BARF database corruption?

[rodr]

I noticed a couple of threads where if you click on a higher numbered page, or "Last", you get the same lower-numbered page. Like the internal post count is higher than the actual post count. A couple of examples:

https://bayarearidersforum.com/forum...42611&page=100
https://bayarearidersforum.com/forum...16889&page=836

[budman]

Thanks Rod.

We will look into it.

[W800]

I notice it too, LOL.

[ScottRNelson]

Originally Posted by rodr

I noticed a couple of threads where if you click on a higher numbered page, or "Last", you get the same lower-numbered page. Like the internal post count is higher than the actual post count. A couple of examples:

This has been happening off and on for years. It has something to do with someone deleting a post that would have bumped you to the next page, but now there aren't enough posts to get you to that page.

I haven't bothered to check, but I'm wondering if you point to a particular post and somebody deletes one before it, do you still get to that post? For example, here's a link to post 3629 on a long thread. If a post gets deleted before that one does it become 3628? I don't want to actually break a good thread to find out.

But I can pretty well guarantee that the issue is related to deleting a post in a thread.

[berth]

There are several threads that have suffered this for a long, long time.

BARF Militia is another thread that does this. The "Post a pic of a recent purchase" thread also.

Just seems to happen to loooonnnggg threads.

[DataDan]

Originally Posted by ScottRNelson

I haven't bothered to check, but I'm wondering if you point to a particular post and somebody deletes one before it, do you still get to that post? For example, here's a link to post 3629 on a long thread. If a post gets deleted before that one does it become 3628? I don't want to actually break a good thread to find out.

Look at the link in your post; it specifies "p=10523742&postcount=3629". Paste the link into your browser address bar, but change "3269" to "12345". The same post will be shown, but it will be labeled "#12345". You're getting p=10523742 either way.

But I can pretty well guarantee that the issue is related to deleting a post in a thread.

I think what rodr implies in his OP is right--there's a post count in the thread header, and it can get out-of-sync with actual count of posts. But the error doesn't occur with every delete. Rather, it might be some kind of overlap problem. For example, one user is adding a post when another deletes, and the addition increments a now out-of-date count because the deletion failed to lock the header record. This kind of random error would be seen more often in threads with a lot of activity.

Go to the Sink thread list page, find a thread with a lot of activity, and click on the value in the Replies column. A little box will pop up with user names and post counts. At the top, Total Posts is displayed (I checked the Investments 2020 thread, and post counts add up to the total). In some of those long threads it will be less than the value in the Replies column. Note that Total Posts should be 1 greater than Replies, since the OP is counted in the former but not the latter.

Unless there are "stranded" posts that can't be accessed, it's probably not a problem, just a slight annoyance for us OCD sufferers. Though a search didn't turn up any complaints about this kind of error in vBulletin, I would guess that it has happened before, and somewhere, a vBulletin admin has written a program to recalculate post counts and alleviate this source of OCD stress.

[berth]

Originally Posted by DataDan

Unless there are "stranded" posts that can't be accessed, it's probably not a problem, just a slight annoyance for us OCD sufferers.

The way this is a problem, not necessarily just of the OCD inflicted, is that if you click on the little arrow icon off the main page of the thread, ostensibly to send you to your first "unread" post, on the broken threads, it just takes you to the last page. And the top of it at that.

Normally this is not a big deal, you just have to scroll to the bottom, then back up to catch up. On photo threads it's easy.

But it's also quite easy to miss something on the previous page.

If there were enough posts to send your thread to a new "last page", the "latest" would normally send you to that page with the unread post. The broken threads go straight to the last page period, so you "miss" posts on the previous page.

And I can't think of a large volume thread where this is not a problem.

[W800]

https://www.qwant.com/?q=vbulletin%2...ient=brz-brave

I notice sometimes that the server appears down for a few minutes at a time. I think this is bots. We use Cloudflare at work to guard against this.

[WoodsChick]

This has always been an issue on the really long threads. Seems like the last few days it’s happening on all kinds of threads, long and short. Incredibly annoying.

[Abacinator]

The What Are You Thinking of Right Now thread in the sink is broken for me. If I click the new posts icon or last page link, the URL won't resolve. But if I then manually change the URL to the previous page it works.

[tzrider]

It should be fixed now.

[DataDan]

Nice work! But you can't leave us in suspense. What was the bug? How did it get fixed? Might it recur? Inquiring geeks want to know.

[berth]

Originally Posted by tzrider

It should be fixed now.

The Post and PIC of latest purchase thread is still borked.

so is the "Awesome videos" thread.

[tzrider]

The repair process is still running and may not have gotten to those threads yet. I’ll check periodically.

[Enchanter]

We rarely delete user accounts from BARF but recently some users provided compelling reasons and requested their accounts be deleted due to privacy concerns. We did this and the process also removed their posts from the forum, causing thread indexing issues.