h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

::lowers eyebrows::
You look better like that!

It was that bad!

Mel

it certainly was!

can i have my eyebrows back please? i'm raising them to be fake caterpillars.

Did I miss summat?
I'm obviously the only one working round here

Incog

Maybe the problem was that oen of the servers had run off with a server from another website, even though it was married, and now they brought it back... chained to the floor...

servers it right

Well as I have only just logged on, the first time in a couple of days - I missed it! Seems ok now so I can only guess that whatever was done was successfully completed! Well done! Good old BBC engineers. I love hearing about problems after I have missed them - no need to worry about what will happen. Perhaps someone will tell me how it was for them???

Re post: 39, Tefkat

"Time warp"

Is this because it is not the time since the last post, but the time since a reply to post was started.

Click 'Write a reply', go make a , then when you do click post, the last post can be minutes ago.

'This post happend 2 days before last Friday '

I think followed that bit. So your post time is when you start your post, not when you finish it.....?

That means your post could have been posted longer ago, but still be more recent then another post?

I suppose so. If you start a post 5 minutes ago and hit "post message" in 10 minutes, then you post is 15 minutes old when posted. meanwhile, if I start a post after you and hit "post message" before you, my post is newer but will appear before your post (I think!!)

I've seen them shuffle in position. Something which wasn't there when I finished posting let alone started posting, later slotted itself in before my post.

So TPTB must sort them out according to time of starting the post, or the time of posting the post, or something.....
Or maybe not!

I'm pretty certain the time on a post is fixed when you press Post rather than when you press 'Reply' - it would seem logical to do it that way to reduce server load...
The difference in times is probably due to the various servers clocks being slightly different, and somewhere or other Jim did explain why posts sometimes get 'jiggled' but I can't for the life of me remember exactly why...

I think its something to do with the fact that the time is assigned by one set of servers whilst the database is on another, so if you get two posts at virtually the same time, one could appear for a few seconds whilst the other one, with a physically earlier posting time, is hung up in the system...

Something like that anyway

So as usual - nothings working and everybody's arguing about the time!

Heck, it could be a lot worse... seems to be working fairly well from over here

**touchwood**

Every post is timestamped by the database at the precise time of posting. There's plenty of time between you looking at a conversation, seeing no new posts and posting yours for someone else to post a reply. No mystery here.

The discrepancy in the times is indeed because the web servers' time is sometimes (often) out of sync with the database. If the web server thinks the time is a couple of minutes into the future then it'll say '2 minutes ago' for a post that has just been posted. I've asked for this to be checked and fixed.

That still doesn't explain the few instances of seeing the thread with the post one has just posted and then going back to the thread to find another post has appeared *before* that post.

Then there were the instances of sometimes not being able to see all the posts in a thread until after posting even when the latest reply time showed that there were some.

Started 10:06 GMT+1 2004-01-14

Just a little tester!

Posted 13:09 GMT+1 2004-01-14

Mel

So that would be on posting then!

Mel