Disaster strikes

It's sod's law that when I think everything is going great something goes wrong.

I was delighted a few evenings ago to see some articles from an old business friend who I hadn't been in contact with for 5 years had been submitted to
www.bb-articles.com through Article Marketer. I'd always enjoyed reading her articles and settled in for a good read. It was great until I noticed that her resource box was incomplete and had no links. I looked through all of her articles and found that most of them were the same.

I was going to email her anyway and make contact again, but I wasn't happy to have to tell her that the resource boxes were incomplete. We both thought that it had been caused by the mass submission from Article Marketer, my friend blasted them and I asked them why it had happened.


Article Marketer got back to me and very nicely explained that my script was stripping out the html. At first I thought that they meant the article directory script but then the day after I realised that they might mean the script that I had bought to enable my site to get mass submissions from
Article Marketer. It's a nifty little script, apart from enabling mass submissions and adding on of categories automatically it also stops the same article from being posted twice and declines articles that are too short or too long.

Anyway I contacted the guy that I bought the script from and he altered it for me. Apparantly he had recently changed it because there were complaints that it was letting through articles with affiliate links in the body and too many links in the resource box. Unfortunately the revised script took it's job too seriously and stripped the html.

The good news is that my new script is working fine, it's different in that I now have to approve every article. That I prefer anyway, I can delete anything that I think are scams and I don't like complete advertorials and can delete them.

The bad news is that there are thousands of articles on my site with incomplete resource boxes. Up to present I've been able to correct nearly a thousand because many of the articles were also sent to my inbox. If there are some that I find that I can't correct I email the individual authors with the links.

I did initially attempt to email all of the authors but there are too many for the email system on my site. I was advised to use an autoresponder but I haven't figured how to use one of them yet. Ok I'm a dummy but I don't like the idea of mass emails anyway.

I'll probably end up going through them all and correcting what I can. I will take many hours but I don't think it's fair on the writers not to have links or contact info in their resource boxes.

Another problem that I had was with the mass input of articles came many new categories. Some of the sub categories have long titles and were overwriting themselves. It made the site look really messy and you had difficulty reading what the categories were.

I found the solution to that problem at AD University. There are some great tutorials on how to customise Article Dashboard sites - and I understand them! Now my home page has just the categories and the messy sub categories have been hidden away from site.

I found another bug in that there is a strange memory error when you click on the top articles link. It can't really be a memory error, more like a tiny script error. I've seen the solution somewhere so once I've got time to look for it again I'll fix it.