Peculiar behavior of the "last post by" listing

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1

An odd behavior I just noticed:

Go to the main board page (the one that lists all of the forums). For each forum, there will be a link listing the most recently-bumped thread, and if you click that link, you will be taken to the thread it lists. All as you would expect.

And underneath that link, there’s another one, showing who posted last to that forum, and if you click that link, it’ll take you to the profile of the person who posted last to that forum. As you would expect? Well, no, not really.

Like, as I’m looking at the forum listing right now, for The Game Room, I see one link that says "The poker world is engulfed…, and below that, a link that says “by Chronos”. In other words, as of when I loaded that page, I had made the last post in The Game Room, and it was in the poker thread.

If you click on that poker link, then you will be taken to the poker thread. But if you click on the Chronos link, then you will not be taken to my profile. You will be taken to the profile of whoever, at the time you click the link, has made the most recent post to the Game Room. Like, right this moment, it appears that that happens to be Lamoral, who apparently posted at some point after I loaded that page.

In other words, there’s a link with my name on it, that doesn’t go to my profile, unless you happen to click it quickly.

2

I’ve noticed that too. For instance I just commented in the other thread in this subforum. The link as you described shows another poster’s name. But when I click on it I’m brought to my own profile because I was the latest person to post. Seems like the updating isn’t happening swiftly.

3

Just refresh your page before clicking the link, so that the name is updated.

4

That will tell you who’s link you are following, but won’t fix the issue of the link going to someone other than who it claims.

5

Real time is hard to deal with.

6

Yeah, I noticed that a while back. It seems a weird design choice not to hard code the link to the profile to the name. But, instead, it links to [noparse]https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/member.php?find=lastposter&t=<thread_ID>[/noparse].

I’m not sure why the designers would ever think that was useful.

7

Looks like a feature of the problem of real time vs. page caching.

The link is to the profile of the last poster, because the link is to pull the identity of the last poster. The problem is your page caches the name on the page as it is at the time the page is pulled, but if you hit the link, you reactivate the “pull the last poster identity” feature. Ergo, it pulls the new last poster’s profile.

I don’t know enough about coding to know if there’s a way to have set it to cache the poster’s identity page with their name while leaving the feature of listing the last poster on the page.

8

Irishman, you’re proposing changing the name to match the link. That’d be tricky. I’m proposing changing the link to match the name, which would be much easier.

9

No, I am proposing changing the cached link to match the cached name, while allowing the feature to still pull the last poster.

In other words, is the link to the listed poster’s identity a separate link from the link to call the last poster for the thread? I think it is the same link, which is why it is pulling the “wrong” poster identity. I don’t know enough about coding to know if there is a way to fix it the way you want.