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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘bugs’
08.05.2022
Last nightâs hour-waster was chatting to Facebook Business Support. No, thatâs unfair. I was actually assigned an incredibly good rep who took me seriously, and concluded that Facebook did indeed have a bug which means, of all the pages I can manage, the one for Lucire is alone in not allowing me, or any of its admins, to do anything. How coincidental, after losing Instagram and Twitter for periods during 2021.
Ironically, one editor canâof course someone who is supposed to have fewer privileges can do more. Such is Facebook.
A few things I learned. Thereâs a Meta Business Suite, which a whole bunch of pages got shoved into, whether you wanted it or not. My public page is there, for instance. It seems if you have Facebook and Instagram accounts for the same thing, youâre going to be in there.
Despite the two-factor authentication discussed in the previous post, I actually can get into the Business Suite, via another page I administer for a friend. From there I can get to Lucireâs tools.
I donât need two-factor authentication for any of the other pages in there, including my own, and have full access.
Trisha, or Trish as she said I could call her, walked me through the steps, and asked me to get to the Suite page. Then she asked me to click âCreate adâ, and I get this:
She asked me to check the account quality, and of course there are no issues:
She wrote: âThanks for letting me know. It’s weird because I have checked all your assets here and it looks good. But, here’s what I suggest, Jack. We’ll need to report this to our Internal team so they can investigate. You might experience a bug or glitch.â
I theorized: âJust so you know, this page dates back to 2007 so maybe it is so old that Facebookâs servers canât handle it?â
It wasnât something she responded to, as she stayed on-subject, but itâs a theory worth entertaining, as it wouldnât be the first time Iâve witnessed this.
So, for now, the one team member who can still go on Facebook for us posted this at my request:
I doubt theyâll ever fix it, and two years ago I did say I wouldnât really bother if Facebook went buggy and prevented us from updating again. Clearly I am bothering, as I know we have readers who use Facebook. But I have very little faith this will ever be fixed, since I have seen other reported bugs (some covered on this blog) get ignored for years, and this isn’t a fleeting bug, from what I can make out.
The lesson, as I have probably hinted at more than once, is never rely on a Big Tech service. The sites are so unwieldy that they get to a point where no one knows how to fix them. If earlier experiences are any indication, such as what I experienced at Vox, we have arrived at the end of Facebook pages.
Tags: 2020s, 2022, bug, bugs, Facebook, Lucire, publishing, social media, social networking
Posted in internet, publishing, technology | No Comments »
01.05.2022
Some of the articles in Lucire are still manually designed in Dreamweaver, and those need to be added to the social networks in a similar way. There we use Zoho Social to update things.
In practice, we only do Twitter, as IFTTT then takes care of reposting our updates to Facebook. Today, I noticed that IFTTT has failed to take any of our Tweets to Facebook since April 25, for no reason I can work out.
We also cannot use Zoho Social to make Facebook page updates, so the fault does not lie with these individual services, but Facebook itself.
First Zoho Social said I needed permission from the page admin to add images, but I am the page admin; then it said I could not post at all.
I went to Facebook for the first time in goodness knows how long to discover there is no way to enter a post manually there, either!
I tried using the Meta Business Tools, but I canât be authenticated, since they require you use an âappâ (none of which I have heard of), a physical security key (strange to me as I have no idea what one looks like or where it goes), or a cellphone (yeah right, like Iâm going to give Facebook that very personal detail for them to sell).
It looks like another massively stupid decision on Facebookâs part, so odds are weâll cease to update any of our Facebook pages going forward. It will take too much effort to figure out how to fix this. Even if we could type into Facebook, we don’t want to be feeding in every headline and link manually.
I ceased to have any respect for Facebook many years ago, but kept things going there for the sake of our readers. But if they are shutting down the pagesâcertainly all their functionality is disappearingâthen we will have no choice but to end our updates there.
PS.: If any of you are wondering, I am definitely the admin, but I can’t do any of the things Facebook says I can:
If I access the options under ‘Page Owner’, apparently I can report ourselves, but nothing more!
Looks I still can post to a page where I’m not the owner but a contributor, but I can’t post to one where I’m the owner and admin:
Remember how a page settings’ page usually looks?
Here’s Lucireâs:
The only options I have as admin are:
And before you ask, there are no page ‘violations’ other than one post from years ago, because US sites can’t handle artistic nudity where you can’t see anything inappropriate. Genocide and misinformation are fine, though.
I think what Facebook does is let you work on pages that aren’t yours(!)âit wouldn’t be the first timeâbut not your own! It really is this daft there.
Tags: 2022, bugs, Facebook, marketing, promotion, social media
Posted in business, internet, marketing, publishing, technology, USA | 1 Comment »
08.04.2022
Above: Vivaldi appears for less than a second; each entry then disappears. One of the bugs from last night.
Vivaldi updated last night, and nearly instantly shut down.
