Recent comments: how recent are they?

February 7, 2001 1:01 PM

A question on the Recent Comments feature: how far back in time does it traverse?
posted by hijinx to MetaFilter-Related at 1:01 PM (5 comments total)

The reason I ask is because yesterday I posted a message regarding Dean Kamen's appearance on 60 Minutes II in the dust-covered IT thread, figuring it'd make it to the top of the Recent Comments heap. Nuh-uh. But I'm glad Sal mentioned it.

Matt, I thought you'd mentioned this somewhere, and if it's in front of my nose, please forgive my myopia.
posted by hijinx at 1:03 PM on February 7, 2001

As far back as you have your home page set to show in # of days. So by default it's 7. I could take that out so it grabs the last comments regardless of the original post's date, but that allows anything to bubble up, which can lead to problems.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:04 PM on February 7, 2001

Cool beans, Matt. Thanks.
posted by hijinx at 1:21 PM on February 7, 2001

Just out of curiosity, what kind of problems would that lead to? The huge query time of searching through every thread ever and bubble sorting them to get the top few?
posted by Neb at 4:04 PM on February 8, 2001

Neb, I don't think it'd be a bubble sort, the sorting would likely be part of the SQL query.

There's over 5700 threads now and somewhere around 49000 comments (a recent comment was number 488xx). The actual numbers are probably slightly less, as there's been deleted threads and comments, but that's still a massive amount of data to run a date comparison on. Ka-chug Ka-chug Ka-chug.

And the allowing "anything to bubble up" leading to problems means that Matt can't hide messages in some of the really old threads for his team of terrorists to discover and use to take over the world.
posted by cCranium at 6:31 AM on February 9, 2001