Apologies if this is a double thread, I lost one to preview.
A thread, More on Ethanol Concentration currently on page 2 of GQ started by Popup, shows tc as the thread starter and doesn’t link to a profile. Why is that?
There are more than a thousand of them in the GQ forum list. You see them if you browse older parts of the forum or if those threads get bumped. The board can’t give a link to a profile, because there is no profile for the name. All of them seem to be changed names. beatle=Ringo and alsmith=Scylla are among them.
It is/was a bug that was IIRC explained in another thread by the software trying to access the profile data while it was blocked at that moment because it was being updated. But why does it affect ‘innocent’ threads?
It only occurs with threads from before the upgrade, so one could believe the bug is fixed. But the old software didn’t even show links there, the quirk started after the upgrade. Maybe the old software did leave not enough or false data for the new one to link to a profile.
As I recall, the old version of vBulletin, much less UBB, never gave the profile link for “thread starter”.
Thanks femtosecond.
Ah! Popup is a changed name too and was formerly known as tc.
That’s what I meant with “the old software didn’t even show links there”. So naturally the old vB didn’t really care about the thread starter name in the forum list, once it had been put there. Some members had their names changed, but the forum list didn’t get updated.
The new vB imported the old forum list and failed to generate a profile link to a userID for a name that didn’t exist anymore. Why didn’t it use the more official data from the post database, is avoiding separate lookups really worth to cut that corner? At least it’s nothing to worry about.
It’s not only changed names. Go to the end of the GQ forum list. ThreadID #722 “What makes you drunk?”, started by Phobia. The first post reads “Phobia, Guest, Registered: Not Yet”. No profile -> no link in the forum list.
The old guest-posts look strange without any of the profile/email/search/…buttons. 
Not what I searched for, but - Thread Staeter w/o a hyperlink to profile?