Sadly, thereâs a bug which shuts the program down the moment you hit a form field (filed with them, and they are working on it), and I found that ZIP archives would not download properly. Getting rid of a Spotify tab somehow got me around the first bug, but I know others have not been so lucky.
In the meantime, I discovered downgrading did not workâVivaldi wouldnât even startâwhile upgrading back to 5.2 didnât solve that problem. Iâd see Vivaldis in the task manager for a second but theyâd then vanish.
Removing the sessions from the default folder helped me start the program again, but I lost my tabs; fortunately I was able to restore those, in order to duplicate each and every one on my old browser, Opera GX.
I had duplicated tabs onto other browsers reasonably regularly, and I could have retrieved a fairly recent set from my laptop, but itâs always good to have the latest.
Right now Iâm deciding whether to stick with Vivaldi while its techs work on the problems, or return to a stable Opera GX, which I last used as my regular browser briefly in 2020.
The type display is still really good, without my needing to add code to get the browser working with MacType.
However, I like Vivaldi and what they stand for, which is why I stuck with it for so long. According to this blog, Iâve been using it reasonably faithfully since September 2017. And I have become very used to it over any other Chromium-based browser.
Some of you may have noticed that this website is finally on https, years after that became the norm. There was one line in the code that wasn’t pointing at the correct stylesheet when this blog loaded using SSL. That was finally remedied yesterday (I hard-coded the stylesheet link into the header PHP file). I’m no expert on such matters but it’s now loading a certificate I got at Let’s Encrypt, and it seems to be working.
One of the changes in the stylesheet that controls the indents and the paragraph spacing does mean some of the line spacing in earlier posts is now off. This happened on the Lucire website, too, but it was one of those things I had to do to make posts going forward look a bit better.
Tags: 2017, 2022, bugs, Opera, software, technology, Vivaldi, web browser
Posted in design, interests, internet, technology, typography | No Comments »
02.04.2022
Now that Microsoft wonât let us type certain characters into Notepad (anything above ASCII 127, at least on a standard US keyboard), Iâve had to look for alternatives.
This is a daft move on Microsoftâs part as I am sure I am not the only person in the world who needs to type ÂŁ or ⏠or the word cafĂŠ. I accept not everyone needs to type en and em dashes.
A number of kind souls on Twitter suggested Notepad++, which I had heard of years ago, but it was just far too complicated for me. What I really wanted was Notepad as it was before a few months ago.
The closest: EditPad Lite 8, which is like Notepad but with a more convoluted search and replace, and tabs so you can have a bunch of files in a single instance of the program.
Windows Explorer is the other one. It keeps rotating photos by itself, even images with no orientation code (such as screenshots). Thereâs no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes itâll rotate left. Other times to the right. Or upside down.
Sadly, the timestamp changes, which is very problematic for, say, email attachments, which I file by date. Also linked files for magazine workâwe canât afford to have photos suddenly rotated in a file because Microsoft thinks so.
That proved to be a lot harder to solve, as most people who make Explorer alternatives want to do multiple windows. Others have clunky interfaces. If you donât want to pay, and even if you do, your choices seem rather limited.
Eventually trialling more than half a dozen, I settled on One Commander, which doesnât rotate photos without human intervention, and I had been happy with it till todayâwhen it changed the timestamps on a whole bunch of photos during a transfer.
I know the program would love to call these photos âmodifiedâ at the time of transfer, but thatâs exceedingly unhelpful for my purposes, when I need them to show the original date and modified date exactly as they were in the originating folder.
Your suggestions are welcome. I do need to preview thumbnails, which knocks out some of the offerings. But again, you have to wonder why on earth Microsoft has introduced bugs when both these programs functioned fine under Windows 10.
PS.: Milos ParipoviÄ, the developer of One Commander, responded to my query about this. He says, ‘One Commander is using Explorer for file operations so it should behave the same way.’ And here’s the thing: I haven’t been able to replicate the bug described above since. So it looks like I’ll continue with One Commander, which has the best UI of them all. Altap Salamander did get a brief look-in, but it’s just not as nice to look at.
Tags: 2022, bugs, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, software, technology, USA
Posted in publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
10.01.2022
Six years ago, I reported this error in Here Maps (a.k.a. Here WeGo), both via the official channels and to a software engineer I knew working there.
Itâs still there. There aren’t two Wharekauhau Country Estates (this is the route between them, to highlight just how wrong it is; the westerly one is correct).
Theyâve since been in touch via Twitter and Iâve re-sent them all the information, including:
Trust me, I went to this one and wound up the drive to some random farm with no one around, and had to back my car down a muddy trail with immense difficulty as there was nowhere to U-turn.
This only came up because Here Maps tried to take me to New World Foxton recently, and I decided to look back.
If I followed their guidance, I would have to drive through the war memorial.
