Mission Bugs and How to Fix them!

From The Nethernet Wiki

We all make missions, it is one of the great joys of being a Pathmaker. But some times, those missions can leave us screaming in pain and anger. So I am creating this page as a "current" (5-1-08) way of fixing some mission making issues you might have. I am currently working on creating a Legendary Mission which will be 1000 pages long, but cut into 50 page chunks for easier viewing. +++++ EDITED 6-12-08 : TO ADDRESS FIXES MADE BY PMOG +++++

Common Mission Issues:

My Lamppost doesn't show up when I test it? -> Well PMOG is new, and only has a few code ninjas working on it. There are a huge number of ways webpages are made and published. Some times these just don't mix. The best thing to do is just remove this site, replace it with another site and maybe place a portal linking from the new site to the old one. This is how I use my portals, linking to sites that don't like PMOG, e.g., image files, such as *.jpg/*.gif/*.tiff will not register the lightpost--a portal to these pages is preferable if you would still like to include this content.

My Lamppost is hidden behind some stuff on the page! -> Yes, this happens because the current PMOG overlays will not overrule Flash native to the site. There is not much that can be done about it yet. The best thing to do is just remove this site, replace it with another site and maybe place a portal linking from the new site to the old one.

People keep griping in comments about [insert chosen website here] ->Some old timers in PMOG have these gentleman's rules for making missions. When they take your mission and come across a very common site--which does not generate any dp , you get bad ratings and rude comments. Some of them are justified, some not. As a general rule avoid Wikipedia, YouTube, and PMOG pages. Google pages should include a warning in the mission description that it takes you to Google, people going for the Indie Badge after all. It is also rapidly becoming noobish to make a mission about Webcomics, so expect flack if you make one of those. At the end of the day though, you still made a mission, and someone still took it.

Why doesn't anyone take my Super Awesome Mission of Awesomeness?!?! -> Well there are a few reasons. Is it NSFW? That will cut your user base right there. Is it about Webcomics? Starts on a PMOG page? Has 8 Wikipedia links? Now if you don't fit any of this, lets look at what gets people to take missions.

Subject Matter - some people take mission purely on what they are about. Make yours interesting and quirky and you are going to have at least a few people look in just to see what your quirky is. Also there are some who will take missions just because of the subject matter. Examples: Bacon, Firefly, WoW, MMOs, Video Games, News, etc.

The Association - whatever your primary association when you make a mission, that is what the mission will be. When your Association changes, your missions will not follow. Once a mission is made, its Association is set.

The Time the Mission is Posted - some people just look at the main mission page to see what is there. And if your mission strikes their fancy you win. Unfortunately there is no data on when this magic time might be. Weekends might be better as people have browsing time, but also weekdays, as most of us play at work.

Datapoints! Need More Datapoints! - Okay, yeah. This is me. I want the points. If your mission is interesting, that's gravy. If it isn't, but takes me to a bunch of sites I never would have gone to on my own, we're still cool, and I'm still happy. I know there are others like me. We band of DP miners. Hence why I made Legendary Mission. :)

Hey I am taking a mission and having a problem! -> First off, reload the page. Then try backing up and trying the 'next' link again. You can also try retaking the mission, or simply going to the standard domain link for something (this helps with wandering lamppost). So for example if you end up at www.ebay.fr and there is no mission box, try just going to www.ebay.com and see if it shows up there. If you are chasing the box sideways, keep chasing, eventually the ram will bog out and you will be able to click it before it moves again. (fixed) Also try shutting down Firefox, waiting a few minutes and then trying again. All else fails, message the mission maker begging for the next link in the mission.

Fix for Missions with a Completed page halfway through.

I know a bunch of us have had this problem. You make a mission, you test it, get halfway through and find the complete mission tag, even though you have more sites to go through.

Here's what's happening -> at some point this page where the completed shows up either was the last page, or the page after it got deleted.

Here's how to fix it -> Move the offending page down one in the organization chain. Then click on the page above where it used to be. Click next, and it should take you to the page that took the offending page's place. Click next and you should reach the offending page, only now it works properly. Once you finish testing simply go back to organize before you publish and switch the sites back and they work fine. As always, be sure to wait at least an hour for all changes to take effect. Your changes are in there, but the servers have no yet cached the info...this is not a bug, it's just lag.

So for example you have 5 pages, A, B, C, D, E. But the mission ends on C. Move C to be between D and E. So now your order is A, B, D, C, E. Click on B and move to D then to C, which should now properly link to E. Just switch em back when you are done.

The Wandering Lamppost Issue

When you create missions you place lampposts and then drop them into your mission. And lampposts by definition are inanimate objects. But not the ones in PMOG, they occasionally like to wander. Oh not far, just over a few pages in the domain. This does however generally break the mission and cause things to end up in very strange places.

For example: I have www.amazon.com as the first page in LM Part 4. This morning I wake up to find it is listed as www.amazon.de. That's right I suddenly went German last night! After checking some of my other missions I noticed this happened in all of them. Any number of lampposts from 2-5 would wander to a different part of the domain. For my part this causes a great deal of hassle as I have to go back and edit the mission, deleting the old sites, replacing them with the correct link (which I can still pick from the drop down list) and then re-testing.

So here is your fair warning: you might have to have continual maintenance on your missions as your lampposts are bad little creatures and go where they don't belong. At the moment other than reorganizing the mission or removing those pages there doesn't seem to be any way of getting around this problem.

THIS ISSUE IS NOW FIXED!!!! Three cheers for Pmog Staff!!! However, any missions created BEFORE the fix (endish of May 08), will have re-organized themselves, and thus be horribly jumbled. You will need to edit, re-test, and re-publish these missions. Of course unless you just don't care about page order in your mission.

This is all I have at the moment. I will try to remember to update if these get fixed or drop any new ones down.

Benefits of trying to make Missions 50 pages long. :)