Several readers mentioned that the last edition of Brigada arrived as if it were an empty email. However, upon closer examination, the text was there, it was just turned “white” or invisible. Thousands of other recipients received the edition just fine, however. So we’re still looking for the common thread. (If you can solve the case, you’ll receive our “Hardy Boys Hero” or “Nancy Drew Mystery-solver” award.) Seriously, if you discover what happened, please let us know. We subscribe too — and our own copies looked normal. In the meantime, don’t forget, if you ever have any problems with an issue of Brigada Today, the entire history of every edition is archived at…
In fact, the editions always appear at Brigada.org before minutes they are emailed.
Find out from as many readers as possible what operating system they are using, what kind of device (tablet, laptop, desktop, smartphone) and what browser or e-mail client they are using (depending on whether they use a web based email system or have a client loaded directly on their device). Find this out for as many users as possible including those who are having trouble and those who are not.
The common thread will probably become pretty obvious pretty quick. Once that happens, the solution may be equally obvious!
I’ll go first, 2012 vintage iMac and iPhone 5S, both using the latest versions of the Apple Mail client and OS. I am having no problems.
I had to chuckle at J Kanner’s comment about his “2012 vintage iMac”. If his is vintage, mine must be ancient: early 2011 MacBook Pro, OS 10.9.4, 8GB RAM, Apple Mail 7.3, html version of Brigada.
I assume that the issue that had the problem was the 29-June-2014 issue (see below for a suggestion). Actually, I didn’t have the white text problem, but the formatting of the newsletter was very strange — article headings were in the same font/size as the articles, some formatting code was visible in the e-mail, lines didn’t wrap to fit the window size. Odd.
SUGGESTION — (totally unrelated to this particular issue except that it made it difficult to figure out which issue had messed up). Several years ago, you struggled with being late in sending out issues. That’s not been solved (and this is not a complaint about that by any stretch of the imagination). My suggestion is for you not to worry about being late, but date the issue the same date that you send it out. This problematic issue was sent on 7 July, yet it was dated 2014/06/29. Since the article didn’t give the date of the messed up issue, only “…the last edition….”, it really made it difficult to know which edition you were referencing.
Hi Bob. Thanks for the suggestion. We have today’s edition ready to go out today. We’ll try to do better.