If I update an hour late, visitor sees old strip all day.

[Bobadventures]

Hi. Generally I'm extremely pleased with the way ComicGenesis is run these days, but I do have one minor complaint that has been bugging me for a long time.

My comic is set to update at midnight. I am, regrettably, not always organized enough to have the comic ready before midnight, so I sometimes end up uploading the comic in the wee hours of the morning. However, if someone logs in to my comic at, say, 1 AM and sees the old strip, and then comes back later after I have uploaded today's comic, they will still see the old strip unless they empty their ram cache. Consequently, anyone who checks the comic during those first few hours will think I never updated that day at all (unless they know to clear their ram cache).

Or, for that matter, if I notice a misspelling or other mistake and re-upload a corrected version of the comic, visitors who saw the bad version won't be able to see the fixed version until the next day.

I know that there is some way to fix this, because other comics like "The Adventures of Dr. McNinja" update at odd hours during the day, without experiencing the same problem.

So, I have two questions:
1) Is there any possibility this problem might be fixed? Granted that it is a minor problem, and ultimately the responsibility for getting the comic up at midnight is entirely my own, but it would be nice if the system were a little more forgiving about this.
2) If I change my update time to, say, 4 in the morning, would that (mostly) fix my problem? That is, I pretty consistently have the sucker up by 4; so then if a visitor checked it at 3am, and then again at 5 am, would they see the up-to-date comic that went up at 4? That still wouldn't fix the "oh no I have to fix a misspelling" scenario, but it would fix the "updating at 1 AM" problem.

Thanks,
--Jim Cleaveland
The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

You could change your update time.

Or, you could do what I do, and that is to manually update your comic via siteadmin if you're updating behind schedule.

After you've uploaded your file via FTP, go to siteadmin.comicgenesis.com. Fill out your name and password EXACTLY as they are on the forum here, click the comic, click near the top where it says Update, and then scroll down to where it says Regular Update, Full Update, and Index Update. You'll want to select Regular Update for this process.

Your new comic should be up pretty quickly.

edited to add: Don't click Full Update. You hardly ever need to do that unless you're doing some heavy-duty retooling, or if something's borked in your archive, like glitches where clicking "next comic" from the middle of the archive accidentally takes the reader to the most recent strip. Avoid using it if you don't have to because it places considerable burden on the server.

Edited again: The "automatic update" thing that CG uses is technically voluntary when you get down to it. It's great for someone who wants to update a few pages in advance and may not be near the computer in order to put those updates up on the days they're scheduled to appear. However, you can do a manual update every time, using the steps I listed above. The automatic update simply means that every 24 hours at your chosen time, the server will check if there's anything new in your FTP workspace folder that needs to be updated. It's very useful, but not mandatory in the sense that you have to wait around for each 24 hour time block to pass if you want to change/ add something.

[Bobadventures]

You could change your update time.

Or, you could do what I do, and that is to manually update your comic via siteadmin if you're updating behind schedule.

After you've uploaded your file via FTP, go to siteadmin.comicgenesis.com. Fill out your name and password EXACTLY as they are on the forum here, click the comic, click near the top where it says Update, and then scroll down to where it says Regular Update, Full Update, and Index Update. You'll want to select Regular Update for this process.

Your new comic should be up pretty quickly.

edited to add: Don't click Full Update. You hardly ever need to do that unless you're doing some heavy-duty retooling, or if something's borked in your archive, like glitches where clicking "next comic" from the middle of the archive accidentally takes the reader to the most recent strip. Avoid using it if you don't have to because it places considerable burden on the server.

Edited again: The "automatic update" thing that CG uses is technically voluntary when you get down to it. It's great for someone who wants to update a few pages in advance and may not be near the computer in order to put those updates up on the days they're scheduled to appear. However, you can do a manual update every time, using the steps I listed above. The automatic update simply means that every 24 hours at your chosen time, the server will check if there's anything new in your FTP workspace folder that needs to be updated. It's very useful, but not mandatory in the sense that you have to wait around for each 24 hour time block to pass if you want to change/ add something.

Well, that's exactly what I do. What I mean is that if you visit my comic between midnight and the time that I actually do that manual update, you will see the old comic--and then if you return after I have done the manual update, you will STILL see the old comic for the rest of that day unless you clear your ram cache.

However, you offer an interesting suggestion. I hadn't realized that I could eliminate the automatic update time entirely; I thought it was a ComicGenesis requirement. I'll try getting rid of it and see if that fixes the problem. Thanks!

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

Well, you can't "get rid" of it, exactly. I don't think it's a checkable option. Uploading to your FTP is a different step of the process than updating from the FTP to the comic site. Manually updating means going into siteadmin and ordering the system to update your comic again even if it just updated it automatically an hour, four hours, however many hours ago.

If you just upload something to your FTP, you won't see those updates until the following automatic update, whenever that is set for. If you're updating something late and want it to go live on your site as soon as possible, you need to follow up uploading to the FTP with going into siteadmin and telling the system to update the files from your FTP to the site.

Hope that makes sense, let me know if I've been unclear.

[robotthepirate]

I don't have any solutions but I know I don't get this problem.

When I update my comic late (using a manual update) it updates and shows the newest page pretty soon after. Not imediately, but soon.

[VeryCuddlyCornpone]

I don't have any solutions but I know I don't get this problem.

When I update my comic late (using a manual update) it updates and shows the newest page pretty soon after. Not imediately, but soon.

That's because I think you did both steps of the manual update, but Bob has only done one. To manually update you need to not only upload using your FTP, but then log in using Siteadmin and force a new (unscheduled) update.