone?) like to make it into a project? That'd be awesome.

technoboy10 wrote:

Neat story! It'd be cool if this was in project form, too.

Hardmath123 wrote:

Wow, I love stories like this — it makes code ninjas look so much cooler than most people consider them to be!

Lightnin wrote:

Solving bad bugs is like solving a mystery: you have to gather clues, imagine how the glitch might happen, and then test your theories.

Recently we were up against a really bad glitch: a small percentage of projects were getting saved in an empty or blank state. The loss rate was only 0.0004% of all project saves - but that's still too high. We never want to lose Scratcher's work: it's super important that Scratchers feel confident that their work won't get lost. So fixing this problem became our highest priority.

But the comments and forum posts we were seeing about this glitch were really hazy - just people saying that all their work disappeared suddenly, for no clear reason. Vague info about glitches is better than no info about glitches, but it doesn't help us get the most important job done: making the problem happen here, where we can step through the code and see exactly what causes the error. Only then can we fix it!

Every report we'd get, we'd restore the projects (so the creators didn't lose any of their work permanently). But that didn't help us understand what led to the projects being lost in the first place. That is, until ZedProduction gave us a key bit of information:

ZedProduction wrote:

Details: I started up the project, and it began the load. I clicked on customs, witch I think was the problem, and the project suddenly opened without anything in it, just a blank shell. I was shocked, and tried to reload the page, but before I could, it auto-saved. I then posted this on the forums.

That gave us a very helpful clue - that at least one of the projects was lost when the creator clicked on the costumes tab before the project was finished loading. We guessed that that might trigger a save before the project was completely loaded - resulting in an empty project. So scmb1 tested that theory out on her test account, and was able to cause one of her test projects to go blank - w00t! That was cause for celebration.

Once we can consistently make a glitch happen on our own computers, it's only a matter of time before we can fix it. Johnm worked through the weekend on the code, we tested it out on Monday, and then we released it this morning. So from around 11 a.m. today onward, it should be much less likely that a project “blanks out.”

This particular story may not be over - there may be other causes for projects getting saved in a “blank” state. But we're pretty confident that we've eliminated one of the causes for that problem (and maybe all of the causes - we hope!). If you (or any Scratcher you know!) see one of your projects suddenly go blank, we want to know about it! In most cases we can restore it. Any additional info you can provide - like what you did before it happened, a link to the project, your browser, operating system, and anything else you think could be helpful - may give us the clues we need to solve the mystery.

Scratch On!
(And thanks again to ZedProduction!)

Lightnin wrote:

ZedProduction wrote:

Details: I started up the project, and it began the load. I clicked on customs, witch I think was the problem, and the project suddenly opened without anything in it, just a blank shell. I was shocked, and tried to reload the page, but before I could, it auto-saved. I then posted this on the forums.

Armorgamesfan687 wrote:

ok