number of new comments lost after reading thread

October 25, 2001 7:10 PM

Sometimes, after viewing a thread in MetaTalk, when I hit the back button, the other threads lose the number of new messages since my last visit information. It doesn't seem to happen all the time. (Mac IE5)
posted by willnot to Bugs at 7:10 PM (9 comments total)

I just got the same thing (W2k/IE6). I clicked on the new comments link (for thread 1229) and then used the keyboard command Alt-left arrow and got the metatalk main page back but with no new comments listed. The page still shows me as logged in, and the page didn't seem to actually reload, but I could be wrong about that. Perhaps a problem with the cookie?
posted by EatenByAGrue at 11:34 PM on October 25, 2001

I thought it was the page somehow counting the last visit as the just-previous page view. this happens to me on the mefi main page too (wme, ie5.5).
posted by rabi at 11:54 PM on October 25, 2001

My "new messages" messages continue to very rarely work correctly. (IE6...but it was the same on IE5)
posted by rushmc at 5:36 PM on October 26, 2001

Remember, MeFi and MeTa are running different versions of the software. Matt's tweaked the former a lot more than the latter, and probably hasn't integrated all the page view and time-out logic.
posted by dhartung at 10:11 PM on October 26, 2001

The "x new" number is all based on dates. When you first come to either of the sites the last date you visited is compared against the dates of all the comments in all the threads displayed on the front page.

When you hit "reload", the last date you visited is only say 30 seconds ago, so there are either very few or no new messages.

In MetaFilter proper Matt's done some code-jitsu to give everyone a buffer time. I think it's a 15 minute buffer, but I'm not 100% certain.

There are a couple of things that could have happened. Either Matt doesn't have the buffer in MetaTalk (which is likely the case) or your 15 minute buffer passed and your last visited time became the present.

I've found it simplifies things to open up new windows for threads themselves. That way your page with the new counts remains unchanged.
posted by cCranium at 6:28 AM on October 27, 2001

I generally do that too, cCranium, both cause it keeps things simple, but also to reduce load on the server by not reloading the front page all the time. In fact, wouldn't it be a good idea to make that the default, since I seem to remember Matt saying front page requests are the biggest load on the server?
posted by EatenByAGrue at 4:37 PM on October 27, 2001

Unless Matt has some kind explicit don't cache code, what I'm doing shouldn't be reloading the page. I'm hitting the back button, and I would expect that the page would be coming out of cache.
posted by willnot at 7:44 PM on October 27, 2001

You mean like that <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="nocache"> that's in the head section of every page?
posted by rodii at 8:14 PM on October 27, 2001

Why in the world is that there?
posted by gleemax at 2:50 AM on October 28, 2001