Be careful what you wish for

October 9, 2002 7:29 PM

Bug: If you set your prefs to show 99 days of posts, the front page shows 99 days of posts, thereby taking forever and making the server pretty unhappy, I bet. There should be some max built in there.

Suggestion: Set login cookie domains to ".metafilter.com" (note the two periods), so logins will work at metafilter.com, www.metafilter.com, and metatalk.metafilter.com.
posted by endquote to Bugs at 7:29 PM (8 comments total)

good catch on the bug.

for the cookies, the only problem with that is getting everyone with a login to re-login to get a new cookie that holds the domain info. What to do about the thousands of users currently lacking domain info on their cookie?

Way back when, I setup the cookies the wrong way, and never wanted to switch back for fear of either not being able to properly log people out anymore, or how to deal with making everyone log in again. Of course the folly of that is the longer I wait (it's been 2.5 years since I wanted to switch cookies to the proper way), the harder it is to implement. Ideas?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:22 PM on October 9, 2002

How about a checking if the new cookie is set, if not you can read the info from the old cookie, make a new *.metafilter.com cookie, and delete the old one? You could probably also do it when you make a working email address a requirement for all members.
posted by riffola at 8:28 PM on October 9, 2002

What, you mean I'm the only one who had his prefs set to 99 days? Come on, it's OK to admit it.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:43 PM on October 9, 2002

Maybe safeguards on font size on the prefs page would be advisable as well? I'm thinking back to the time that I accidentally set my preferred font size to 122 point type.
posted by machaus at 5:17 AM on October 10, 2002

Why not just not set your preferences to 99 days?
posted by UnReality at 5:38 AM on October 10, 2002

Um, Unreality? Because someone's going to try. Honest. I write web software for a living. Rule number one: Users are Stupid. And even then, someone could get two or three accounts, set the days to 99, and hit refresh over and over again until they bring the server to its knees.

Machaus - I agree with you totally there.

Every field in a preferences screen should have some sort of error checking or contingency planning...
posted by SpecialK at 8:50 AM on October 10, 2002

Ideas?

I have very little technical knowledge of servers, cookies, etc., but couldn't you just log everyone out at some low-activity time, and when everyone logs back in they receive the new cookie?
posted by me3dia at 9:06 AM on October 10, 2002

I set mine to 99 because I wanted "a bunch" of days, and figured if I put in 99 it would bump me down to something reasonable decided by someone who knows what the server can deal with.

I think if you set a ".mefi.com" cookie on anyone that's already logged in, it should just overwrite the existing one. Setting two wouldn't kill anything either.
posted by endquote at 12:58 PM on October 10, 2002