Delete file save notes in tracking software..........

Thats what I ended up having to do after untold problems with the xml file was driving me totally nuts so just gave up on the whole idea of saving it,cure one problem only to create two new ones.

Not stars best ever idea imo........

Some "ASCII only" player names were also mangled in the initial rollout from Notes.TXT to Notes.XML.

If you had a note on a player with a quote (") or with an apostrophe (') in the name, it is mangled in Notes.XML.

Since the latest fix by Pokerstars, these names do get created correctly from Notes.TXT to Notes.XML So if you have not deleted your Notes.XML file since they came out with their fix on Feb 9, your older notes on those players are gone.

For example, I have the following player in my Notes.TXT from Dec 23:

Mr"T"1942

On January 8 I saved a copy of my corrupted Notes.XML. In it I found:

Mr\

I also had the following player in Notes.TXT:

'59PBass

And on January 8 it was:

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'59PBass

I think each "\" was prepended to the name each day that I shut down the Pokerstars client.

I also had (with the quotes in the name):

"CAJUN BEAT"

That name and it's note were not found at all in my January 8 Notes.XML. I think it was because of the following name from Notes.TXT:

"seemorenuts

In Notes.XML on January 8 it appears as the single character:

\

Any name with a quote was truncated at the point of the quote, and was replaced by "\".

Any name with an apostrophe had a "\" prepended to it and then had additional "\"s prepended later.

Up until January 8, the following characters were converted in both names and the notes:

< === &lt
> === &gt
& === &amp

Up until January 8, the following character was converted in only the notes:

" === &quote

And the following character was not converted in either names or notes:

' === &apos

NOTES MISSING WHY?
The xml file was renamed and then just deleted. Pokerstars was unitstalled and then reinstalled.

NO NEW NOTES ARE BEING SAVED!!!
NO NEW NOTES ARE BEING SAVED!!!
NO NEW NOTES ARE BEING SAVED!!!
NO NEW NOTES ARE BEING SAVED!!!
NO NEW NOTES ARE BEING SAVED!!!


Sorry for the bolded I have seen this asked at least 10 times and no one has answered if there is a solution.
All answers so far are for the lag issue related to the renaming of the xml file. This problem is different.
Any ideas on this problem?

Ok I saw in another forum to delete pokerstars folder also. So after I uninstalled pokerstars I manually went to my computer drive c program files and pokerstars and right click delete the pokerstars folder. Reinstalled stars and now it seems to save notes fine. Too bad all my recent notes are gone. Whatever.

None of my notes were saved last night either.

Well now mine updated. I think the client just doesn't have time to clean up or something when I shut down my computer and let it shut down PS, rather than close the client manually.

Lost a lot of notes last night.

I back my notes.xml file at the end of every session. Only safe way.

I'm not sure that would matter in my case. I'm guessing that the client keeps all the notes for that session in some kind of log or cache, then writes them to notes.xml when it's closed. But when Vista closes the PS client to shut down the computer, it doesn't get time to go it's cleanup (guessing all this). So I'm not sure backing up the notes file would help.

^^^Could you not just close the Stars client, wait a few moments, then close the computer down? (Serious question)

Yes of course. Just sometimes I forget to do that.

While trying to fix my Notes.XML I've found a name with the ASCII character:



Ok, that probably is displayed as an empty box. It is the ASCII character "DLE" which has the value 16 (0x10 in hex). This is one of the first 32 "control" characters in the ASCII table. I don't think there is a way for me to press a key (or series of keys) to enter that character into an edit box.

The name of the player in Notes.XML is:

pi�o

The more unusual aspect of this name is how it appears in my Hand History (HH) file. The name there is displayed as:

pičo

And even more interesting is that every hand with that player has the DLE character at the start of the hand history text (before the name "PokerStars") and not in front of the player's name:

PokerStars Game #25606451844: Tournament #144057362, $10+$1 Hold'em No Limit - Level XVI (375/750) - 2009/03/04 17:02:50 CT [2009/03/04 18:02:50 ET]
Table '144057362 141' 9-max Seat #2 is the button
Seat 1: Morrissey81 (22160 in chips)
Seat 2: pičo (11856 in chips)

This is the only player name in my Notes.TXT that has this character. It is the only name that has an ASCII character with a value less than 32 (0x20) out of the 70,000 names in Notes.TXT.

