Numes

I can get to the DVDTalk Easter Egg page here:
https://www.dvdtalk.com/eggs/index.php

But the search doesn't work, or if I click on any individual title, it doesn't take me to the page with the description of the easter egg, it just brings me back to the main easter egg page.

Is this a known issue or any chance of being resolved?

IBJoel

No chance of being resolved. But I should be able to remove the link from the menu to prevent future dead-end navigation.

Numes

Ahh darn I wasn't expecting that. If I may ask, what happened?

Adam Tyner

It was coded a million years ago (and not very well). When some other updates on the server were made, this incredibly old code wouldn't recognize the ID in the URLs anymore. So even though you clicked on:
...it acted as if you'd punched in:
...and, not seeing an ID, it'd redirect you to the landing page. The fix is easy -- just replacing references to $ID in the code to $_REQUEST["ID"] or $_GET["ID"] -- but since that section has been abandoned for a decade, it's probably best to leave the lights off.

TheBang

The database has historical easter egg information for 1018 titles. Information that is probably not available anywhere else now, as most other DVD news sources from this time period have disappeared into the Internet sands of time.

Can't you assign someone the 2 minutes it would take to go to index.php and read.php and do the find/replace Adam outlined above? Actually, the substitution is either what Adam said or probably $HTTP_GET_VARS["ID"] to $_GET["ID"]. I've had to implement the exact same fix to similarly ancient scripts, and it really is that easy to fix it.

IBJoel

Considering how low of a priority this would be for our tech team, I'm sorry but it's just not going to get worked on for years. Or business team will simply tell tech flat out, "don't work on it".

b2net

This would be excellent information. Is there a way to extract it as a flat file so at least we could still have access to the information via text search?

TheBang

Not trying to be contrarian here, but it would only take about 1 additional minute of work to fix the two files than the amount of time it would take to remove the link from the menu.

I know you're not a PHP coder, but it literally is just as simple a fix as Adam and I described. Maybe you can have a tech do an assessment on the files to confirm how much work it would take to fix it? They would probably just abort the assessment in the middle and say, "This is silly; I can just fix this right now" :%s/HTTP_GET_VARS/_GET/g :wq "There, done."

How about this proposal instead? Have tech download the 2 files from the server. Give them to Adam, and if he can find a couple spare minutes, he can implement the fixes and then give the files back to you to upload.

Because it doesn't have a direct bottom line effect? I mean, it's only your community, right? But if you want to talk $ and ¢, it is the 3rd Google search result for "DVD easter eggs"

That would take significantly more time and effort than it would to just fix the scripts.

IDrinkMolson

As a workaround for now, you can always use the wayback machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150909...ad.php?ID=1875

Does anyone know the date this change broke things? The above snapshot is from 2015.

IBJoel

A head's up: I did ask tech if they could just do the fix. We had a long weekend, though.

TheBang

Thanks, it looks like they partially fixed read.php. It works for the list of titles, for example:

https://www.dvdtalk.com/eggs/read.php?ID=1870

But it does not work for the featured titles across the top (the ones with the cover art displayed), with URL's like this:

https://www.dvdtalk.com/eggs/read.php?titleID=478

They also still need to fix index.php. This is so that the Search box works, and so that the pagination navigation at the bottom works.

IBJoel

This is still being worked on and I also have to add that this is very low priority for our tech team, especially as we are launching updates on every site in our department. I will make sure it's not dropped, however. It just might take some time (once DVD Talk is updated, I can also likely say it's a "bug" from that and give it a little more priority).

EDIT: We actually expect almost no user-facing issues with this update, not to worry anyone.

TheBang

I just checked and noticed that the Easter Eggs section is fully working now. Looks like it got nice bit of code cleaning to go along with the rest of the site updates. Thanks for getting this one fixed, IBJoel!

Numes

Excellent - Yes, thank you IBJoel!