Donât get me wrong. I really like Here Maps and the latest UI is fantastic. Itâs no worse than its competitors in accuracy terms. Google has sent me to plenty of wrong places when I was still using their site for things. Itâs just annoying when the official channels, reporting bugs the way they suggest, clearly donât work. Hopefully if anyone’s planning their journeys to the above places, they’ll be able to see this post!
Tags: 2016, 2022, Aotearoa, bugs, Foxton, Horowhenua, New Zealand, Nokia, software, UI, Wairarapa, Xiaomi
Posted in design, internet, New Zealand, technology | No Comments »
19.05.2021
Yesterday, I worked remotely, and I donât know what possessed me, but as OneDrive was activated on my laptop, I decided to save a word processing file there, planning to grab it from my desktop machine later in the day.
Normally I would just leave the file where it was and transfer it across the network, which is what I should have stuck with.
Heck, even transferring a file using a USB stick would have been a better idea than OneDrive.
I hadnât signed up to it on my desktop PC. I went through the motions, used the default settings where it said it would back up documents and pictures (while making it clear my files would remain exactly where they were). I grabbed the file I needâthe entire 18 kilobytes of itâand thought nothing more. I deactivated OneDrive as I saw no real use for it any more.
Bad idea, because most of my desktop icons vanished, and my Windows default documentsâ and picturesâ folders were emptied out.
After reactivating OneDrive, I found the lot in the OneDrive folder, and promptly moved them back to their original folders. The desktop filesâthe text files I had on there plus the iconsâI duplicated elsewhere. Ultimately, I made new shortcuts for everythingâthank goodness my laptopâs icon layout is identical to my desktopâsâand restored the three text files from their duplicate directory.
The above took me all of a few minutes to write but in reality I spent an hour fixing thisâsomething that Windows said would not happen.
Chalk it up to experienceâconsider this fair warning to anyone who thinks of using âthe cloudâ.
Also in the âsay one thing, do anotherâ file for yesterday: I attempted to sign in to my Flickr account, which has not been touched since around 2008. I tried a range of addresses I had in 2006, when I originally signed up, and attempted to do password resets. Flickr: âInvalid email or password.â I even tried an address that Yahoo! emailed me at in 2018 concerning Flickr, and which Flickr itself said might be the correct email (use your Yahoo! username and add â@yahoo.comâ to the end of it).
I had no other option but to email their support, and mentioned that I was a paying Smugmug customer, given that the photo site now owns Flickr.
They have responded in a timely fashion, not telling me the email I had used, but said they had sent it a password reset in there.
Surprisingly (or maybe not, considering we are talking about another big US site again), the address was indeed one of the ones I had tried (Iâm glad I kept a record). Except now it worksâwhatâs the bet that post-enquiry, they fixed things up in order to send me that reset email?
I thanked the support person for the reset email, but suggested that they had some bugs, and fixing them would mean less for him to do.
Don Marti linked an interesting article in The Drum in which he was quoted. Duck Duck Go, Firefox and Github have all opposed Googleâs new FLOC tracking method. Meanwhile, Bob Hoffman points out that only four per cent of Apple users have opted in to tracking after the Cupertino companyâs new OS opted you out by default.
Most of the time, people tell me that they find targeted ads âcreepyâ as they appear from site to site, so itâs no wonder that take-up has been so low with Apple users. So if not FLOC, then what?
Well, hereâs a radical idea: show ads on sites that have subject-matter relevant to the advertiser. Itâs what happened before Googleâs monopoly, and there were plenty of smaller ad networks that did a great job of it. The prices were still reasonable, and Google wasnât taking a big cut of the money earned. Of course Big Tech doesnât like it, because they wonât earn as much, and the old system actually required people with brains to figure out how best to target, something creepy tracking has tried to replace.
The old methods, with their personal touch, resulted in some creative advertising workâI remember we had some page takeovers on Lucireâs website where the traditional header was redesigned to show off the R55 Mini, thanks to one of our earlier ad directors, Nikola McCarthy. No tracking involved, but a great brand-builder and a fantastic way for Mini to get a fashion connection. Ads with tracking are so transactional and impersonal: âBuy this,â or, âYouâve searched for this. Buy this.â
I doubt it does the brands much good, and before you say that that doesnât matter, let me also add that it canât do the humans much good, either. The userâs purpose is reduced to clicking through and buying; so much for building a relationship with them and understanding their values. That isnât marketing: itâs straight selling. Which means the marketing departments that put these deals together are doing themselves out of a job. Theyâre also spending money with a monopoly that, as far as I have read, doesnât have independently certified metrics, which 20 years ago would have been a concern with some agencies.
I do like innovations, but every now and then, I feel the newer methods havenât done us much good. Tracking is tracking, no matter what sort of jargon you use to disguise it.
Tags: 2000s, 2021, advertising, Aotearoa, Apple, BMW, Bob Hoffman, bug, bugs, Don Marti, Flickr, Google, JY&A Media, Lucire, marketing, media, Microsoft, Mini, New Zealand, privacy, publishing, Smugmug, USA
Posted in business, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
17.09.2020
Something is crashing my PC and taking Eudora mailboxes with it.
