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

Dear h2g2,
I just checked again and my comment just re-appeared. This is fun! What will happen next time I check? How do you techies reply to our questions? Where do I go to find your answer?

Traveller in Time on his toes
"Relax, and probably it was just your browser cache fooling you.

Postings do not appear and disappear at random, besides if you stay on topic you can reply to your own message without retyping the subject. "

"Postings do not appear and disappear at random"

Yes they do! It was a bug reported some time ago and seen by many people. As an intermittant problem, it may not have been traced and fixed.

The BBC servers have quite a lot of problems like that - especially on the message boards. Not only do posts come and go but whole threads and pages of threads do. The reply links often decide not to bother showing up even when a board is open.

This is a previous conversation about the bug: F47996"?thread=296248

Cross-linking back to your other thread: F47996

Traveller in Time on his head
"Well, you are right as in there have been reports about postings coming and going on a random base.

However the chances of this hapening at the server side are very small, I can find the other posting by 'dotcom44'
< F80629?thread=411419&latest=1#p6349230 >
And it has not disappeared once . My guess remains it is the local cache of 'dotcom44', or even a confusion by pressing the name of the thread instead of most recent. "

This kind of thing has happened in the past, but it's not a common thing by any means. The most common reason is (as Traveller suggests) a local browser issue. Sometimes your browser can be set to never fetch pages from the server if it has already seen it. Opera commonly does this by default. It's less common on Internet Explorer but it happens. Your ISP might also have what's called a caching proxy, which means that it will return the previous copy of the page, rather than asking us for a new copy with your post on it. Equally, if you were looking at the first page of posts, your new post wouldn't appear on it, as it appears on the latest page.

I think any of the above are more likely explanations than the servers playing up (since that is a relatively rare cause for this particular event). If it happens again, it would help us enormously if you could post a link to the page where the bug is happening (just copy the URL from your browser's address bar and paste it into your message).

And also, if you want to follow up one of your own messages, it's better to reply to it, rather than start a new conversation, just so that everything is in one place. And we 'techs' work office hours, so a query is unlikely to get an official response outside that time (in fact, I'm still on Christmas break) but as you will have seen, there are plenty of people on site able to offer help and suggestions in the meantime.

"The BBC servers have quite a lot of problems like that - especially on the message boards. Not only do posts come and go but whole threads and pages of threads do."

But, as I'm sure you know, most of the BBC's message boards run on a totally separate system (both software and hardware) from h2g2, and the problems which arise are specific to that system, so it's misleading to cite that in relation to this issue.

I know they run on different software on different starting servers but that doesn't mean that some of the servers on the route in between those and the user (each of which might have caches) won't be the same in the two cases. So it isn't misleading at all to suggest the problem might lie outside the immediate h2g2 area.

Perhaps not misleading, but definitely wrong in this case. The BBC doesn't use caching on its proxies, and all of the problems with missing posts and threads on the messageboards system are down to problems in the software itself.