Posts made by Ardony

After posting the above, I did manage (with some difficulty) to recover my pinboards by searching for "pinboard" in favourites. That said, now I have to leave each in an open tab, because the toolbar pinboard icons no longer function properly, so I fear being unable to retrieve them again. Not what you could reasonably call "robust".

Despite my (much earlier) post in this thread, the combination of Opera's blocker and AdBlock is still working pretty well on my Win 7 PC. However, if I'm loading a lot of YT music "videos", after a time the ads manage to get through, but closing Opera (without deleting cookies) and restarting it gets everything working again.

If YT charged a reasonable amount for Premium, as they do for some jurisdictions I'd pay for it, but I'm not paying the greedy beggars more than $25 per month regardless of how little I might use it.

Yes, I have seen, it thanks—a couple of years ago from memory (noted that, unhelpfully, posts on the forum do not have a time stamp). It's no more use now than it was then. I mean, what's the use of a "hidden file in bookmarks"? Why hidden? This is about as helpful as a parachute that opens after the first bounce.

If indeed you believe pinboards are stored on the user's device, as you appear to suggest, please tell us where.

Oh, also noted are the references to using Sync as a form of backup. Great idea, if only sync would work, but it refuses to. I posted about that a couple of months ago but no-one bothered to respond.

I wonder how many users have given up, exasperated with Opera because the marvellous features it offers, eg. pinboards and sync, are buggy, fragile, and time-wasting when the you have to spend hours trying to work around the flaws, to say nothing of the hours spent setting up pinboards only to have them wasted when they are arbitrarily deleted for no reason. These issues should have been dealt with years ago.

They are only links to Opera servers, because the links start with

https://pinboard.opera.com/view/1

So no amount of backing up will enable the uiser to restore the actual pinboard if some miserable beggar with access to the server decides to delete what the link refers to. or if an error of some kind either breaks the links or corrupts or deletes the p[inboard.

Despite treading on eggshells to avoid pinboards their disappearing, two of my five have vanished . I get a message to say they "were deleted". Well, certainly not by me.

The whole problem could be so easily overcome if they were stored on the user's computer instead of on Opera servers and only accessible via a link that's so easily broken. How hard could that be? Cookies are stored on the user's device, so why not do this with pinboards, then none of these stupid irritations would occur.

I would be very grateful if someone could advise me why, whenever I use my 'phone to scan the QR code on the PC it just takes me back to the "Let's get started with your email" page when I'm already signed in to my Opera account on both devices.

It has worked properly only once, but ever since has misbehaved as above.

I've signed in a dozen times but this just keeps happening every time instead of getting the page to check the codes match.

Windows PC and Samsung A06.
Thanks.

Hullo.
I had similar pinboard issues a year or two ago. You might be able to find the thread I started at the time, but eventually I gave up because someone who replied turned out to be rather perverse and unhelpful, so I gave up.

What I did learn is that pinboards are stored in the "bookmarks" file. On my ancient Win7 PC this is located at:

C:\Users\Playtech\AppData\Roaming\Opera Software\Opera Stable

This file seems to back itself up to bookmarks.bak in the same location, though my attempts to restore pinboards at that time were unsuccessful (like yourself, I'm just a button-pusher with no technical aptitude). However, both files are included in my daily backup routine.

The other thing I learned is that if Opera is set to delete cookies on exit it will also delete your pinboards. How stupid is that? Consequently i never delete cookies and they just accumulate—probably in the thousands now, and there's no way I can see to select which to delete and which to retain.

It's a crying shame that such a useful feature should be so vulnerable to unintended deletion without warning. Even after all this time pinboards are still shown as "beta", and it appears nothing has been or is being done to rectify the issue and make it more robust. This reminds me of the old English proverb about "spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar".

Sorry I can't be of more help. It would be good if someone who really understands these issues would contribute to the discussion.

I've been using Adblock Plus in addition to the integral Opera ad blocker. I'm not sure which is doing what, but when an ad appears at the start of a YT video I've found that pressing F5 gets rid of it, and none appear while playing. Using an elderly desktop PC.

I might be more sympathetic to Google/YT's pleas for revenue if they weren't such rampant, unapologetic tax evaders.