The latest is losing my Q3 outbox table of contents, which I suppose isnât as bad as losing the inbox, outbox, and all third-quarter emails, though being at the end of the week, there was still some repairing from the weekend back-up I made.
The outbox was there but the table of contents was corrupted, and when Eudora rebuilds, for some reason the recipient isnât recorded, only the sender.
Once again I was faced with a line-by-line (or, rather, group-by-group) comparison of the back-up and the existing mailboxes, to see what changes had been made since the 11th.
Above: What remained of the third-quarter outbox. I can no longer group this âbox by recipient, since Eudora doesn’t rebuild sent email folders with the recipient in the relevant column.
There were about three dozen emails that werenât in common.
The below Windows crash appears to have happened just after the last recorded ârecipient-lessâ email in the corrupted table of contents.
That was a while back, but I do remember another crash that slowed the computer to a crawl, with the non-closing app on restart being something to do with an AMD capturing window error.
Could AMDâs software be crashing and deleting mailboxes? If so, itâs cost me many, many hours of frustration and the knowledge that I have a corrupted table of contents for this quarterâs emails that will never be fixedâa rare imperfection among years of perfectly archived âboxes.
I was also able to trace it to when I sent a message to a friend on Facebook who is not easily reachable by other means. Since I rarely use the site it was pretty easy to pinpoint when I was last there.
Considering my phone died after installing Whatsapp what’s the bet that running Facebook on a desktop browser kills your desktop’s data?
Itâs as I always say: the newer the software doesnât mean more reliable. Just ask anyone using Facebook today.
I have updated the AMD driver so letâs see if the bug recurs. Iâm considering running Eudora back-ups on a daily basis but the weekly Windows back-up takes in many other work folders, and I donât believe thereâs a way to run a second job through the default service.
I visited a dental surgeon earlier this week and noticed his software didnât perform as he wished. He couldnât edit things in his billing software due to a bug. He had to return to the file minutes later and repeat the task before the program let him.
I dispute those who say I encounter more bugs than the average user. Watching the surgeon, he just lived with the bug, and knew that if he waited long enough, his program would allow him to make edits again. It seems to be a bug affecting the most basic of tasks. The difference, I imagine, is that he didnât document the stupidity of the software developer in preventing him from doing a fundamental task, whereas I regularly call them out, especially when it comes to common sites such as Google or Facebook where the (misplaced) expectation is that they must hire the best. Not always.
Prof Sir Geoffrey Palmer once said in one of his lectures, âThe more lawyers there are, the more poor lawyers there are.â The analogy in software is, âThe more software developers there are, the more thick software developers there are.â Like any profession, and I include law, not everyone who graduates is smart. Just look at some of our politicians who claim to have law degrees.
Tags: 2020, bugs, Eudora, law, Microsoft Windows, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, software, Victoria University of Wellington
Posted in New Zealand, technology, Wellington | No Comments »
12.09.2020
Iâve used Eudora for around 25 years as my email client and in the early days, when the inbox got too big, I had it crash every now and then, necessitating the program to rebuild the table of contents. From memory Iâve lost some emails back then, too, and had to ask friends to re-send. But, by and large, itâs been largely stable, and since Windows 7 I donât recall it crashing so badly that I would be up shit creek. Till last night.
Normally, Eudora has back-ups for its in- and outboxes (which it renames with 001 and 002 suffixes) so in the case of a lost âbox, you can rename the old ones and hopefully not lose too much. But what if a crash was so severe it would take out not only the in- and outboxes, but also the content of the back-ups, as well as your third-quarter email folder? Thatâs exactly what happened.
I havenât gone back into Windows to find out what caused the series of crashes but it seems to have begun with RuntimeBroker.exe and ntdll.dll. Iâm not even going to pretend I know what all this means:
So what do you do when youâre up shit creek and renaming mailboxes (which Iâve had to do when we had a fuse blow) doesnât work?
The most recent back-up I had was from September 5, and a lot happens in email-land for me over the course of six days. But it was the most recent, and it had to be the starting-point. So, first up, I retrieved them from Windows Backup and put them into a temporary folder (you canât put them into the original folder).
The third-quarter âboxâs contents were still there, but the table of contents had been corrupted, but it had six daysâ worth of changes to it. I renamed this to Q3 In (2), closed Eudora, and placed the backed-up third-quarter mailbox and table into the Eudora folder.
Then itâs the laborious process of seeing how they differ. The best thing to doâand why Eudora remains superior to so many later programsâis to line up the mailbox windows side by side, size them the same, sort them both by date, and begin going through screen by screen. If the first email and the last email are identical, chances are the ones in the middle are identical, so youâre only looking for the emails in the corrupted table that are newer. You then have to shift them one by one into the backed up one. I deleted the identical ones from the corrupted mailbox and by the end of the exercise I had over 4,200 emails in the trash.
