Folksy improvements & issues - Mon 1 Nov 2021

Folksy Site Issues
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We’ve been making some major updates to Folksy recently and wanted to let you know what we’ve been doing and why you might have been seeing some errors.

As part of our focus on improving the buyer experience for buyers:

  • we have just launched a new dedicated Christmas page at Folksy Christmas on Folksy
  • we’re redesigning the item pages
  • we’re working on a better search experience

To make these changes possible, we need to make some significant changes to Folksy’s full system. As a result, we have seen a few issues in the past couple of weeks:

Search

‘Shop Search’ was broken for a while on Thursday night. This was a bug caused by an update to our search libraries that we hunted down and fixed as quickly as possible.

‘Item Search’ has also been affected. We will be making updates to the search strategy to give more refined results but, in the meantime, when a user searches for an item they will be shown many more results than usual, with the most relevant items still appearing first.

Homepage

Some people experienced issues on the homepage this weekend, particularly those browsing on (possibly older) phones. We think this is because there have been changes to Folksy’s assets (such as images and styles) that older devices haven’t picked up.

In this situation we’d advise people to clear their browser caches for Folksy.

We tested the changes pushed last week on a selection of modern browsers on phones and desktops before deploying them, but when making any changes at this scale there are always edge cases that are difficult to check. However, we will be looking into identifying which devices/browsers were struggling and potentially finding a way to include them in future tests for significant releases.

Log-in

Earlier today (Monday 1 Nov), we had a 10-minute window when people were unable to sign in. This was due to a bug in a low-level change that we were unable to identify until it went live. We rolled back the changes as soon as we spotted the issue.

Further updates

We are continuing to push low-level updates this week. While we are constantly monitoring site performance, please email our support team at support@folksy.co.uk if you spot any serious issues (eg broken pages) and mark the ticket as ‘urgent’.

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Camilla
I see that New Shops list has Gone from the front page. How are those of us who do regular monitoring on there for you of rogue new shops to find them so we can report them to you ?
For anyone else who missed this before feature disappeared and didn’t save the URL, Sasha has very kindly given it to me via on the FB group :
https://folksy.com/new-sellers

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Hi Joy, would it help to bookmark this page Folksy - Newest Sellers on Folksy?
We removed the new sellers based on feedback from sellers who felt the rogue shops that didn’t meet our terms and conditions were too visible on the site and potentially damaging our reputation. It’s a shame though, as we want to give genuine new sellers a chance to be seen and the new sellers view helped boost their visibility. So we’re going to be reviewing the process around new shops in the New Year.

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Hi Camilla - could you let me know whereabouts I’d find the new dedicated Christmas page? :slight_smile:

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Thanks Camilla Yes I do understand … there was some very dodgy lingerie hanging about last week for starters… didn’t give a good impression :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Hopefully you can add a new shop vetting step so they get stopped before they start as it were.
Sasha kindly gave me a link and I now have it safely on my front page… I often browse it, not to catch the naughty shops but to see what lovelies I can spot…
Joy xx

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Yes of course, sorry Sarah. It’s here - https://folksy.com/christmas

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Will you be asking for contributions for the Sustainable Gifts category like you have for plastic-free cards? Or is there something I can do to have my products considered for inclusion?

Thanks

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There’s a new shop selling ‘handmade’ leather men’s shoes. Didn’t take long to track down the American website they are sold on as a mass produced product, This really makes me sick for those of us who try so hard to make and design our own creations. So, it’s good to have the new shops link.

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Thanks for letting us know what’s going on behind the scenes. Love the Christmas page!

Can you just clarify the criteria for your “secret santa” selection please? About 1 in 3 of the items on the secret santa ideas page are over £10, but at the top is a big red button marked “see more gift ideas under £10” Is price relevant or not? Or tags? Or is it just a personal selection?

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Must admit I wondered the same as there lots of cases of multiple similar items from the same shop so can’t work out how things have been selected for inclusion in the various categories. ??

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@VioletFlameGlassArt Yes I saw those, but wasn’t sure whether they were genuinely hand made or not, so didn’t report. I think you deserve the Folksy Miss Marple badge for this week’s detective work!

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To be included on the Folksy Christmas page, are there any specific tags we should use?

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If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s sniffing out fakes. These particular items are made in a factory in Pakistan so not even UK made!

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Yes! Here you go - Eco-friendly, sustainable Christmas Gifts - suggestions please!

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AND … and I have given the link… they are for sale in an Ebay shop with thousands of listings .Made me laugh when I found it as I knew there was something fishy but couldnt at first put my finger on it.
:rofl: :rofl:

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Thank you :grin:

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Hello! I’ve been struggling to have access to some sections of my Folksy Shop.
I’ve got a sale yesterday (yay!) But the page doesn’t allow me to go to that section and get the address or give them any update about delivery day. I get a message saying: we are broken. Same with a couple more sections. Some of them work, some of them don’t.
Is anyone else experiencing something similar?
I’m just a bit stress about the sale as I would like to do it asap but Folksy doesn’t seem to work :confused:
so I can’t print the receipt and things like that.

Is this going to be fixed any time soon?
Hope yes :slight_smile:
Thanks!!

Elena (Samai Handmade)

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I’m having the same trouble this morning.

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Hi Elena. I’ve spoken to Doug about this and he’s going to investigate to see what’s going wrong but in the meantime we will email you the order details.

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I’m having issues with the site today too. Got kicked out a few times whilst trying to do a listing then couldn’t log back in. Taking me three times as long just to list one item. I’m afraid I only have an oldiPhone SE 1st gen so I hope I’m going to be able to continue to use the site after the improvements. Going to give it another try but thought I’d check to see if it was just me.