The thread A (quasi-political) McDonalds question for non-U.S. dopers, currently in GQ, appears to be manifesting some sort of glitch. In the forum listing, it’s shown as being started by cainxinth, and last post by him, with a total of three replys. Within the thread, however, the first post is by BF. There are a total of four posts in the thread, with the last one being cainxinth, re-stating (or rather, stating) what his OP was supposed to be. The time of last post on the forum page matches that of the last post in the thread, and all dates are April 22, 2002.
Anyone have any idea what happened here?
Not really, but there’s no charge for guessing, right?
- Humongous solar flare.
- The Five-Planet alignment.
- Terrorists.
cainxinth started the thread, but as stated in the technical issues FAQ, sometimes thread creation is not 100% complete due to the database being overloaded with too many sessions, so the thread is created without cainxinth’s post (either through the way the program is written and/or due to mySQL’s incomplete support of database transactions). 3 people reply before cainxinth comes back to repost the OP. There was a (missing) OP with 3 replies, the last reply being by cainxinth, so the forum display was correct.
Not quite… There were a total of four real, existing posts in the thread. Apparently, the software thought that the first existant post (the first reply to the missing OP) was itself the OP.