The status (read, replied) is gone after the transfers but itâs a tiny price to pay for completeness.
Above: The remnants of the exercise, after discarding trash and duplicate emails from the corrupted third-quarter mailbox.
Then the inbox. Same story: there was a 001 âbox that had survived the crash but none of the tables of contents were usable.
In this case, itâs fortunate we use Zoho as our email service. I went into the trash folder, where all checked emails wind up after POP3 access, and transferred everything from the 5th to the present day into the inbox. Fortunately, from there itâs not difficult to do a fresh POP3 access. Again, I closed Eudora, put the backed-up inbox into the main Eudora folder, and simply checked my emails. You do lose once more the status of the emailsâyou wonât know if youâve replied to themâbut at least you have an inbound record.
The outbox was a very sad case, and unfortunately the news is not good. Here, the table of contents was complete but the mailboxes (all of them) were blank. Therefore, clicking on the table of contentsâ entries actually deleted them because the mailbox was corrupted. Strangely, all showed the correct sizes.
Thereâs no easy way here. You canât take sent emails from Zoho and put them into your inbox expecting Eudora to be able to download them. The only solution I found was to forward each one, one by one, to myself from within Zoho. Then I placed them into either my third-quarter outbox or the active outbox. My own name appears in the recipient column, and the dates are wrong, but, again, if completeness is the aim, then itâs a small price to pay. Sadly, of the three recovered âboxes and tables of contents, itâs the least elegant.
I imagine I could edit each email as a text file within the outbox and allow the table of contents to generate new entries, then recompile them into a new table, but after youâve spent hours doing the first two âboxes, youâre not keen on such a technical solution after 3 a.m. And there’s also no guarantee that the table would generate properly anyway.
Windows was the culprit here, as Eudora has always been very stable, and crashes like this are exceedingly rare, if you keep your in- and outboxes to reasonable sizes. Iâve never seen the back-ups get wiped out as well. A good case study in favour of regular back-ups, and maybe I might need even more frequent ones.
Tags: 2020, bugs, email, Eudora, Microsoft Windows, office, software, Zoho
Posted in business, New Zealand, technology | 1 Comment »
08.09.2020
After my last post, it seemed fair to give Google a chance to respond. I filed some feedback with them, and, surprisingly, I got a reply. But then I was taken around in circles, again, just like in 2009, though the respondents arenât arseholes like âChuckâ all those years ago.
I clicked to claim this knowledge panel. You send me a verification. In that verification you have âReview infoâ. Itâs just a blue box. I canât click on it or do anything with it. Then when I go to the page to publish on Google Search, you tell me my address doesnât have permission. I canât remember how I got there, but you also show me another window saying someone is already managing my company on Google. That canât be so as Iâm the only person logged in via the Search Console and you verified that I was the right person.
Googleâs first response (links removed):
Hello Jack,
Thank you for contacting us.
You are currently the verified owner of the knowledge panel entity âLucireâ. If you donât see âSuggest an editâ option at the top of your knowledge panel, please confirm that youâre logged in to a Google account that was used for the verification. Also, check that your Web and App activity is turned on. If you are using a G Suite account, turn on the Web & App Activity settings in G Suite Admin.
If this issue still persists, please send us the following so that we can investigate further, examples of these images are attached:
A screenshot of your knowledge panel (please make sure that your verified email/Google account name is visible at the top right-hand corner); and
A screenshot of your âWeb & App Activityâ page.
Also, weâre hoping to bring more features to you in the future. Unfortunately, Posts on Google is not open to every entity at this time.
Regards,
Jay
Google Search support team
It would be rude not to comply.
Hi Jay:
I really appreciate your reply. In the past, whenever I’ve contacted Google, I get radio silence, so I’m really happy you’re there.
I signed in as me but there’s no ‘Suggest an edit’. I fail on the first hurdle, actually, as I believe I had turned my web activity off a while ago. Unfortunately, there’s no way for me to turn it back on or to access the first link you gave me.
I have a Gmail with a school I work with. Even though I’m logged in with [redacted], the verified address, I get prompted to log in with my school address when I hit your first link. I switch accounts, which is the logical thing to do, and log in again. Except the site prompts me to log in with my school address. It’s a never-ending loop.
Hopefully the attached screenshots will help with troubleshooting or to find out what I’m doing wrong.
The browser is Opera, which is Chromium-based, and it has no privacy settings or blocked cookies that might prevent me from accessing Google.
Thank you,
Kind regards,
Jack
Above: This is the knowledge panel screenshot Google keeps asking me for. I’m logged in, with the verified address, and there’s no ‘Suggest an edit’ as they claim. That’s actually why I contacted themâbecause I’m literate and I’ve already read their instructions, which are either wrong, or I’m encountering something unexpected on their systems.
