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

There a (new?) bug in the 3-minute delay. While that doesn't apply to h2g2 any more, there's no sensible way to get any bugs addressed anywhere else!

Posts which clear pre-mod (and perhaps newbie pre-mod), sometimes after many hours delay when the site is busy, are being counted against the person making a new post at the time they pop through the moderation system. This leads to the poster getting a random attack from a newly refreshed 3-minute delay on their current post even though their last genuine posting attempt was made more than 3 minutes prior to that one (and even though they had already been through the 3 minute time-out after that earlier post when they first posted it and before they could make their next to-be-delayed post).

Coincidentally, I'm fixing another bug in this area right now, so I can take a look. Can't promise a fix if it's anything more than a tweak, though.

Well thanks for looking anyway.

PS There's another longer-standing bug (which I might or might not have mentioned before) affecting more than one MB. That of the return to X link, on the page shown after a post has gone off into the netherworld, being faulty and not returning to the correct thread at all (when it was a reply rather than a new thread starter).

PPS It now looks as though the 3-minute rule isn't being consistently applied to the immediate posts (perhaps because of the same bug with the delayed ones). The first time it happened within seconds, so I thought it was one of the unsynchonised server issues again (since it has happened before, especially when the site is clogged and slow to respond). This time the gap was much larger (but less than 3 minutes I think). So it's less likely to be a server glitch and more likely to be a software error somewhere.

First investigations suggest to me that the delay is being applied in the wrong place - it's *not* happening at actual posting time, but it is happening when the post passes through moderation. I'm trying to replicate this to make sure I'm not misreading the code, but it's definitely re-applying the delay later, which is the main problem.

Right, I've fixed the initial bug with the delay only being kicked off when the post is moderated - now the delay happens when you post and there's no delay as a result of moderation.

Now to check the timing mismatch.

I think the timing anomalies you've described are more likely to be because of the random setting of the last posting time by the moderation system rather than a server time mismatch. The procedure that returns the elapsed time since the last post always returns the number of seconds, not a date/time, so that the time on the web server is irrelevant - they could be minutes out of sync with the database and they'd still display the correct elapsed time.

By the way, when I said I'd fixed the other bug - that's fixed in our development build, not on live. It won't appear on live until the release after next, probably in early December.

Ah, I was wondering if it was one of those new definitions of "fixed".