Request: Please Don't Reply to Ryan/Beast/Rage/Pulsar Thread for an hour

[Chad]

Quick request: Please don't reply to the WFW Great Expectations: Dan Ryan & Beast vs. Aaron Rage & Pulsar thread for about an hour or so. I've sent in a trouble ticket to the vBulletin folks and have referenced it as part of the issue. I would lock it temporarily, but I don't want to make any changes to it that might affect the reply count or thread.

I also researched and changed a setting in vBulletin that may be part of the issue. That's part of what I've asked them about in the support ticket.

-C

 

[Chad]

Once more update: in looking through all the rp threads on this page, it looks like the timing between the original reply and the second reply you guys have used to force the update has been under one hour. My hope is that the setting change will have fixed the problem. As soon as I know, I'll let you know here.

-C

 

[PaulNJ21]

The Rocko Daymon/Silencer thread also is off by one.



Paul

 

[PaulNJ21]

The count is messed up for Wells vs. Johnsons too. Six replies instead the five showing according to the counter.


Paul

 

[PaulNJ21]

Eight replies instead of the six showing in the counter in the Rabesque/Johnson vs. Powermaster/Roderick thread.



Paul

 

[PaulNJ21]

Four replies in the Dan Ryan/El Arco Iris thread with the last one not being registered correct to Diablo.


Paul

 

[Chad]

Got 'em. Thanks for the info.

I've had some back-and-forth discussion with our friends at vBulletin today. The next step is for them to log in to the backend and take a look at things.

-C

 

[PaulNJ21]

Just went back to check this message, there are seven replies before I am posting now and it only lists six.



Paul

 

[Chad]

An update on the post count problem:

One of the vBulletin techies logged into the boards as an admin and to the server and could determine nothing wrong in the vB or server settings that was causing the problem. His suggestion is to upgrade to 3.0.7 (we are not on 3.0.3) and see if that helps at all. My gut feeling is that it won't, since most of the mini-upgrades were for security holes. I'm planning to make the upgrade this weekend if I get time, and we'll take a look from there.

I did, however, notice one other thing that's started to click over the last couple of weeks. Some forums have the option to "moderate posts" on, which means that before posts go public, they're put into a moderation queue and wait approval by the moderator. We had a usergroup issue recently that was causing a few members posts to always go into the queue, even though the forum didn't have that option turned on.

When I looked in the moderator queue, there were probably posts from 50 WFW threads stretching back for a long, long time. I cleared them all out, after making sure that they had already appeared on the boards. I went back into the mod queue today and saw four or five WFW posts in this forum that were appearing, including the back-and-forth replies from Levinson and myself and a couple of others. I deleted the 'queue' versions of these posts, and it appears that the reply counts for those threads is corrected (while some of the counts for older threads are still off).

So.... long story even longer: here's my suggestion. The next time you have a post that doesn't 'bump' and show up in the thread count, please PM and/or e-mail Paul and myself. We'll go into the mod queue and see if the post appears there, then test what effect 'accepting' or 'deleting' the post in the queue has to the reply count. If it appears that that is what's causing the count problems, then at least I'll have a more detailed version of the bug that I can contact the vB staff with.

Hope that helps.

-C

 

[PaulNJ21]

Question about the moderation queue, if the moderation queue was the problem, why would Brunk (an administrator) and me (a moderator) be having the same problems as people who weren't administrator or moderators? Doesn't the queue sends posts by a certain level of board member through automatically without the need for moderation even in moderation mode?


Paul

 

[Chad]

It depends on the permissions set on the forum as to how the moderation queue actually works. With the right permissions, *any* user's note can be queued. In the cases I've seen, I can't find any reason why certain notes are appearing in the queue, since the forums involved don't have any permissions set to queue messages. I've also seen notes get help up even from mods.

Even weirder, I don't understand why the notes would appear in the moderation queue when they're already appearing on the boards. The mod queue has three basic options: Accept (post the note), Delete and Ignore. Accepting doesn't appear to make any difference since the note is already posted; Delete deletes it from the queue but not the boards, and Ignore just leaves it in the queue.

Pretty bizarre. I'll try and get the upgrade done this weekend or next week and see if that makes any difference. But for now, the stopgap measure would be the next time you see one that doesn't count, to see if it ends up in the mod queue, and then see if accepting or deleting it from the queue makes a change in the post count. I don't know if it will or not, since earlier this week I changed the option that allows the board to update counts automatically rather than batching it and doing it once an hour.

-C