Disappearing reviews -- help!

[Banderson]

We have an OCS instance running version 2.1.2-1. One of the admins just reported that, when he changed the Director Decision to "Revisions Required", all the reviews disappeared. I've done some preliminary investigation, and there are no assigned reviews for this paper in the database. The "Peer Review" section of the "Review" page reads "It's not yet possible to perform this review. Either the abstract review is not yet complete, or the author has not yet provided a paper for review.", and the "Director Decision" dropdown is disabled. I didn't see the page three days ago, so I can't confirm that it was differenct then. The admin says that it was, but I can't find anything in the code that would explain how changing the Director Decision would apparently revert the paper to it's initial status. Does anyone know of a bug in 2.1.2 that might explain this?

Thanks,

Bill Anderson

[Banderson]

Further info: I found a bug (http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4859) that seems to explain part of this problem, but neither it nor the bug it duplicates (http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4913) mentions the disappearing reviews. Is this part of the same issue? Are the reviews recoverable, short of restoring the database from backup?

[jmacgreg]

Hi Banderson,

Apologies for the delay in replying. You're working with an old version of OCS, and my memory is a little foggy -- I can't recall if I've run into something like this before. Have you tried applying the patch listed in bug 4913?

WRT whether the reviews have actually disappeared from the system: again, I don't remember how/whether the OCS 2.1.x DB layout differs from the 2.3.x line, but my suspicion is that nothing has actually been deleted. Additionally, I don't see anything in the [url=http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&list_id=1324&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&longdesc=revisions%20required%20&product=OCS&longdesc_type=allwordssubstrbug database[/url] regarding OCS and "revisions required" that might point to a problem, not to say that something hasn't been overlooked. I would strongly suggest upgrading your system to the most recent version of OCS. Additionally, if you could provide us with your submission method (eg. abstract followed by presentation, etc.) and even a link to your conference, I'd be happy to run a test submission through.

Cheers,
James

[monngon]

Thank you James support !