A few weeks ago YT started nagging me to turn off Opera's ad blocker. Naturally I ignored it, but now they appear to have found a means to disable or circumvent the ad blocker, so I'm back to being constantly bombarded with mindless, time-wasting, repetitive ads.

Anyone else having this problem? More importantly, is there a way to overcome it? Other than coughing up the subscription, of course. And yes, the ad blocking is still turned on in Settings.

Thanks.

@leocg I hesitate to get bogged down in semantics, but the following sentence, "We're... determined to fix this" clearly contradicts your "working as designed" assertion.

@leocg Sorry, I really can't accept that. In the thread you referred me to above, on the same topic, two years ago the Opera representative @kmielczarczyk says:
"We should do better. We're looking into this issue and are determined to fix this."

The pinboards header still shows "beta" (if you know where to look and use a magnifying glass).

As for using sync, to quote my original post:
"I disabled sync after attempts to sync my Android phone to the PC resulted in many hundreds of bookmarks on the PC being wiped and replaced by the few older ones on the phone."

Now I can't even get sync to work at all, and as often as not can't even access my Opera account because it throws a tantrum ("Sorry, an error occurred") when I enter my email address correctly. After scanning the QR code (having backed up bookmrks) there is no field to enter the numeric code from the phone and I get another unhelpful error message.

All this would be brilliant if it worked properly, but why does it have to be so difficult? Especially for those of us who struggle with all this confusing stuff?

@leocg Thanks, but two years later this still hasn't been fixed and is still catching out mugs like me who don't notice the tiny word "beta". That's disgraceful. And still no warning of this serious flaw despite so many complaints? I shouldn't have thought that would require much time or effort.

Talk about spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar. Destroying the credibility of an otherwise excellent product in this way and creating such a nightmare for users' is just plain stupid.

Still, thanks again for your help. And is there any way to recover the lost pinboards? I still have the bookmark.bak file from before this disaster occurred, but renaming it and restarting the browser has not restored the lost pinboards.

@leocg Is this what you mean by "cleaning sites' data on exit"?

Settings:
"Clear cookies and site data when you quit Opera"

Found this in the settings and it is switched on.

Really appreciate your help with this.

@leocg Yes, as far as I'm aware. What else might you expect?

I'd only started using pinboards a couple of days prior. Thought it a brilliant idea, created 5 or 6, and put several open tabs in each to clear the clutter of so many open tabs, now the whole lot's been obliterated.

@leocg Sorry to contradict, but that's exactly what happened. I don't even know how to "clean" sites. I simply closed Opera and all other programmes for routine PC maintenance. So far I've wasted an entire evening and morning trying to recover them.

The instructions for pinboards do not warn that they will be arbitrarily deleted when Opera is closed. Consequently I've lost a lot of essential links to web pages I'd previously kept as individual tabs.

The only useful thread I've found on this topic suggests they could be recoverable from synced data. However, I disabled sync after attempts to sync my Android phone to the PC resulted in many hundreds of bookmarks on the PC being wiped and replaced by the few older ones on the phone.

I'd be very grateful to anyone who can suggest how to overcome these issues.

@leocg What do you mean by "clean data"? How?

Couldn't agree more. I have that trouble (tinkering for the sake of it) with Thunderbird, so tend not to update if I can help it. Ditto FF—still keep an ancient version (56) for a single purpose, because updating makes a mess of Roboform that I'm not clever enough to resolve. Cheers from NZ.

Thanks ledsalesoz. A small comfort to learn that I'm not the only one with this maddening issue. As you say, why would any sync software overwrite newer files with older? On that basis, it seems likely that deleting all the phone bookmarks would simply result in all the PC bookmarks being wiped. I've wasted too much time repeatedly restoring the PC bookmarks, and I'm really not adept at this sort of thing.

Such a shame they can't (or won't) get this right. It's brilliant when it works, but a nightmare otherwise. Seems like a case of spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar.

When I first installed Opera I had no trouble syncing my Android phone to the PC. At some stage it stopped working, and now when I try to sync via the QR code it copies the old bookmarks from the phone and overwrites the newer ones on the PC, when I want to do the opposite. This is driving me mad. Is it possible to force it to sync from the computer to the phone? Would deleting all bookmarks on the phone do it?
Thanks!