Intermittent StoryMap Publishing Error

[SaraJL]

Hello everyone!

On StoryMaps (either newly published ones or re-publishing) we are occasionally getting this message:

I have done some troubleshooting and have been unable to pinpoint way this message appears.

• It happens on either regular users or admin
• Clearing out the browser cache sometimes helps, but then it will sometimes come back (we normally use Chrome)
• The project is only open in one tab
• It's not any one particular StoryMap or group of StoryMaps that has the error

Occasionally when it shows up, I just refresh the screen and then it will publish. On rare occasions, even if it auto-saves, sometimes if I refresh it I may lose a couple of edits. 

Does anyone know what might cause this message? It's getting a little difficult to diagnose - and I'm not entirely sure what to tell tech support in a ticket just because I can get it to consistantly appear. I don't really care if it happens to my projects, but students are experiencing some frustration with it on their final projects, so I just trying to find an easy solution to try and avoid it.

Any advice is appreciated!

[SaraJL]

I just want to report that we are seeing this again with StoryMaps! I'm not able to figure out the exact cause. 

If anyone has seen this before and knows of what was causing it or if there was a way to fix it, any advise is welcome.

Thank you!

[OwenGeo]

@SaraJL - I'm sorry you are seeing this error again.

In your screenshot, what is that large grey area? It looks like perhaps an image or video did not finish uploading before publishing? 

[SaraJL]

@OwenGeo That top portion is the cover area at the top of the StoryMap! Sorry it's a bit of a tiny image (I was trying to cut out some of the detail because it was a screenshot that a student sent me and I didn't want to have any identifying information for the user in it) This might be a little better screenshot:

This was an individual project (so multiple people are not editing it) - but my hunch is that the project was open in editor mode in multiple tabs on the same browser. I'm doing a bit of troubleshooting to see if I can trigger this with a tester StoryMap, but I've had a couple of projects where sometimes people do this and it struggles a bit with saving. It doesn't happen all the time, so I'm not 100% sure if that is the case, it's just a hunch.

I hope that makes sense! Let me know if you need any more info.

Thank you for the help!

[OwenGeo]

The grey area indicates that the author attempted to add media to the cover but it failed to upload. Can you try having them delete the cover media and try again (or add a different image)? That can sometimes cause the publishing error to appear.

[SaraJL · Accepted solution]

@OwenGeo I just wanted to let you know that I figured out what was causing the issue!

I had the student send me the photo they were trying to upload - looking at the properties, the photo has the correct file size and pixel size - however, they were trying to upload it while the picture was in HEIC format (that high-res file format iOS uses on smartphones). 

I deleted the original cover picture from their project, converted it to PNG, and then it worked just fine!

I just wanted to let you know!

[OwenGeo]

Great sleuthing!!! We do support HEIC format images, so we will look into this to see if we can repro the issue on our side.