With the new bookmark system being live, I suddenly and without warning found myself unable to create new bookmarks. The reason: One of my bookmark folders had over 6000 bookmarks. The maximum number of bookmarks per (top-level!) folder is 3000.
There is now also a limit on the number of top-level folders, which is 5 (never mind “offline folders” - they are practically useless), so you are now limited to a total of 15000 bookmarks.
So I was forced to reorganize my bookmarks so they would fit into 5 folders of no more than 3000 each, which was quite annoying already, as it doesn’t fit at all with the system of bookmark folders that I have been using. But wait, it gets better:
When I copied half (according to the scrollbar) of my 6000 safes to a new folder, the number of bookmarks in the new folder showed up as 1911. “Just a glitch”, I thought, then quickly sorted the bookmarks by date and checked the top and bottom bookmark in the original and new folder. They matched. I then copied the other “half” into another folder, which then showed up as having 1537 bookmarks (the number seems to be random).
My math skills may be getting rusty over the years, but 1911 + 1537 is definitely nowhere near 6000. Another glitch?
I then deleted what I believed to be the first half of the bookmarks from the original folder - the ones I had moved to the first new folder. As expected, the number of bookmarks in the original folder dropped by about 3000. Good. Or not good. Apparently, deleting works, whereas copying works maybe.
Or does deleting actually work? I checked the original folder again, still sorted by date, and it turned out that all my bookmarks from 2007 (which I allegedly had just deleted) were still there!
Managing bookmarks is ■■■■■■ up beyond all recognition. Did anyone with more than a handful of bookmarks actually test this on sisi? How did this pass QA? How hard can it be to manage a few thousand items in a hierarchical data structure? It’s not exactly “big data”. And if there IS a limit to how many bookmarks you can delete or copy at once, why doesn’t it fail consistently and gracefully, with an error message?
CCP must be aware of this fuckup, as it is actually mentioned in the patch notes:
If you are one of the fearless 102 cartographers with over 20,000 saved locations, you will need to exert caution in your winter location cleaning routine as the folders and subfolders you see might contain more locations than at first may appear.
However, this information is also useless, because it doesn’t specify what “caution” one has to exercise.
(I also never had a “location cleaning routine” - it was never necessary)
Right now, I don’t know the state of my bookmarks. I don’t know which ones I have copied to the new folders, which ones I have deleted, and which ones I still need to copy, and how I can do this reliably. Basically, I have to consider most of my bookmarks lost. Most of them are redundant safe spots, so losing them is not a disaster. However, one of my 5 allowed online folders is still broken due to bookmarks I cannot delete or back up, and I am disappointed by how sloppy CCP has handled the fact that their new bookmark system simply isn’t able to handle the amount of existing bookmark data.