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Not good enough lads …. Not good enough

Is this the same issue affecting

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058352052/russia-ukraine-war#latest

Fair City thread is affected too

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058160260/fair-city-news-spoilers-and-discussion-v10-read-post-1-before-contributing#latest

I don't care what other 3rd part boards relies on regarding the stability/functionality of the platform …. For me as a user Its just not good enough, and its going on for months.

It’s a slight inconvenience, it’s been “addressed” and we’ve been told it’s being looked at.

What more do you want? The options before the move to Vanilla was shutting it all down.

Why is it that threads about site problems seem to drag in the posters who, actively, dislike the site and have been heralding its demise for years?

Vbulletin

I wouldn't call it 'unusable' at all. But mods, or regular posters themselves, should take a more proactive approach and just start another thread as soon as it starts happening

When I click on the Harris V Trump thread it's all blank but I can see from the main page there's new posts.

This is happening in other threads too. The "Zero refugee" or whatever it's proper long name is thread is now invisible too, page after page is blank.

(what do you mean "most new posts are going to the new Debate thread"?)

I expect it will happen on any thread that has had posts deleted from it. The more posts deleted, the further you will have to back in pages to get to the posts. The Zero Refugee thread likely to have a lot of deletions.

If the thread is completely unusable, maybe tag one of the CA mods and get the messed up thread shut down and a new one opened?
That had to be done last time this glitch occurred on the Russia thread.

Re: most new posts going to the new Debate thread.

There was an original thread for Trump v Harris, but that was affected by the glitch.
Someone set up a new thread for the Tuesday debate last week, as the glitch would have made the original thread unusable during frenetic posting about the debate.
So most of the new posts about the US Presidential election are still going to the debate thread as it is more responsive.

A workaround/hack would be to edit offending posts to say "DELETED" etc and not actually turn off their visibility so that they are still there for the normal role user.

If there were 1000 posts, 20 per page, but 100 got deleted, what you have is 45 pages of visible posts for the normal user, but the site is calculating 50 pages and taking the user to page 50.

I'm sure it is and I'm sure there is a reason why they want them kept. My suggestion was a temporary measure which is really a hack to make the site usable again.

Or just close up those threads and restart new ones and repeat when the problems arise the next time.

Hi ….. 3 days later and I still cant see anything but blank pages on the "Zero refugee" thread. I have gone back 10 pages and they're still all blank!! What on earth is happening, is this at my end? What can I do to fix it ? It's days since I asked about this but seems the issue is not fixed, is anyone else experiencing this?

I’ve gone back 10 pages and more on a few threads before I honestly just gave up and figured I’d wait for the fix to be implemented.

It isn’t the same for everyone as I can see the threads being added to (after I’ve marked all threads as read, they’re later appearing in bold), but it was too early to be suggesting navigating back 10 pages fixed it - I think that may have been more of a coincidence that it appeared to work on some threads when there was only a few of them in the initial stages. As more threads are experiencing the issue, it’s becoming obvious that the 10 page workaround, isn’t working.

EDIT: I think the reason we’re now seeing the effect on dozens of threads is because of the length of time and the amount of posts the threads have been running for - similar to the old 10k limit before data in the DB starts getting corrupted - something unforeseen in the underlying code is happening.

I’ve only just gotten to read Mike’s post in the bugs thread, then yours that followed, then nothing on the next page. I shouldn’t be thinking to myself “Do I feel lucky?” 😂

yes I have

Please post a screenshot from page 1010 of the zero refugee discussion

Likewise the Fair City thread. It is currently on page 478 on my laptop, and there is nothing, I went back to page 470

There are posts on page 469

How far should you have to go back?

You shouldn't have to go back at all, it's a bug that's being worked on. While the bug is still active, you have to go back until there are posts - it's a different number for different discussions. However, the number is static (±1) for each discussion - all users have to go back the same number of pages for each discussion.

Seems like it would be logical for mods to close existing thread and start a new one for the popular threads that are many pages out of synch.

Probably, but given the number affected, the reduced number of mods, the coordination needed, and the lack of any top-down communication for expected timeline of a fix… I wouldn't hold my breath. Some individual mods might do it on a discussion by discussion basis if they're directly involved or specifically asked.

Is this how it ends?

Regardless of however many pages you need to go back it makes affected threads almost unusable as one can not easily go to the next unread pst in the thread.

This is caused by the same root problem as the blank pages issue - the stored count of posts against a discussion does not match the actual number of posts. You can check out the stored count of the Russia-Ukraine discussion here: https://www.boards.ie/api/v2/discussions/?discussionID=2058352052 (value of "countComments"). As of this post, the count is showing 6,139. In reality, there are only 6,127 posts.

When you click the "Post Comment" button, the front-end of the site builds the post and sticks it on the end of the displayed posts. When deciding what post number to display, it only does a quick check against the (incorrect) stored count. However, when you refresh, and the front-end does the normal building of the page, it properly calculates each post number.

If the countComments value was correct, it would resolved both this issue and the blank pages issue

Boards should be paying you to look after the site instead of that Vanilla shower 😀

A large part of the reason is that there's no timeline for a fix. The initial feedback was that this was a high priority issue, it was affecting other Vanilla sites, and that Vanilla were actively working on the issue. In that context, closing and re-opening hundreds of affected discussions across the site didn't make sense - it would be reasonable to have expected a fix was imminent.

Now however, it's 15 days later, and there's still no indication of when the issue will be fixed. It could be today, it could be end of the year. The mods have no idea whether they should go ahead with closures.

And closures are of limited use anyway. Say a mod closes a discussion and reopens a new one - how do they let the participants know about the new one? On a working site, they'd just make a final post with a link to a new one and lock it, but no-one will see that post unless they know to go back 5+ pages. Sure, if you browse at the category level, you might see the new discussion, but for lots of posters, their main touchpoint is their list of bookmarked discussions.

I mean this could be something that could see users move on elsewhere.

This is something that has seen users move on elsewhere