October Novel Prep Challenge

Due to ongoing problems, the Assignment Log has been modified.

Executive Summary:

As most of you have experienced, the Assignment Log is very slow to report your entered data on the front "Log" tab. In some cases, completed assignments were getting hung in cyberspace altogether until we tinkered with the log on our end and "pushed" the results. And in some cases, the data was going to the web, and then disappearing again after the fact.

Yesterday, we completely redesigned the Assignment Log to fix this problem. However, as with any design involving active data, it is possible that we introduced new bugs. Please don't panic if you encounter any new issues. Just report them in the forum like you normally do, and we will address each issue as it arises.

Overall, the Assignment Log performance is much improved, and you should now see your logged data appearing on the web within five minutes of entering it, which is normal lag time.

Technical Details:

For anyone interested in a more thorough and technical explanation, here it is.

The Assignment Log is made with a Google product called Sheets (formerly Google Drive Spreadsheets, formerly Google Docs.) We used Google's "Publish to Web" feature to publicly publish the spreadsheet in a read-only form. The only other way participants could all see the Assignment Log would be to have each user create a Google account, set up Google Drive, and learn how to use it. This was an impractical solution because (1) not everyone would be able to set up accounts on their own, and (2) it would be difficult to manage from our side, because by default, Google give edit access to all shared users, and we would have to manually adjust each user to view-only access one at a time. Not only is that tedious, but the likelihood of human error is high, and we could have accidentally left a user with edit access, who could have accidentally deleted data or calculations. That was why we chose the "Publish to Web" feature. It essentially turns a spreadsheet into a read-only website that anyone can access.

Google reports in its documentation that the "Publish to Web" feature can take up to five minutes to report data because of their internal refresh cycle. However, our data was taking hours or even days to publish, for some reason, and sometimes, previously published data disappeared again. The raw data was publishing properly to the web, but the calculated results on the "Log" tab were not, and in particular, certain "Required" assignments were occasionally getting permanently hung. For example, in one situation, the log only reported Required assignments up to #6, even though many participants had completed 7, 8, and 9, and random higher assignments like 16 and 31. None of the results above 6 were publishing. Meanwhile all the Bonus assignments appeared as they should.

Please note that we were able to see all the calculated results perfectly fine in the Sheets version of the log (not just the raw data; our "Log" tab properly contained all the calculated results, too.) For whatever reason, some results were just not publishing to the WEB. More interestingly, newer data was passing the hung data and making it to the web. In one troubleshooting step, we observed numbers on our Sheets file not appearing on the web. We colored those particular cells magenta in Sheets, and the magenta coloring went to the web, but the cells were still blank So the formatting published to the web just fine, but the calculated results themselves were hung. In the situation where the log only reported up to Required #6 from the previous paragraph, a user had entered assignment #8 prior to assignment #6, but only #6 was appearing on the web version of the log. Assignment #8 appeared on the Sheets version in the appropriate place.

We contacted Google Drive. I am not please with Google's service. The Google Drive tech notified me that she could not help me because this was a Sheets problem, and provided me with a link to established Sheets help documentation (which I had already thoroughly searched.) On follow-up, she directed me to the Google Drive forums to receive one-on-one help. I published a long description of the problem, including a screen capture. Within about an hour, I received an answer from a member of the general public asking if I had tried certain steps, which were very rudimentary and I had tried repeatedly already. I went ahead and tried the steps again. At some point in the troubleshooting, the hung data went to the web, but as usual, new data got hung a day or two later. I have sent two follow-up posts to the Google forum explaining that the problem recurred and have heard no response from the community member who tried to help me. As of today, five days later, I have yet to hear a response from an actual Google tech qualified to support Sheets, nor have I received any help outside of the Drive tech who could not assist and a single community member who has not responded to my follow-ups.

So we focused on redesigning the Assignment Log instead. The raw data was publishing just fine, but the results were not. Also, the Leaders observed that the Sheets version of the log, although it did properly calculate results, ran slowly and caused our devices lag and even overheat. Therefore, we tried to redesign the log with as little reprocessing of the data as possible. We published the revision yesterday, and so far, the results seem to be updating much faster.

Please report any new bugs you encounter, and we will address them as quickly as we can. Thanks for your patience, and I am SO SORRY that all this has been distracting us from our writing.

Write on!

Cheers,
Michelle