I used to blog on
Minds all the time, but for whatever reason I cut back significantly
over the past year. One day I decided to make a blog post about a
very much sought after feature people have been requesting on Minds;
Dark Mode. Little did I know that in performing this great service I
would uncover a bug – a bug that literally took my breath
away.
People have been asking for a Minds native dark mode
for years now. During all that time, I found a great 3rd
party solution in the browser extension Stylish. Stylish uses
community-based themes hosted on the userstyles.org website. The
problem with stylish is that every time Minds changes the formatting
of its site, the user themes need to be updated to meet the CSS
changes to the site.
So, the blog and the bug. The main
thesis of my blog post was to showcase a gallery of screenshot images
of various pages and features on Minds, using a userstyle theme
developed by @csharpner. As usual, once satisfied with the blog post
itself, the composition and the image layout, I posted it, and went
on with my work on Minds.
Sooner or later, as everyone
does, my regiment on Minds took me back to my channel page. As I
scrolled down below my Bio, I was startled to see that my image
wiget, that little area in the left sidebar on my channel, had
disappeared completely! I have to admit, there was a moment of panic
as I have nearly 3 years of images, many hundreds, of images stored
on Minds, and the only practically way of accessing them is via that
widget.
The first thing I did was to make a ticket in Help
and Support where I was told by the ever helpful @JakePassi that this
seemed to be happening to a fair amount of channels; sometimes the
image, and other times the video wigets were disappearing, and that
he would speak to the development team about it.
The
second thing I did was to open a ticket at the Minds Gitlab account,
where I could not only observe, but take part in the process of
identifying this issue, and dealing with it; which it is still in
progress.
As you well know, once you publish a blog post,
a copy of it is sent to your channel page. It was around this time I
noticed the banner of a previous blog post was on my channel, but had
lost its banner image. I thought to myself, “Oh my Luculent, this
is becoming a nightmare!”.
Being the sort of individual
I am, I set out to see what I myself could do concerning this
conundrum; I wanted my gallery back! The following is a synopsis of
my accomplishments for which indeed returned my image widget in all
its glory to my channel page:
It seems as all images that
are not directly uploaded into posts, including comments, comments in
conversation feeds, direct uploads into blog posts...etc are
automatically marked as ‘unlisted’ by design, (but should not
impact our galleries or our wigets).
So I set out to see
what I thought might be the culprit. I remember a bug were some
notifications led to empty or broken sources, for which I found was
related to posts with images that have been automatically marked as
‘unlisted’. I decided I would run with that concept, and went
immediately to the blog post I made earlier to where the banner of
the corresponding post on my channel had disappeared; checked all
the images I could find (most were in a media page side-bar), and
noticed they were all marked as ‘unlisted’; and set myself to
editing them to mark all of them as ‘public’.
After marking all
the images in said blog post as ‘public’, I browsed back to my
channel page, and lo-and-behold! The lost banner had returned! Did I
dare ruin my excitement by looking for my lost image widget? I
couldn't help myself and had to scroll down for a peek. I nearly lept
out of my seat I was so overcome, the wiget had indeed reappeared.
Granted, it was still broken showing only one image, but it was
there!
I was on a roll. Now I’m convinced all this crud
has something to do with all these images that have been auto-marked
as ‘unlisted’. So, I went on the hunt for any recent comments,
replies, or posts I made with images in them (some of which I found
in media page side-bars); checked how those images were marked; and
set them all to ‘public’. It was a long and arduous task. I had
to go through a ton places where I uploaded images or videos, but as
I set and marked each one as ‘public’ the more and more I filled
up my images wiget again!
To really bring home the
ultimate satisfaction of returning all the wigets on my channel page
to a normal and expected state, just this morning I came across a
video I posted as a reply deeply nested in the Help & Support
Conversation Feed. You guessed it, it was marked as ‘unlisted’
Performing the task of manually marking it as ‘public’ I went
back to my channel and had a look. I felt completely victorious, all
the wigets were back in complete order for the first time in
months.
At this point, I will not let any upload I make
remain as ‘unlisted’ until we and the staff overcome this hurdle
of missing and/or broken wigets on channel side-bars.
So
elated at this point, I decided to write this blog post, hoping that
anyone experiencing anything akin to this dreadful situation, might
use my workaround to brighten their day, and return the full joy of
their minds user experience.
Keep in mind though, that
this is only a workaround, and I have been following and
participating in, (as best I can), the (bug): ticket over at Gitlab
to properly resolve this issue. The staff and community members
tasking on this ticket are working very hard toward finding a
solution to this dilemma; it’s now a high priority. I can only hope
this, my experience has helped push the day where all is ‘made
well’ come all the faster.