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

Hi, is anyone else seeing this?

Thread title (-1 new posts).

Seems to happen just after I look at a posting.

Does this mean that the last posting I looked at has now been removed and that I should attempt to delete it also from my memory? Fascinated!

What's happened is that we've separated the posting code from the code which updates people's conversation lists. We found that updating those lists can take a significant amount of time, especially for long threads or heavily subscribed forums, and the longer posting takes, the more lock-ups we get in the database. Removing the list updating code from posting means that posting should now take less time in general, but it also means that conversation lists will lag behind what's actually posted.

Because of this lag, there's now a bug where you can get a negative number of new posts. It should always clear itself after a short time, though.

Thanks Jim. Makes sense, and it's a cool kind of bug too.

Get this, I'm now seeing "-1 new posts? (-1 new posts)" in my conversation list.

How bizarre...

And as an added bonus:

"No Posting, No replies"

Ooh - this is rather fun. I'm up to (-3 new posts) now...

Oo, I'm glad I found this thread: I always think it's just me

Traveller in Time lost count
"Whether it shows -n new posts, no new posts or n new posts we have to check it to make sure there are no unread postings.

Can we have a counter for unread posts ? "

Also F94020?thread=2270498

The whole point is that it takes time to update the conversation lists to show how many new posts are there. Previously, this time was combined with the time it takes to post, so that posting could easily take a very long time, especially on popular threads and forums. This affected everyone. Now, posting should take less time, but at the expense of a time lag before the conversation lists are updated. I'm afraid that this means the conversation list won't immediately show you if someone has posted to a thread. This is a necessary compromise to try to reduce the massive impact that heavy posting was causing.

Traveller in Time on a stopwatch
"Well it never took a posting twenty minutes to return. . . .
"

Er ... the time lag seems to be running at about half an hour at the moment

Hmm... OK. It's going to take a bit of getting used to.

If it sticks at around 30 minutes for updates, then it will cause problems in trying to have a one to one conversation with someone. But as I type that, I think of the solution and that revoles around multiple tabs open. OK, no problem then.

Surely having everyone clicking refresh on an open conversation every two minutes is just going to cause the same problems as before.

As for a 30 minute refresh, I'm guessing it's probably server dependent. There's some negatives showing up in my list that are over an hour old

We're looking at this issue right now. The lag between posting and listing is much larger than we'd anticipated, so we're evaluating the best way to handle this. It might be a couple of days before this happens, though.

Traveller in Time with no more recent postings then one hour old
"So by the time the postings are days old we will be informed "

Ah, I see now Jim, it is a cunning ploy to get your hit rate up on the site. Because we will have to actually go into the threads to see whether there have been replies your page hit KPI will be going through the roof and thereby validating the success of the site and showing how important the site is to the Beeb and its users.

So, took 2 hours from 7 till 9 to put this update onto the servers and it's now going to take DAYS to rectify????

Marvellous!!!....now where did I put me blood pressure pills!

Yes, and while the hit rate goes up, the number of actual *postings* will go down because noone will see there's something to reply to.