Above: What happens when I click on Google’s web and app activity link that their reps send me. It asks me to verify my email but it’s the wrong address (this is the school one). I click ‘Next’ and get to the second screen, where I can choose the address that Google confirmed was the verified address, and the one used for its own search console. Notice the verified address has a green circle with a J inside it, just like in the top image. I then get taken to the third screen, but note that I have not been logged in. I sign in again. And guess what? We’re back to square one.
This is where it starts to go awry, because despite a really good start from Jay, who confirmed that my regular address was the one that was verified to edit Lucireâs knowledge panel, I next receive this.
Hello Jack,
If you got your Google Account through work or school, you might need to contact your administrator to turn on the Web & App Activity additional service for your organization.
If this issue still persists, please send us the following so that we can investigate further, examples of these images are attached:
A screenshot of your knowledge panel (please make sure that your verified email/Google account name is visible at the top right-hand corner); and
A screenshot of your âWeb & App Activityâ page.
Also, please confirm that youâre logged in to a Google account that was used for the verification and check that your Web and App activity is turned on. If you are using a G Suite account, turn on the Web & App Activity settings in G Suite Admin.
Regards,
Jay
Google Search support team
I fired this off in reply to Jay.
Hi Jay:
Thank you. A couple of things here.
The school account has nothing to do with this. I’m just saying that your server keeps defaulting to the school account and every time I log in with the correct verified account, it logs me straight out again. Every time I switch to the correct account, your system doesn’t like it.
You already have the screenshots. I already sent the screenshot with the knowledge panel. I have re-attached it. This is logged in with the correct, verified account, the one that’s used for the search console, and the one that was used to claim the knowledge panel.
As explained, your server will not let me in to get a screenshot of the web and activity page.
I am logged into the correct account.
As explained, you will not let me get to the web and activity page in order to get a screenshot.
Kind regards,
Jack
Jay wasnât the only one on my case. Tanvi sent me something even more left-field.
Hello Jack,
As informed please, you might need to contact your administrator to turn on the Web & App Activity additional service for your organization.
Also, please confirm that youâre logged in to a Google account that was used for the verification and check that your Web and App activity is turned on. If you are using a G Suite account, turn on the Web & App Activity settings in G Suite Admin.
If this issue still persists, please send us the following so that we can investigate further, as per attached image format:
⢠A screenshot of your knowledge panel (please make sure that your verified email/Google account name is visible at the top right-hand corner); and
⢠A screenshot of your âWeb & App Activityâ page.
Regards,
Tanvi
Google Search support team
Notice how they keep asking for the knowledge panel screenshot, and I keep sending it, but no one cares.
And they keep wanting this web and app activity page, which they wonât let me access. My response to Tanvi:
Hi Tanvi:
I am the administrator for my organization. There is no one else.
I am logged in to the account used for verification.
As explained, I cannot access the web and app activity page. Every time I do, you log me off.
I do not know what a G Suite is.
I re-attach for the third time the knowledge panel.
I cannot make a screenshot of my web and app activity page because you will not allow me access to it.
Kind regards,
Jack
They just need to check their own records to find I am the only person registered to look after Lucire, and if Iâm not, then their security holes are pretty damned massive. But doing something logical like that might cut to the chase too quickly, and we know from 2009 that Google likes giving you the run-around. I donât know who teaches them customer service but I bet itâs the English.
They keep asking for a web activity page that their own systems won’t let me access.
I think we can realistically chalk this one up to another failed Google service. I hope they can get it cleared up, as the knowledge panel is Wikipedia-based and, therefore, not accurate. While I don’t use Google, I know the majority of people do. Iâll continue being as nice as I can, as I want to see this fixed, but somehow I donât think it will be remedied any time soon. The folks on the frontline wonât understand why their systems cannot accept that one person has two separate email addresses and two separate Google accounts, one linked to each. Youâd think I was the first person ever to have two email addresses, just like Marty McFly telling his uncle that he has two television sets in 1955.
PS.: It just gets nuttier. Just because you keep asking the same things doesn’t mean the answers will change.
Hello Jack,
Thanks for proving screenshot but please provide screenshots as per attachment only.
Please confirm that youâre logged in to a Google account that was used for the verification and check that your Web and App activity is turned on.
To get access to your suggest and edit, please contact your G-Suite Admin. If you are using a G Suite account, turn on the Web & App Activity settings in G Suite Admin. To know more about G Suite please look into G suite Help Center.
Regards,
Tanvi
Google Search support team
Here you go, Tanvi. We can keep going around in circles and your firm will look more and more useless.
Hi Tanvi:
I have provided screenshots as attachments. I don’t know any other way to send you screenshots.
Again: I am logged in to the correct Google account and it was the one used for verification.
Again: I do not know if web and app activity is turned on because you will not let me access it.
There is no G Suite. I am not using a G Suite. I am the only person authorized to deal with this. I am the admin.
Please check your records. You will find that there is no one else authorized to deal with this matter. Mine is the only account that deals with the search console and it is the only account verified to edit the knowledge panel.
