Issues with StoryMaps (Not Saving Edits)

[LauradeCelis]

My name is Laura de Celis, World Geography teacher for American Heritage School (Broward County – FL). I implemented Esri technology a few years ago by having my students create multiple story maps regarding different topics we discuss in class. During these years, I have received lots of positive compliments from my colleagues regarding this tool. It has been a process of creating a trust for the technology not only among my colleagues but also among my students.  All these years, I have not experienced any issues with the technology but recently, I have started to receive a lot of emails from my students notifying me that the platform is not allowing them to save their work. They still have close to one month before they end their semester, which means that most of them are working on their final projects. Most of them (not all are experiencing the issue) are becoming frustrated since every attempt to edit, modify, or save any of their story maps does not work. The attached video was sent to me by one of my students. I am including a video showing this behavior hoping that there is a fix for this.

[OwenGeo]

@LauradeCelis -- I'm very sorry to hear that some students are having issues with their stories. Is it possible to provide a link to a publicly shared story so we can see what the problem might be? I'm not seeing anything abnormal about the autosave process in the video, so we'd need access to the story to try to trouble shoot this issue.

If it's not possible to share a story that has experienced this issue publicly, you can contact Esri Support on the student's behalf and a support analyst will be able to help you further.

[LauradeCelis]

Thanks for the quick response. The video illustrates the workflow most of my students perform when updating their story maps. It consists of copying and pasting their text from Word to the story maps canvas. Then, they usually publish it to see their changes and continue with the next slide. This specific video shows the text the student just pasted into the canvas, then goes to publish, and after publishing, the sections populated with text are gone, they show empty. Here is the link to the Story Map for further assessment:

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/f00732045c8d4ddb8ef783a4bd392dbf

[OwenGeo]

@LauradeCelis - There is a lot of extra mark-up (hidden formatting characters) that Word adds that can sometimes cause issues when text is copied from Word and pasted in a StoryMap. This is something we are already looking into as we know some authors often copy text from Word, but it is a complex problem that doesn't have an easy solution. When possible, we recommend copying from the web version of Word since we have seen more issues copying from the desktop version. 

Thank you for providing the link to the story. We'll take a look to see if we can see any evidence of that issue here.

Also, if you can get a copy of the original Word document from the student that would be extremely helpful as well.

[LauradeCelis]

Can you share your email? I can send you the link to have access to it. It is actually Google Docs, not Word. Sorry for the misunderstanding. 

[OwenGeo]

I just connected with you here on the Esri Community, so you should be able to send me a direct message with the link. Thanks!

[LauradeCelis]

Could not find how to send this privately but here you go… https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BTdh1n_Jgx-PskQXqbfhWxNrtHudC-WzxAmC8SWQbr8/edit

[OwenGeo · Accepted solution]

@LauradeCelis - Please see more information about this issue in this related thread Re: Pasted Bulleted Text from Google Docs Disappea... - Esri Community