Missing page mystery
Sun, Oct 31 2010, 9:22PM
On http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/general-discussion it says
Welcome to the new Gramophone Forum
and that the 'Last Reply' wasby juliawaq
6 hours 3 min ago (as of the the time of posting this, of course).But if you click on the '4', you end up at http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/general-discussion/welcome-to-the-new-gramophone-forum?page=3ie, page 3 There's no p.4 listed in the navigation links at the bottom of the page, which are « first ‹ previous 1 2 3and the last post was on Sat, May 8 2010.
Sun, Oct 31 2010, 11:58PM
#2
RE: Missing page mystery
Long story - how long've you got?
Ah, one of those :-)
Would it also explain the awful formatting of my post - which looked ok when I wrote it, honest - and the fact that it didn't actually appear to exist after I had posted it?
Mon, Nov 1 2010, 11:43AM
#3
RE: Missing page mystery
The formatting I can't explain (since it looks OK to me right now), unless you wrote it in Word (or similar) and copied and pasted, which is a recipe for HTML disaster.
As for it not appearing in the list immediately, you're correct. The forum landing page and the forum lists themselves are actually constructed and reconstructed on a scheduled basis, rather than in real time, so any new post won't appear on any of those pages until that scheduled job is run. I can't remember how often OTTOMH, but I think it's every two minutes. This mechanism was to get round some fairly awful performance problems we were having in the early days, and was rustled up by me in about 20 minutes.
As a result (ie me making it up in a panic as I went along), a couple of use cases were basically missed out - the main one being if the last post of a thread is deleted for any reason (spam being the most likely). Therefore, that spurious missing post is one which has been deleted (I presume, since I didn't do it), but is not being cleared out of the table which feeds those landing pages. If I added a reply to that thread now, it would go away.
It's on our list of defects, but isn't quite top priority just yet - though it will be in the next week or so.
Mon, Nov 1 2010, 11:57AM
#4
RE: Missing page mystery
Actually, I've just noticed that you're also asking about page numbering. The URLs for paged threads are actually one askew (by design) - so the first page has no page number, the second page is page 1, etc. Not the way I'd have done it, but it's out-of-the-box functionality and it's not enough of a big deal to change, IMO.
Mon, Nov 1 2010, 12:51PM
#5
RE: Missing page mystery
Further, I've updated the offending thread so it's back where it should be.
Mon, Nov 1 2010, 1:43PM
#6
RE: Missing page mystery
The formatting I can't explain (since it looks OK to me right now), unless you wrote it in Word (or similar) and copied and pasted, which is a recipe for HTML disaster.
The formatting problem was that some line breaks and spaces weren't preserved - what I typed in the edit window differed when it was previewed, and differed again when actually posted, with some line breaks completely ignored/removed. My 'original' post was much more 'structured'.
It's happened in more than one post recently. (I've tried in both IE and Chrome, in case it's a browse issue - but it doesn't seem to be.)
And I compose directly in the edit window, for exactly the reason you mention :-)
Mon, Nov 1 2010, 2:00PM
#7
RE: Missing page mystery
Actually, I've just noticed that you're also asking about page numbering. The URLs for paged threads are actually one askew (by design) - so the first page has no page number, the second page is page 1, etc. Not the way I'd have done it, but it's out-of-the-box functionality and it's not enough of a big deal to change, IMO.
The problem isn't that the page number in the url differs from the 'real' page number (that's the 'fault' of whoever wrote the software) - it's that the forum contents page says there are 4 pages in the thread -
Welcome to the new Gramophone Forum
but there are only actually 3 pages in it - ie,
http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/general-discussion/welcome-to-the-new-gramophone-forum?page=2
is the last page in the thread.There's no "...?page=3" - ie, real page 4. (If you actually go to http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/general-discussion/welcome-to-the-new-gramophone-forum?page=3 you actually get the content of "...?page=2" )
Mon, Nov 1 2010, 2:18PM
#8
RE: Missing page mystery
OK, I see it now. Not quite as big an issue as the spurious latest post being shown, but I'll add it to the list.
Thu, Nov 4 2010, 3:00PM
#9
RE: Missing page mystery
Currently on
http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/audio-and-video-equipment
The The FM switch-off? thread shows the Last Reply as
by alicethomas
5 hours 45 min ago
But there's no such reply on
http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/audio-and-video-equipment/the-fm-switch-off?page=1
The most recent is 8 Sept.
Long story - how long've you got?