I have been in touch with admin and I believe they are working on fixing this bug but just thought I would let you know about it.
I have found several of my recent draft listings have been showing up in searches. It is not really too much of a problem except that if people click on the item it says it can’t be found, which is fine as if you have it in drafts its not ready to be found anyway but it might lead to frustration with the site in general if buyers can’t find what they want.
Also beware what pictures you put in a draft listing - I know I often write up my drafts before I have taken photos but in order to save the draft you need to add a photo. I used to put any old random photo there, not necessarily even associated with the listing (could even be one of the dog!), and these would now be visible in the search - I have now created a blank photo with the words “draft listing” on it just to be safe.
In my case I have 2 shops and some items I have for sale in one are in draft listings in the other in case I want to swap which shop I am selling from. This means several of my items are showing in searches twice, once for real and once from the draft. Frustrating if a customer clicks on the wrong one and is told it can’t be found - they may not go back and try the other one.
Thanks for this Roz @Rozcraftz that could lead to frustration for customers. I’ve recently cleaned up my shop, deleting out of date drafts and so on, mostly to try to solve my “the numbers don’t add up” problem, but I never thought that anyone else could see my drafts. I quite often put gibberish in any box that I think might be required, just in case! Oops!
Roz, @Rozcraftz, I feel really silly asking this because it’s probably really simple but I haven’t managed to figure out how you actually save a draft listing. I find I either have to list it or lose it! What do you do to save it as a draft?
When you make a listing you have to go as far as “Preview listing” before navigating away from the page. Just don’t press that final “List it” button! If you close the page before previewing the listing you will lose it. You need to fill in most fields in order to preview it. Hope that makes sense.
Roz
edit: I only discovered how to do it by accident so definitely not a silly question!
I wonder if this problem accounts for a weird thing that just happened when I was viewing the main Folksy Page… I clicked on a listing photo and got a “page can’t be found” message. That was actually in one of the special big “spots” on the main Folksy page, so it could be more of a problem than it first seemed.
May well be the reason - initially it didn’t concern me too much but thinking about it, it could cause a lot of frustration with potential customers who may then go elsewhere.
Hi @Rozcraftz
Thanks very much for telling support about this! They passed it on to me, and I’m looking into it, now.
I’ve been trying to replicate the bug, without much success so far – although I’ve seen the results of it on the site, so I know it’s happening!
Would you be able to give me URLs to the affected items?
And would you be able to let me know when they were created, and what (if anything) else you did with them (like edit and re-save them, or anything you can think of)?
And thanks again for bringing this to our attention,
Doug.
Hi there are quite a few listings in drafts in my new shop Orchard Felts but I am having real trouble getting onto Folksy at the moment. These links are items in my shop Rozcraftz that I put into drafts last night/this morning and are appearing in the searches for "key fobs"
These listings were copied from an existing listing and then the title, description and photos deleted and rewritten and a couple of the tags changed.
I did try and create a test listing yesterday which I couldn’t find in the searches - wonder if its something to do with copying the listings rather than doing them from scratch. I have a couple of older draft listings which also don’t appear in the searches but not sure how I created them as they have been there a while. Hope that helps.
Thanks so much for those, @Rozcraftz – I’ve pushed a fix to stop it happening, and have run a script that should remove any of the existing draft items from the search index.
Thanks very much, again.
Doug.
