MetaFic

It turns out that SIYE's back-end engine refuses (and I mean refuses) to let anyone edit my posted chapters. I can't. The admin's can't. The only editing possible is by manually manipulating the database behind the thing, from a shell prompt. Since I lack shell access, and only Dino can step in at this point, well . . . he's slammed with real life, and the four chapters at SIYE that are truncated can't be fixed. So I just re-posted Chapters 4, 7, 10, and 26 as "new" chapters for a temporary work-around. Sorry if you get spammed over the "Author update!" notices, or feel let down since it wasn't really new material.

Actually, there was a time on SIYE when "silent editing" was common. I had several chapters edited by archivists who just knew they were correct and I had mistakes in what I was doing. Needless to say, that went down well with me when I found out. After much heated arguing and back-and-forth that couldn't be resolved, the back-end folks put in a script that now automatically notifies you when *anyone* edits your chapter -- even when the author does, too. Unsurprisingly, the process of silent editing disappeared as soon as that script was installed.

At the time, the admins were fans of Echoes, and were somewhat defensive of my right to not have others muck with the story without my consent for any changes -- or even the failure to give courtesy that an edit was taking place. What I wonder at this point is that if they didn't leave a bit of hardcoded magic in when they left, making it impossible for anyone to edit one of my validated chapters.

The only things that can be edited, apparently, are Chapter title, A/N, disclaimer, and the chapter order number. After a bunch of PMs and reviews mentioning the problems, this is the only work-around we could think of. What's more worrying to me is that many people have read the four chapters in question and never noticed they were truncated. Only one or two of them were "obvious" truncations. Somewhere around 20k-esh words were "truncated" from the story as closely as I can tell.

That's some glitch, eh?