What’s With Those Sunday Color Errors
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I got an explanation from Andrews-McMeel about the repeated errors in posting images to GoComics on Sundays. Turns out it’s not a GoComics error but a problem within a much larger corporate context.
The company — which handles an immense number of projects going back many years — has been in the process of a major, multi-year update that involves their content management and workflow systems.
As Chris Waldron, Chief Digital Officer, explains it:
The reason we are having this issue is because we are currently in a position in which we need to run both our old system and our new system in parallel as we migrate millions of assets, hundreds of creators, and dozens of internal staff from one to the other. Running both concurrently has created an unforeseen side effect where the different files we produce for printing are mingling with the digital-only files and getting mixed up via the older autonomous scripts that manage the distribution of the various files.
Obviously, you’d need to be deep inside to see the glitch, which is why it’s taken so long to locate and correct, but Waldron says they feel they’ve isolated the problem and that this past Sunday’s Big Nate problem is likely to be the last.
It does, BTW, explain the mystery of why the single color plate kept appearing, since digital files should contain both black and color images in a single file. The two-plate color and black format would be part of the print version, so that the error was in the system automatically grabbing the print color rather than digital color image.
There are still a few unresolved issues, the main one — in my humble opinion — being why nobody either previewed the Sunday GoComics package before it posted or, at worst, stayed up and viewed it when it updated in the wee hours.
As to why it was only happening to Sunday strips and not during the week, that is probably why it evaded capture for so long.
As Waldron indicated, the entire system contains millions of parts. My suspicion is that there have been other bugs as they deal with this massive update and that the Sunday color issue on GoComics is just the one that we can see.
If he’s right about having corralled the issue, it’s a case of all’s well that ends well.
If not, at least now we know why it was so elusive, and, as a wise man once said, knowing is half the battle.
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