Strange, I can't request this hand history from Stars to see how they stored it. Do they not let you request individual hands from a long time ago?

I"d contact Stars to see if this issue is an ongoing concern for new hand histories.

Ok this worked until I restarted stars then it was mkssing notes again. It seems that stars usually saves the notes from the day before but then the next day the notes from 2 days ago are missing but the 1 day before notes are there. Then the next day I might have the last 2 notes from the day before but the other notes are gone.

I have been in contact with pokerstars for almost all of february and they are not helping. Usually it takes a week then they email requesting more information, why they didnt ask originally I have no idea. After I send the info they email 2 days later saying the problem is fixed with the update. I find it is not fixed. I email again they email back asking for a copy of my current notes file which of course only contains 2 notes since it doesnt save all my notes. Then they email back saying they have repaired my notes file and I can reimport it to pokerstars...LOL. ITS NOT THE NOTES FILE. THANKS A LOT FOR REPAIRING MY 2 NOTES i AM SURE IT TOOK A LOOONG TIME AT LEAST THE WEEK I WAITED TO RECEIVE THE FILE.

Notes still not saving.
When I start pokerstars I open my settings folder and notes file is there. But after taking a few notes and playing a while, the notes arfe still displayed when I click on the players note tag but the notes folder is no longer visible in the my settings folder. Then I restart pokerstars and boom the notes folder is visible again and it saved all my notes
i just took. SWEET. WAIT WTF............ After going to bed I restart my computer the next day and notes folder is visible but no notes were saved. Or maybe one or 2 notes were saved but never all. So I am saving my notes file every night now with word but the next day I try to copy and paste to the client or click options player notes management and import the notes back to stars but its not an xml doc so it will not import the notes. But I can copy and paste the notes so good. I open stars and see the 2 notes that were saved from the night before are displaying a notes tag on the appropriate player. But the other 30 notes I just imported by copy and paste, none of these shows up with a tag on the player. So the notes are in the pokerstars notes folder but they are not being displayed anywhere. So I restart pokerstars and the noted I just imported are gone but the 2 from the previous day are there.

POKERSTARS SUPPORT???? Prolly not.

Any fix for the notes disappearing?

No word yet. I just noticed my first email to pokerstars was actually late january. Eight emails later still nothing. My notes on my desktop computer which runs windows XP works fine. My laptop with vista pro is the one with the problems with notes disappearing. Saving notes before I shutdown the computer and pasting them to the notes folder the next is not working. The notes dont display a tag on the player. Of course I explained in a TLDR post above but still no luck fixing this.

how big should a non-corrupted notes.xml be ?

mine appears to be non corrupted, yet stars seems to be eating all my memory anyway.

Couple hundred KBs imo.

Is there a way to edit my notes.xml file without Stars losing it completely?

I want to change all the color indicators of one class of people to another. (Make all orange tags, red.) I see the index=7 thing, and tried changing them all in notepad with index=6, but when I save it and reload Stars there are no notes on anyone anymore. (Backup ftw ofc ) I then tried just changing one note on one person (changed the word the to teh) and same thing, once I restart Stars all my notes are gone again. It seems me editing the .xml file with notepad changes something that makes the file no longer able to be read by Stars. So is there a way to do this?

Thanks for any help!

Try editing with XML Notepad?

Make sure Stars is closed when you edit. When you close Stars it rewrites the XML file and you lose any outside changes.

Tried it, still the same problem. It doesn't seem to like any changes I make. Grrr.

Thanks for the replies tho.

You can edit the color of the notes through the software itself.

Just go to options>player notes management>player notes label.

Awesome, that werks. Thanks ogabay!

No problem.

how much attention would there be for a player-note service that either merges notes.username.xml files, changes color, exports a list of player names or imports a list of names into the .xml?