Kind regards,
Jack
P.PS.: September 10. Where did we get up to? I forget, because the same thing keeps happening. It’s Groundhog Day at Google.
Right, it’s back to Jay.
Hello Jack,
The screenshot that you have provided is not in the correct format, please resend the following screenshot in correct format so that we can investigate further, example of the image is attached:
A screenshot of your knowledge panel (please make sure that your verified email/Google account name is visible at the top right-hand corner). Please refer to the attached screenshot.
Regards,
Jay
Google Search support team
Fair enough. Jay included a screenshot of exactly what he wanted. I send this to Jay. (It makes no difference. See below.)
Hi Jay:
I wasn’t sure what you meant by correct format but the screenshot helps. Please find that attached.
Kind regards,
Jack
SaiKumar is now on the case. He’s got what I sent to Jay.
Hi Jack,
Thank you for providing the screenshots.
Could you now please try the following and let us know if anything has changed? If not, please send screenshots.
Incognito mode
Mobile device
Different web browser
A screenshot of your âWeb & App Activityâ page (please make sure that your verified email/Google account name is visible at the top right-hand corner).
Regards,
SaiKumar
Google Search support team
This seems pretty reasonable.
Hi SaiKumar:
I’ve attached what I see in incognito mode. I’ve also attached the same screenshots using a fresh copy of Edge instead of Opera.
I can’t help you on a mobile device, sorry. It’s not something I’m prepared to use.
As discussed, Google will not let me access the web and activity page so I cannot supply a screenshot for you. What happens when I click on the link in your email is explained in my email sent on September 7 at 22.51 GMT.
Kind regards,
Jack
How many times to I have to tell them that they won’t let me access the web and app activity page? They keep asking, I keep telling them I can’t access it, and they ask again.
Hello Jack,
Thank you for sharing screenshot.
We need your a screenshot of your âWeb & App Activityâ page for our investigation. You are only providing screenshot of knowledge panel (please make sure that your verified email/Google account name is visible at the top right-hand corner).
Regards,
Tanvi
Google Search support team
At this point, I have my doubts if Google’s staff is even literate.
Hi Tanvi:
I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, Jay and Saikumar this, but I cannot give you a screenshot of the web and app activity page because your system will not let me access it. Please see my email from September 7, 22.51 GMT.
I have already provided you with the correct screenshot from the knowledge panel page but here it is again, from two different browsers.
Regards,
Jack
OK, I shouldn’t have sent Tanvi those SERP screenshots again, but what’s the bet she’ll come back and demand I send her the web and app activity page screen that they won’t let me access?
P.P.PS.: This feels like the final email for now.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us. We are looking into this. We will get back to you as soon as possible.
Regards,
Tanvi
Google Search support team
I thanked her and I think we can leave it there for the next few years.
P.P.P.PS.: I actually got a reply (September 12, 21.56 GMT). Links removed because I can’t be bothered making them active.
Hi Jack,
Thank you for patiently waiting while we looked into the query for you.
We would request you to try to claim the knowledge panel using a different Google account. If you don’t have one, then create a Google account. Once you create a Google Account, use the email address to add it in the account. Please follow these steps in order to add users to your account:
Visit https://www.google.com/search/contributions/manage
Under âAdd people to this accountâ, click Start now.
If you need to switch accounts, use the dropdown menu next to your profile image to select the account you want to manage.
Click Add new user.
Enter the Google email address of your new user.
Choose whether the user gets manager permissions. To grant manager permissions, move the toggle to the right.
Click Invite.
You can set different permission levels for users:
Manager: Can suggest changes to the knowledge panel, and add or remove users.
Owner: The primary user on the account, and has the same permissions as managers.
Contributor: Can suggest changes to the knowledge panel.
You can read more about updating users here.
Regards,
Aghrajit
Google Search support team
I followed his instructions as they seemed pretty reasonable but, as it’s Google, they’re not really supposed to work.
Hi Aghrajit:
Thank you for your detailed instructions. I have followed them, added my other Google account [redacted], and invited myself as a manager.
I received the Google confirmation and clicked on ‘Get started’.
However, there is no link to allow me to claim the knowledge panel, just a link to give general feedback, as though I were a regular user. I don’t have any additional privileges.
Please find the resulting screenshots attached.
Kind regards,
Jack
I think they need to face the fact that their knowledge panels don’t work as advertised, a bit like how their blog review process didn’t work as advertised, or how their anti-malware warnings didn’t clear as advertised, or how their Ads Preferences Manager didn’t work as advertised, etc. Remember, this is the company that didn’t even know where the White House was in Google Earthâand it was version five when I discovered this!
P.P.P.P.PS.: September 13, another Googler, who’s trying to be helpful.
Hello Jack,
Thank you for contacting us.
