Troubleshooting

The following is to provide some of the frequently asked questions our Hugo Help and Hugo Packet team get. Since our team is spread across several time zones, we wanted to provide some basic troubleshooting you can do on your own and some templates for information to provide the team with.

Logging In

I don’t see the “Login to Vote” button in ConTroll
First, look in the membership portal and verify that you have a Seattle Worldcon 2025 WSFS membership. If this is missing and you did purchase one, contact registration@seattlein2025.org to see what might have happened.
I got to the Voting Portal, but it says that voting is closed.
Verify that the membership that you have is a “Seattle Worldcon 2025 WSFS Membership”. If you were a Glasgow nominating member, you would still be able to navigate to the voting portal, but it would still show closed.

If you recently purchased the membership, but had already logged into the voting portal, log out of the voting portal. Try clearing your browsing history and cache. After doing that, try logging back in. If the issue still persists, contact hugo-help@seattlein2025.org and provide your Seattle membership number (begins with 10), email address, and name. Advise that you have purchased a membership. Our team will take a look to see what might be occurring.

Voting

I clicked “email my voting record” and I didn’t get the email
First, double check your spam box and things like the “promotions” tab. Sometimes it may sneak into there even though other emails from Seattle Worldcon 2025 do not.

If it isn’t there, verify that you have added *@seattlein2025.org to be whitelisted.

If all of that has been done and you still aren’t getting the email, please contact us.

Note: If you log out of the voting page and log back in and see your choices, that does mean your selections have been saved. We certainly understand the comfort that the email provides you though, so do not hesitate to reach out.

Hugo Packet

How do I download a big file?
Sometimes when you try to download a large file, your connection gets lost partway through.

Unfortunately, there is no good general solution to that problem. Try downloading again. If possible, download while you’re somewhere with a relatively fast internet connection and a good signal.

If you’re using a wireless connection, sometimes moving your computer closer to your router can make the download faster.

If you’ve tried various approaches and they haven’t worked, you can let us know, but we may not be able to help you.

After I download, how do I do things with the files in Windows?
When you download Packet material, you receive it in the form of what’s called a “zip file.” Windows lets you see the folders and files that are inside a zip file, in a way that makes it look like those folders and files are completely available for you to use. But it turns out that before you can do certain things with them, you have to extract them from the zip file. To do that, right-click the zip file in File Explorer, and choose Extract All.
How do I open a zip file?
There are tools to open zip files built into most operating systems these days. For example:

  • Mac: Double-click the zip file in the Finder. (On a Mac, don’t use the unzip command on the command line.)
  • Windows: Right-click the zip file in File Explorer, and choose Extract All.
  • UNIXlike systems: Run the unzip command on the command line.

There are also free third-party tools on most computer platforms that can open zip files; to find some of them, you can do a web search with phrases like [open zip files].

When I open something in a zip file in Windows, I get a “destination path is too long” error message
First, unzip the zip file (right-click the zip file in File Explorer, and choose Extract All), rather than trying to open the file from within the zip file.

After doing that, if you still get this error message, then move the zip file up to a higher level in your folder hierarchy before unzipping.

Under some circumstances, Windows won’t allow any file that has a full “path” that’s longer than 260 characters, including the lengths of all of the folder names in the folder hierarchy, and including the length of the filename.

How do I transfer files to my Kindle device or Kindle software?
Use Amazon’s Send to Kindle web page or app.
An ePub file looks bad in my ebook reader
Unfortunately, different ebook readers sometimes display files very differently. If possible, try opening the file in different ebook-reading software.

If you’ve tried various approaches and they haven’t worked, you can let us know, but we may not be able to help you.