Maybe. I like to think that I’m attentive enough that if it had happened to me more than once or twice I’d notice. Perhaps not, though.
Heh. I’m reminded of a funny story involving my old mycology professor being pestered by a bunch of students from his “general ed”-level botany class for non-majors, while on a field trip. He usually is happy to ID mushrooms for folks, but he was carefully trying ignore or brush-off polite enquiries from a few persistent students who wanted to know ( just quite legitimately curious and not having a clue what they were looking at ) what the hundreds of little brown mushrooms were that were growing on the ground in this particular major metropolitan park they were walking through :D.
But no, in my case it’s just early senility ;).
- Tamerlane
Ah, you admit that you did know, then! Gotcha! Mycology enthusiast, indeed…
I haven’t had a post dropped, but I just revisited a post of mine in ATMB and the post I was replying to (but didn’t quote) is gone. The original post was on a matter tangential to the OP, so it looks like I gave an irrelevant answer to the OP.
I have polled the mods and have heard from almost everyone at this point - doesn’t appear we did this intentionally. Jerry has reset the server, but otherwise can’t offer much other than to say the server has been under a heavy load lately; maybe the indexing got screwed up. We are interested to know if this is happening to others. Folks?
I just checked the Pepper thread that Zenster noted his post had been lost from, and his lost post has not reappeared.
From what I know about databases (a lot) and vB/PHP (a little), my guess is the posts are being saved, but the pointers in the index are screwed up. I don’t think resetting the server will fix this; resetting probably just reloads the same file(s). Is there a re-indexing function in vB or perhaps the PHP interpreter?
I know that reindexing requires the board to be taken down while that happens, but my experience with other databases suggests that an index with a bad set of pointers just keeps getting worse.
What in the world is hamstering?
It’s a little inside joke, which you would get if you had, say, read some of the board.
Since you are new and have not read the postings in question, you dunno. I suggest you spend a little time doing some homework. Can’t know what’s going on until you do, really.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Well, that’s a little unfair. Wouldn’t it be much less strain on the put-upon server if people didn’t have to search so much?
kputt, the term refers to the inside joke around here that the reason the Boards seem so slow is that there’s one little hamster providing all of the energy for running the server. If you listen real closely, you can hear his wheel squeaking.
Anyway, I came to this thread to report one of my posts having disappeared. It was in this forum, too, in the thread to which Cecil Adams just posted. If you look at recent posts I’ve made, it shows up in the search results, but not in the thread itself.
Thank you, dantheman. I was contemplating answering kputt’s question in a courteous manner, and you beat me to it.
kputt, posts disappear on occasion - it all depends on the hamsters’ moods and the precise angle of the earth’s shadow against the dark side of the moon.
Looking at the E-R diagram of the database, I don’t see how this would be possible with the current database structure, but I certainly could be wrong. If a thread doesn’t know that a post belongs to it, I’m uncertain how the relationship will be re-established in any way except manually.
Table POST has the following members:
threadid
username
userid
title
dateline
attachmentid
pagetext
allowsmilie
showsignature
ipaddress
iconid
visible
edituserid
editdate
The only thing that links a post to a thread is the threadid. POST has no relationship with FORUM, only THREAD, ICON, ATTACHMENT, and, of course, SEARCHINDEX.
vBulletin has a Search re-indexing function built into it. However, this function parses thread by thread, going into the posts linked to the threads. So AFAICT, re-indexing the Search won’t even make the POST text visible.
Update: the post of mine that had disappeared (and it was a mighty small one, too) has reappeared.
Just had my first missing one in here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=201226
It was a lengthy and informative piece on the realities of wind power, which took me an hour to write. Stupidly, not saved in Word. Then I had to post a short and terse bit instead.
I did actually view the post in the thread - I saw it with my own eyes. And then…nothing.
Just FYI…
I just submitted my “What Are Your Handwriting Idiosyncrasies?” thread for the second time today. It came up on screen as a new thread. I then cycled into the IMHO forum to make sure it was listed there as well and, presto, NO THREAD.
Here is the thread ID# I was given when the thread posted a second time:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=204486
The last server reset seemed to help a lot. As of about 72 hours ago, I’ve begun to see posts of mine auto-delete. I don’t know how difficult it is but it might help to begin resetting the server on a regular basis. My post to auntie em’s “Foods that fail to fill you up.” also got hamstered as well.
Zenster, I just clicked on your Hemant Lakhani thread in The Pit, and up popped Guinastasia’s Cracker rant instead. I thought it may have been a slip of the mouse, but when I hit the “back” button, the two threads were several apart from each other in the list, and yours was highlighted as a visited link. I clicked it again, and got the correct one.