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

There's an ongoing problem with message board bugs and with the reporting of them. Most of the new dna message boards don't have a bug-reporting forum at all (and the contact pages have shown themselves to be pretty useless for any sort of complaint at all). The hub feedback page says that it is for pan-dna bugs. But not all bugs are pan-dna, eg they don't afflict both the MBs and h2g2 (and other older sites) nor even necessarily affect all the MBs the same way. Eg you had already noted the #p stuff wasn't supported on all skins.

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I spotted one such bug on mbreligion the other day. It's in the new link back to the previous message (which had so long been needed, even with the dodgy and buggy quote functionality). That link takes the form of &post=x#p=y but the numbers aren't quite right. The former number (x) turned out to continually change to be the last child post number, while the latter number (y) remained correctly set to the parent post number. Which meant the link wouldn't work correctly across a page boundary.

Eg: F2213234?thread=3155801#p36525971

Interestingly though, today I notice that that has been fixed - and in different ways for links on the first page than for links on subsequent pages. So someone, somewhere must eventually have done something to fix it.

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Another message board bug (or "feature"?) which still exists though is the failure of F-links that go to a user-forum to display anything - in either that MB's own skin (presumably not written) or the correct sub-site skin. On mbsn, users had been told (in an official post) to contact the various Springwatch accounts opened by external staff and have been given their MP numbers (also shown here F4381867?thread="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbsn/MP4373693" >http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbsn/MP4373693

Nor does the MP page even show properly before they've acquired any conversations (I happened to spot one of the accounts when they were still very new and hadn't yet posted).

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There's also no complaint link for pages/forums to complain about faults in those. Eg F2564203?thread="/h2g2/forum/2564203" >F2564203 instead of F4381867 (which perhaps belatedly explains the huge number of people mistakenly posting on that forum and clearly imagining themselves to be on the Springwatch one!).