First of all, I’d like to apologise to any of you who experienced broken wiki links after the last update. I’m not going to hide behind the “open beta” banner, I made a mistake with the WikiWord generation algorithm and rolled out an update that affected people’s data without asking first, for which I apologise. This update fixes the problem, and provides an optional means of applying the fix to your Markdown pages.
What went wrong?
My updated algorithm stripped out some characters that it shouldn’t have, like the - character for example. So if you had a page named “Notes-2012-04-30.markdown”, it generated a WikiWord of “Notes20120430”. The updated wiki links may have worked in WikiPack, but if that page was also in your Trunk Notes wiki, which allows the - character, the previous update would have broken inbound links to that page.
The update applied the new WikiWord algorithm to your existing pages automatically in an attempt to maintain the wiki links between them and shouldn’t have caused any kind of disruption, but because of this error made on my part it actually broke those links for some people.
Repairing the damage
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Your account settings page now has a “Regenerate wiki links” button which will apply the new WikiWord algorithm to your pages and hopefully reverse any damage made to your wiki links with the last update. This is completely optional, and should only be used if you noticed that some of your wiki links, especially for pages with non-word characters in the filename, stopped working after the last update. If you didn’t notice any problems then you probably don’t need to use the regenerate wiki links function.
The page History function should allow you to revise and rollback the changes made to your pages last week if needed. You'd have to navigate to the page in question, hit the History button in the sidebar, and then... well, comparing the changes wouldn't reveal anything because the it wouldn't have affected the rendered HTML, and there's currently no means to view the raw Markdown of previous versions... you could at least view the page as it was prior to the update last week and if the wiki links still work in that version you can revert it back easily with the link at the top of the page.
Again, I assure you that I always take the utmost care to preserve the privacy & integrity of your data at all times, so I regret that people’s data was affected by an error made on my part.
I found that the 'Regenerate wiki links' didn't "reverse the damage" but using the History and Compare I was able to return to the '.markdown' version from before the change. I sorted my Dropbox wiki folder by 'Date Modified' to sort out which files were affected by the update.
ReplyDeleteFor me the change affected 12 out of 162 files. I don't know why but only a few of the files that could have been affected, were affected. For example WikiLinks to Diary-2012-03-March.markdown had the hyphens removed but not to the January and February although they were similarly named files.
I was able to see History comparison changes for WikiLinks like this [[Notes-2012-03-March]] with the rendered versions show 'Notes-2012-03-March' or 'Notes201203March' but the History comparison for [[Diary-2012-01-January|January 2012]] and [[Diary201201January|January 2012]] naturally both show the same 'January 2012'.
Whilst never nice to make errors hopefully this little episode has made WikiPack stronger and more robust for everyone.
Thanks Neil, it has been a learning experience. As you noticed, one thing this has highlighted is that it would be useful to be able to view the raw Markdown when using the History functions as some changes that don't affect the rendered HTML won't show up when comparing versions. So I'll definitely be working to make it stronger and more robust.
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