Hunch Help

I encountered a few contractions and possessives that are not allowed in the "About Me" text entry box.

don't, doesn't, life's, voter's, shouldn't, it's.

It would be nice if this was fixed because the error message only says what you allow - and some contractions and possessives, such as "I'm" and "widow's" work. It took a lot of trial and error to find these.

Also, your count of letters, spaces, punctuation, etc does not match with the "x number of characters left" number. If I could attach a screen shot, you would be able to see that the character count is 2003 (out of an allowable 2000) but the "Characters remaining" count is 19.

Regards,

Jack

Posted at: 7:44PM on Oct. 11, 2010. [ permalink ]

Possibly not a bug, maybe just me being stupid; but how do I access the 'results' of the reader census widget. In the set-up screen, it says 'Your readers can access: hunch.com/blogger/coxy.me.uk/' - except that URL doesn't work. I just get a 404.

Posted at: 3:40AM on Oct. 12, 2010. [ permalink ]

Sorry for the confusion. Try hunch.com/blogger/coxy.me.uk/readership-stats/

Posted at: 10:38AM on Oct. 12, 2010. [ permalink ]

@john-cain - I was just able to add all of those words into my About Me section, so I'm not sure the source of your problems with that. Did you see a yellow error message pop up?
As for the character counting, you are probably right. Think of it as a handful of free words to use as you choose. :-)

Posted at: 11:41AM on Oct. 12, 2010. [ permalink ]

Jon,

I'm afraid that we have a failure to communicate (remind me to add Cool Hand Luke to my favs) about the problems that I had.

First, the easiest. The "extra" characters are not a benefit, they are a detraction. The number of characters left tells you that you have more words allowed than you really do. In other words, if you are close to teh limit, you think you have more characters left than you really do. Does that make better sense?

Next, I do not know what other differences there may be between your setup and mine. That being said, I really don't like to be blown off when I report something that took me several hours to track down since there is NO error message that points to the actual problem. I've done a LOT of software testing in my time (I'm 50) and I expect that when I give you a report that it gets looked at, not just a "ain't a problem on my machine" response. A truly experienced programmer or tech support tech knows that there are many different things that can cause a problem that happen on one system but do not happen on another.

I could give a fig if you fix it or not - but at least give me some credit for taking several hours to track down a problem interfacing with your software.

Posted at: 9:19PM on Oct. 12, 2010. [ permalink ]

@john-cain - We don't usually get feedback from users with so much experience and technical know-how, so I hope you are understanding about my brief response earlier. Behind my curtness, we actually have queued up these issues for investigation but our technical team haven't gotten to it yet. They would probably know better than I what specific questions to ask.
Many times when we ask for details like OS and browser version, the user's eyes will glaze over a bit and we start down a confusing back and forth. I'm using Safari w/ the latest OS X and I couldn't recreate the issue. What's your setup? That, and any other relevant details you can offer us, would be great to help get us started.
Here at Hunch we really depend on our users and community in many ways, and we always do appreciate it.

Updated at: 10:33AM on Oct. 13, 2010. [ permalink ]

Seems like the issue with the use of apostrophes has to do with how the character is entered and encoded into our database.

For example, if you copy-paste this into your profile text, it will not work:
O’Connor

However, if you copy-paste this one it will work.
O'Connor

Posted at: 11:47AM on Oct. 13, 2010. [ permalink ]

Search doesn't give me the same results as it used to.
E.g. when I searched
New Bands, I used to get (surprisingly enough)
New Bands
now I get a subdivision, namely
New Remix Bands

Posted at: 1:37PM on Oct. 18, 2010. [ permalink ]

@ictus - I just ran some searches and confirmed this. Looks like the subtopics are coming up ahead of the topics themselves. Will pass to engineering.

Posted at: 1:50PM on Oct. 18, 2010. [ permalink ]