Posts being delayed or held before really being posted?

lkbart

There have been multiple times lately that I have posted something in the continuing challenges threads, and come back later to find that there was a post or two before my post, yet at the time that I posted, I did a preview and there were no other posts, and then I clicked post, and my post showed up in the thread next, then the next day, all of a sudden my post is behind one or two others. This happens regularly, and not just to me. There have been some discussions in the challenge discussion thread about it. There is no time stamp any more (don't understand why?), so that doesn't help. What gives? It's like there is some queue the post sets in even though it appears on this end that it's posted. Whatever happened to real time posting? If the posts are not going to be shown in real time, it's not worth playing the sometimes fast paced challenges.

Richard

Nothing is being delayed intentionally; in principle, it should be first come, first served. Once in a while our automated spam filtering software puts a post into a moderation queue for no apparent reason and it will stay there till a mod approves it. When approved, it will eventually appear in the correct thread time sequence. However, this is pretty rare, and in any event it should not apply to you or other long-time participants. Posts do have a timestamp--if you hover your mouse over the date of the post the time shows like a tool-tip--but it is only to one minute precision. I have been surprised myself on occasion in the Dgrin Game when someone beats me to the punch by a matter of seconds. Browser caching can also be a factor, I think.

All that said, there may be something buggy going on that we're not aware of. It would be helpful if you could provide a link to the post(s) in question as soon as you notice a problem and we'll try to figure it out.

lkbart

Thanks for the response. After having it happen a few times in a row, I did a few screen shots when I posted, then of course this last time when it happened, I forgot to screenshot it & there were 2 posts ahead of it later. Oh well. Will keep trying.

JAG

I understand Lillian's frustration as I've had it happen to me several times too. My theory is this; when there are several who are actively playing the game all about the same time for the same subject and they post fast, the last one who posts, does not get to see the new posts when they hit send. Even when they have done the preview before posting. It most likely has to do with cookies and such that help speed up the loading. Although I'm not certain that "cookies" is the word I'm looking for since I'm pretty much computer illiterate. However, from the knowledge I do have, I know that some sites will not physically refresh a page unless you hit the refresh in the browser by the address bar.

I've been avoiding this annoyance by not playing till I know that others who regularly post to these threads, are not actively online. Simply because I don't like to have to go back and change images to keep in step with the games. This might not be an acceptable answer to the problem, but I think that the switch to vanilla has not been good in this area. At least in bulletin, we were able to have an automatic refreshed page when you did a preview before posting.

Richard

@JAG said:
My theory is this; when there are several who are actively playing the game all about the same time for the same subject and they post fast, the last one who posts, does not get to see the new posts when they hit send. Even when they have done the preview before posting.

You are correct. The preview of your post does not reload the page, so if someone has managed to post something while you are composing your reply, you won't see it in the preview and might be taken by surprise when you finally post. However, you can save a draft of your post and reload the page in your browser. New posts should show and if there's nothing new you can just hit Post Comment, as your draft will still be in the text box. It's still possible that someone will manage to post between the time you reload and post, but it becomes less likely if the time interval is very short. There's really no good way to avoid that problem completely--it happened to me once in a while in vBulletin as well. Another common source of surprise comes when new posts span two pages and you don't notice it---you think you are replying to the last post on a page but there are really other later posts on the next page, which only appear to you after you have posted. I think we saw an example of this not long ago in the Dgrin Game.