[OJS 3.2.0-3] Section ordering glitch, please help

Over the last few weeks I created a new issue and proceeded just as I had in previous issues. After submitting everything, I reordered the articles within the sections and reordered the sections all from the Table of Contents. All reordering worked except one section will not keep the order I enter. It has one article in that section, but that should not be a problem I wouldn’t think. I go into the issue and move the section where I want it. Then when I click “Done”, I see it save and then I actually watch it revert back to the wrong order immediately before I even exit the popup box for ordering. It puts the section three spots lower than I want it. We just updated to OJS 3.2.0-3, but that did not solve my problem. I am operating as the system admin, so it should not be a permission issue. Additionally, it has let me reorder every other section and article except this one, so it appears there is something wrong with this single section.

Here is what I’ve tried to no avail:

  1. Chrome and IE, but the problem exists in both
  2. Creating a new section and moving the article into the new section and reordering that, but it behaves the same way; the new section will not reorder.
  3. Verified the journal settings for section order, and they are correct. I even tried moving it there to try and affect the setting, but that did not work.
  4. In the table of contents, I tried moving the section to a different spot that is also wrong, just to see if I could get it to move. Well, it moves alright but then it messes up other section orders as well so I reverted back to the “least incorrect” order.
  5. I tried setting the order when it was a future issue and when it was already published, but I have the exact same problem either way.

I’d appreciate any solution so that our sections are properly ordered. We arrange them alphabetically and group the similar sections together, and right now there is one education section in the middle of the engineering sections, which makes no sense.

Thanks!

I’m not sure how it is done in 3.2 (unfortunately I don’t have access to 3.2 at the moment), but in 3.1 there is a table “custom_section_orders” in the database. If you take a look of all the sections which are associated with your issue, you will probably notice that the problematic section isn’t listed. If you add this section in the table, you’ll be able to order it. It’s an issue we have many times. I think it happens if a section was createad after starting the issue. In the old OJS Version (2.X) there was a button to set the sections to the default status which helped, but this workaround is missing in 3.X.

Kind regards
Daniela

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Thanks for the response, Daniela! I had IT do this (since I don’t have access to the back end), and it helped but it didn’t work perfectly. Turns out that in that table you referenced, there were only 8 sections for the issue. However, there are actually 21 in the issue! So I was running into the same problem again because there were 13 sections that weren’t listed in the table. Once we added them and dictated the position, it works perfectly. I imagine I could reorder them on the front end now and the order would stick, but I’m scared to touch it since it works perfectly. Hahahaha. I have no idea why so many sections were missing from that table because none were created new for this issue. In any case, thank you a million for helping!

Sincerely,
Sharon

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Hi all,

There is more recent solution to this issue here (for version 3.3.0-8)

Best,

Dung.