GD feels a little boring right now, so I decided to go back to the very last page (419) to look for interesting looking threads to read. What I found surprised me. Rather then have names next to each post, all posts had the title “guest” where their names should go. Very odd. These are not all guests. Some of them are moderators. This doesn’t occur in the next page at all, nor does it appear on the last page of our local cafe. Why then are they mislabeled in that one forum?
Anyone have an answer?
I wasn’t there at the time, but there have been references in other threads to this as part of the fallout from the board meltdown (either the winter of our missed content or another one?) which lost the user registration part of the database, resulting in earlier posts listing everyone as a guest.
Link doesn’t work (goes to page 3 of GD for me, at any rate). But most likely what you’re seeing are threads dating back to older software.
At some point back in the mists of time, back when we were using Ultimate Bulletin Board (uBB) instead of vBulletin, the SDMB upgraded from one version to another. From version 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 or whatever, hell if I know.
Anyway, a few months or years farther down the pike, we upgraded from uBB to vB — completely different software — and for some reason the conversion of the older posts worked correctly for the posts created in the later version of uBB (so for those posts you’ll still see user names) but the posts created in the earlier version of uBB did NOT convert properly, so you won’t see any usernames by those old posts, as if they were posted by anonymous “Guests”.
Here’s an example of such a thread (please don’t post to it):
Funny, it worked for me just now. Ah well. Thank you for the answers, guys.
It had nothing to do with the Winter of our Missed Content. It dates back much farther than that.
Here is the original thread I did on the phenomenon.
There were no absolute conclusions drawn, but what I describe above —one changeover from one verson of uBB to a later version of uBB, followed 8 months later by the changeover to vB — was established in this thread. That posts created by the later but not the earlier version of uBB was compatible with the vB software when we switched — causing those 8-month-old and older posts to suddenly lose the name of the posters who created them, to no alarm because they were 8 months old or older by then — is just my conjecture. (Makes sense, though, doesn’t it?)
FWIW, this sometimes happens to me even on the front page of a folder. Refreshing the page will usually restore the names.