We’re trying to troubleshoot an issue where one of our self-hosted networks is no longer being indexed/updated in the Pressbooks directory.
We run two self-hosted Pressbooks networks (BCcampus Open Publishing and British Columbia/Yukon Open Authoring Platform). Both are listed in the Pressbooks directory. However, British Columbia/Yukon Open Authoring Platform (pressbooks.bccampus.ca) hasn’t been updated/re-indexed since January 2025.
We’re hoping the Pressbooks team are able to tell us what’s preventing new books/updates from being indexed, or the community has any advice for troubleshooting directory indexing.
As an example, this book was published in May 2026, is public, CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 licensed, has over 5000 words, and has the ‘Yes. I want this book to be listed in the Pressbooks directory’ option selected, yet is missing in the directory.
It looks like an issue with some exceptionally long book descriptions was preventing the directory from collecting them. I’m going to attempt a manual resync on our end to see if that fixes it, and I’ll keep you posted if anything else needs to be tweaked on your side.
I have performed a full resync of your network, and the data should be appearing in the directory now. I will monitor the ongoing sync process, and if there are any issues, I will contact you here again.
Excellent, thank you for getting that fixed for us so quickly!
So the issue was that some books had descriptions that were too long - is that a bug on the directory end or is there something we should be configuring on our end to prevent this?
On a (somewhat) related note, we have staging environments where we run copies of our Pressbooks networks. Would that interfere/confuse the directory and if so, is there a configuration or wp-config constant we can use to disable contributing to the directory network-wide for the non-prod environments?
Our directory seems to be working fine with your network now, so no further action is required. If you notice any issues, please let us know.
As for network exclusions, we only collect data from registered production networks. Unregistered networks will not be added to the directory, even if they are publicly available. For more details on how to exclude books on a registered network, please visit Pressbooks Guide.
Perfect, thank you for all your help. It looks like the all of our books are getting into the directory now. We’ll keep an eye on it and let you know if it crops up again.