Flock with Del.icio.us users, on starting the browser, have seen all of their favorites disappear. Or they have seen favorites not being sent to Del.icio.us . We currently believe that something on del.icio.us’s end has broken, causing the problem — a server is broken or they have introduced a bug. We are aggressively investigating the issue (bug 2919). This effort is led by Ian.
Update: I did not make it clear that the favorites are safe on Del.icio.us .
At first we thought it related to the upgrade to 0.5.13, but this seems to have been a red herring. I have been able to reproduce this issue on Flock 0.5.13 and also 0.5.12. The most prevalent trigger with the most severe symptom is starting Flock, which an upgrade includes, that is why we were first led down that trail. It seems in that scenario, Del.icio.us is telling Flock that there are no favorites on the server, so Flock updates to this state.
technorati tags: delicious, flock, del.icio.us, bug, flock.com, flockbrowser, online favorites, online bookmarks, shared bookmarks, flock-qa@flock.com, flock-dev@flock.com
3 Comments
So, what’re we recommending for our users? Don’t use Flock until this problem goes away? Delete or save a copy of your profile before restarting Flock so that if delicious deletes your faves, you can recover them when the problem’s traced down? Are favorites actually being deleted from delicious or are they simply disappearing from Flock. We need to publish something more clear about the data integrity ramifications of this and how users should proceed until further notice.
Thank you Daryl for your comment. I have updated the post to make it clear that the favorites are safe on Del.icio.us .
We can’t yet make a recommendation, but in working with the del.icio.us team, we think that restarting the browser after their issue is corrected with resolve the issue.
Whew! Thanks for the followup!
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[...] Apparently Favorites are disappearing (*gasp!*) without a clear reason. Lloyd thinks that it might be something on Delicious’ end, but we’re still looking into it. Rest assured, no existing data is being lost — however, creating new favorites is definitely flaky (possibly because of interactions on the server side). Keep an eye on Bug #2919 for details. To report any issues you run into, drop a bug report to feedback (at) flock dot com. We’ve got our best people on this, so I’ll let you know the outcome as soon as I get word. Tags: del.icio.us, flock, flockbug, flockbug:2919 [...]
[...] We have concluded our investigation of the bug where when starting Flock all your favorites were gone. This was del.icio.us specific, and the bug was not in the Flock browser. There are no negavite effects to your favorites on del.icio.us. Unfortunately, the nature of this del.icio.us service bug, requires your manual correction. [...]