Comments | permmembers: "couldn't retrieve anum for entry" error when exporting journals/comments

khyron in permmembers

"couldn't retrieve anum for entry" error when exporting journals/comments

Aug 24, 2011 09:24

Greetings fellow permanent account holders! If you have a moment, I wonder if you'd mind helping me troubleshoot something? I've been running into a really frustrating LJ bug, and I know that many permies also value the ability to back up their LJ content so I thought this might be a good place to ask ( Read more... )

Comments 26

jojobear99 August 25 2011, 00:59:19 UTC

did you even try googling this? ;-) I googled "anum livejournal" and came up with http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/appx.glossary.html which explains what anum means, which essentially is a random number for spam prevention.

you can also view the code for ljprotocol.pl online at:
http://code.livejournal.org/trac/livejournal/browser/trunk/cgi-bin/ljprotocol.pl
but unless you're a techie it won't mean much to you....

a better place to ask about what that error means would be lj_dev (though that has been asked before with no clear answer) as that's where the people who might understand that code used to hang out. But a support request might be more useful if you want to actually resolve this problem. My first guess would be there's some entry in your journal its hiccoughing on and figuring out whether the tool's broken or one of your ( ... )

jojobear99 August 25 2011, 01:00:20 UTC

apologies, I misread, you understand anum ;-) ignore half of what i just said. I'd still say go straight to filing a support request.

khyron August 25 2011, 01:06:21 UTC

In my post above, in addition to mentioning that I know what an "anum" is, I also mention support tickets and provide a link to the one I've already made. In case you're interested, here's a list of similar tickets I've culled together so far ( ... )

jojobear99 August 25 2011, 21:18:51 UTC

Yeah... part of the trouble is that when SixApart sold LJ, most of the employees who wrote most of the (code) infastructure and previously actively developed LJ stayed with SixApart instead (and personally, I don't blame them for that), causing a mass exodus of developers, and an almost complete turnover in employees for LJ. And around the same timeframe time more and more of LJ's codebase stopped being part of the open-source project and more of it domain specific/proprietary "enhancements" which further alienated some of the non-employee devs, and the whole lj dev community was essentially abandoned over time, and very few of the people who know the code well are still willing and able to commit bug fixes ( ... )

Thread 5

ron_newman August 25 2011, 03:38:29 UTC

I'm having no problems using ljdump on davis_square (where I'm one of the maintainers)

khyron August 25 2011, 03:47:31 UTC

That's interesting, I haven't tested any tools out on a community. I've just been trying to back up my journal. Do you mind trying to run ljdump on your own journal real quick just for kicks? You don't have to let it drag on or anything, if you get even one entry processed it will be much further than I can get (the missing anum error is triggered with my journal immediately).

If this issue is only effecting certain journals, I wonder what the discriminating factor is and why it's started recently?

ron_newman August 25 2011, 03:50:59 UTC

It backs up my journal too, but I don't have much there.

khyron August 25 2011, 03:55:13 UTC

Fascinating. One theory that some folks have advanced is that the error is in fact "real," which is to say perhaps there isn't a bug in ljprotocol, but rather that problematic entries are to blame (which have been somehow saved to the database without an anum value, by client mishaps or LJ screwups or something). The fact that you can back up one journal while others can't certainly seems to lean in that direction...something journal-specific.

Of course the problem is that LJ gives us no access to see whether our data is messed up, and there appears to be no way to contact a support person directly to have a dialogue about which entries in one's journal might or might not have weird data in them (gawd, at this point if I could narrow the problem down to just an entry or two I'd freakin' delete them!).

I wish there was something more I could do about this, I feel like my hands are tied all of a sudden.

Thread 8

(The comment has been removed)

khyron August 25 2011, 03:59:20 UTC

Thanks for the feedback, so it's definitely journal-specific then. Man, I wish there was some magical tool I could run to find out which entries in my journal might have messed up data. This is maddening, oh how I wish I'd just backed up my entire journal with comments a few weeks ago before people started reporting this happening.

cyanglow August 25 2011, 07:25:29 UTC

Not sure if it's at all related, but I attempted a full back up at dreamwidth last night, but entries and comments failed after about fifteen minutes. Icons/profile info/etc. was successful, but not the journal content.

I'll try it again now, but if it fails again, I'll go ahead with submitting a support ticket.

emploding August 25 2011, 10:42:44 UTC

I've been considering doing a backup for some time now, and this seems like a good chance to do it.

Am running ljdump now, will let you know how it goes.

It's been going for a few minutes and seems to be going ok. So if you're getting an immediate error, it's not replicating for me.