--- In [email protected], Brian Crozier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:
> 
> I'm brand new to the site. Actually I've been trying to use it for 
a while but it kept crashing my computer. I played with the ISBN 
lookup box and it worked okay for me on January 1st. It didn't work 
on every book I tried as I guess only some were in the database. But 
it seemed to be functioning fine. If I'm not talking about the same 
thing, sorry, I call newbieness! :-)
>  

Welcome to BookCrossing, Brian! [Side note: it's appreciated if you 
trim your replies to this group so they don't contain the text of the 
note you're replying to; saves a lot of space.]

A failure to find a matching ISBN is not the problem people are 
talking about; that's just a limitation of the Amazon database that 
BC uses for the lookups. The "ISBN lookup" problem occurs when 
somebody does a lookup and the ISBN is found, but instead of the book 
details being correctly filled with the expected title and author, a 
string of additional text and HTML tags is added, causing anything 
from mild unsightliness to general chaos. The problem happens on some 
books and not others; sometimes it messes up the registration screen 
while other times it doesn't seem to cause any trouble until someone 
tries to make release notes or a journal entry on the book. The fix 
is pending - not sure how soon, as the sad loss of BC programmer Dan 
Clune did set back a lot of code-related work - but now that the 
holiday season is winding down perhaps we'll get some news about the 
fix.

In the meantime, I'm still advising people not to use the "lookup" 
button on the live site; you can still fill in the ISBN if you have 
one, and if there's a matching cover-pic it'll show up on your 
bookshelf, but if you avoid hitting the "lookup" button you'll also 
avoid the garbled-book-title problem. [If you do get a garbled title, 
you can usually - but not always - fix it yourself via "edit book 
details". Sometimes even that screen won't work properly, though, and 
in that case you'll need to get BC support to help.]

-GoryDetails

Books just wanna be FREE! See what I mean at:
http://bookcrossing.com/friend/GoryDetails 





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