TOPIC:

Our Toastmaster for the last 2 meetings (different users) has not been able to view and print the speech intros. What could cause this?

Please tell us your club number so that we can investigate further.

4596, this site: sentry.toastmastersclubs.org

Thank you.

I've had a look at your site, and I notice that all the members' names have a dot between first and last names. Has this always been the case?

I suspect that this is one for the programmer to look at.

This has always been the case. After the new updates I don't think this is necessary, but everyone is used to their user name being that way.

Thanks. I wondered if that might have something to do with the problem, but if it's been like that for a long time, then probably not.

You could ask the users to reload the site from the server and see if that helps. It does in quite a few cases. There's a link to do this right at the bottom of the page.

This has happened over multiple months for multiple users on different machines. I don't think it has to do with their personal/work comps. I will have them check though.

Need the browser and browser version.

IE 9

Works fine for me in IE9.

If you want me to investigate further, I will need more details, such as a relevant screen shot, and exact steps taken and what was expected vs what was observed.

None of our admins have had an issue either. It is like they don't have access to even see the button to print the intros. Any thoughts about how we would open that up to more people?

The "button" is just a printer icon above the introduction box. Some people miss that.

If they do not see the icon, ask them if they are missing other icons, also. (like on the agenda buttons)

I was able to watch the user do it. The printer icon does not show up for them when they are toastmaster. It shows up for me and other club members when we are toastmaster or when we log in as site admin. Why wouldn't it show up for some users when they are toastmaster? Attached is the screenshot of the access I expect every user to have when they are toastmaster.

Are there other icons missing for them also, or just the printer icon?

Not sure. Is this a group setting I can edit?

No, you just need to look at the person's screen.

If the other icons are missing, also, then the person's browser is likely blocking the download of the webfont that is used for icons.

If there are other icons visible, then the web fonts are not the issue, and I need to investigate further.

I was able to see and use the printer icon on the same computer as this user. The font is not being blocked. I believe it is some kind of permission issue.

Ok, could you provide a screen capture of the problem screen?

You provided a screen capture of the ok screen, which I am already familiar with. I need to see the problem screen.

I have logged in as one of your members assigned as the toastmaster and I am still not seeing an issue. I need to see the screen capture of the problem to make sure I know what I should be looking for.

This seems like an elusive issue. Also, the code is set up such that if the print icon is missing then there should not be a speech intro box there either... the two are shown or hidden as one "unit".

Can you log in as Luke Arneson? He is the one that is having the issue.

Can you log in as Luke Arneson? He is the one that is having the issue.

Great idea!

That helped me solve this mystery.

This problem is the result of a design limitation... no really a true bug, but a weakness in the method used to determine who the Toastmaster is for a particular meeting agenda. Not my design (a prior developer), but an issue that I will need to address with a feature change in the future.

The problem has to do with the text matching that is used to find the role corresponding to the Toastmaster so the identity of the Toastmaster can be determined. Text matching is a weak method for doing this, because no matter what pattern and logic is used for the matching, usually sooner or later somebody will come up with an exception to the pattern matching rule that breaks it. (too many variables to try to match and exclude for)

In this case, you have two roles, Introduction of Toastmaster and Toastmaster, and the code looks for the first occurrence of a role containing Toastmaster, unless you keyword the role (put asterisks around the words that actually identify the role title). In your case, the person assigned to "Introduction of Toastmaster" was being found as the Toastmaster, *not* the role called Toastmaster.

While you may consider this to be a bug, as I note above, I consider it a design flaw that there is not an easy fix for except to redo how the role titles are flagged for internal processing. We have had a number of issues with the text matching approach, and I don't want to keep putting band-aids on a bad approach.

Since this design flaw is not something that is going to get fixed quickly (will take a good bit of work and a feature change-out), I can only offer you a workaround.

For now, the workaround for you is just to put asterisks around the Toastmaster role in your agendas, so that it gets found first as the Toastmaster as opposed to the Introduction of Toastmaster role.

OK, I opted to change the first role to Introduction and keep Toastmaster the same. Sorry it took so much explaining, but it is hard to find out exactly what is causing the issue when I, myself didn't have it. Thanks so much for the answer.