Please confirm if you are using a G-Suite account. If yes you need to follow the correct steps to turn your Web & App Activity on at an administrator level. Please contact your G suite administrator or system administrator and let him know about it. Please follow the below steps so that Web & App Activity is correctly turned on. Try this with the new email you have added and let us know if you are facing the same issue.
Web & App Activity settings in G Suite Admin.
Regards,
Abdul
Google Search support team
At this point, it was getting ridiculous, even though Abdul was being pretty nice about it all. I replied on the 17th:
Hi Abdul:
Thank you. I know my main address [redacted] is not part of any G Suite. I don’t know if [my school email address] is. Is there a way you can tell me if it is?
I doubt that I would be given more privileges than the address currently has because it’s not meant to be used for non-school purposes, and as a board member of that school, it would be inappropriate for me to ask the admin.
I only used this address as it’s the one that Google kept insisting I log in to (see screenshots of September 7), as it refused to let me log in on any other account.
I know your next piece of advice will be to create a new account to see if it could be added to manage my contributions, as Aghrajit suggested, but I’m unwilling to start yet another presence on Google, which has more than enough information on me. Three identities seem like overkill.
Is there no way to simply allow me to log in with the very address [redacted] you verified? I feel we are getting further and further away from the original purpose of this thread, which was to allow me to edit a knowledge panel using an email address that Google confirmed.
Kindest regards,
Jack
Sivaram replied:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us.
We are looking into this. We will get back to you as soon as possible.
Regards,
Sivaram
Google Search support team
I’m not certain if I’ll update this post. I think I’ve made my point: that things at Google can be half-baked. At least this isn’t deceptive in the way the Ads’ Preferences’ Manager was so many years ago.
Tags: 2020, bug, bugs, customer service, Google, Lucire, technology
Posted in internet, publishing, technology, USA | No Comments »
06.09.2020
A guide to emojis for 2020.
At least Twitter works. Google, as usual, doesn’t.
I had a check to see how Lucire was performing in a Google search yesterday and noticed there was a Wikipedia box to the right, and a message saying that if it was about us, I could ‘claim’ the box. I clicked on the link, and as Google knows my email address is associated with Lucire through its search console, it verified me. ‘Congratulations, you’ve been verified’, according to the Google website, and I could ‘Add or change info’, with a ‘Review info’ box that I could click on.
Actually, it’s just a coloured rectangle. Clicking on it does nothing.
Maybe it’s my privacy settings, so I used my fresh, unblocked, Google-can-plant-what-it-likes Chromium browser. I log in as me on Google. And here’s what I get.
Another variant is the below:
âThis account doesn’t have permission to publish on Google Search.’ Um, it does. You just told me I did.
The box remains claimed but there’s not a damned thing I can do.
Long-time readers will remember my pointing out many years ago how the Google Dashboard isn’t accurate, especially when it comes to arithmetic. Nothing has changed.
Google says I have one task. Well, I can’t, since I’ve never used it. Click through: I have none, and Google returns a ‘Get started’ page. Google says I have two albums. Again, impossible. Click through: I have none. It says I belong to one group. Click through: zero. I’m honestly astonished at how bad they are. If you can’t do maths, you probably shouldn’t be working with computers.
Finally, I see Facebook has forced a lot of people to change to its new template. I actually don’t care what the UI looks like, as I’m not there sufficiently to care. And I bet that if you were Māori, you’d want to have the old template back, since you can’t type macronized vowels. The macron just winds up on the baseline on any Chromium browser.
One friend tried to replicate this on Windows and couldn’t, so this might not be a universal issue.
The font being called by the stylesheet is Segoe UI Historic. I have it installed, and it’s not something I’ve ever edited. I will point that that, according to Character Map, no macronized vowels are visible in the relevant Unicode range, though I haven’t opened it in Fontlab to confirm. If the browser has to substitute, that’s fine. But what font (indeed, which of the Segoe fonts) has macrons on the baseline? It appears to be Microsoft’s Segoe, so if it’s not a Facebook linked font (the code inspector suggests it isn’t), then we can point the finger at Microsoft for a buggy font on a standard Windows 10 computer. Either way, someone in a Big Tech outfit goofed.
I had bookmarked this on my cellphone but because it’s my cellphone, it takes a long time to get it on this blog. I have to remember to grab the phone, then look up the post. But it’s your regular reminder that Facebook usually does nothing, despite saying it actively takes down hateful content. As I noted on The Panel in late August, eight copies (I believe in part) of the Christchurch massacre still exited on the platform as of March 15, 2020. The lies are laid bare once more.
As a company, they also take their sweet time in removing bots. Here’s Instagram in a message to me on August 27 (it’s not the only 2018 report they responded to that week):
Same old, same old.
Tags: 2020, Big Tech, bug, bugs, Facebook, Google, language, MÄori, Microsoft, Twitter, USA, user interface, Wikipedia
Posted in culture, internet, New Zealand, publishing, Sweden, technology, Wellington | 2 Comments »
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