Subtle changes, bugs and feedback

Popcorn?

In all honesty apart from the slight glitches which should be expected considering its pretty much brand new, this place is miles better than most other forums around. I use a number of different forums and this pales the others in functionality, ease of use and aesthetics.

Deserves a #kudos @velocio and team for that.

do you have to act like such a dick?

Strange, that was what I was thinking.

I get it, I really do. You don't like change, you don't like the new interface, you didn't like the vBulletin interface either, it's not all perfect on your iPhone, and so on.

I mean... your comment:

I've just had Cloudflare interrupt proceedings with a "checking your browser before proceeding. DDOS protection by Cloudflare" screen. What is this shit?

WTF do you think it is? It says... right there and you are a web dev, you know exactly what it is. So who is being a dick here?

I take the time to explain, you know just in case you really don't know what it is and because other people who might genuinely not know what it is are reading... and you just come back with quips as if there's some flaw and just to whinge about something else too (Persona), without even conceding there's damn good reasons for a WAF to exist and do it's job.

And you know this stuff, you must. You would be crap at your job if you didn't... and I know you're not crap at your job because you've shared stuff you've worked on and it's good. Ergo, if you know this stuff, then this is all posturing and it must just be you being a dick.

That's truly how I read your posts. And perhaps I'm wrong... but it doesn't feel like it.

The man has the patience of a saint.

I guess after using VBulletin for the last five years, you kinda have to develop a very thick skin.

Heh, I'm stressed and probably just venting.

Back to deal with accountancy... that stuff adds up nicely.

Actually it didn't add up, they'd lost a transaction from August. But now it adds up.

So hold up, your day job isn't even IT?

OK, yes, I was being colloquial. I swear a lot. It doesn't mean anything. What is this shit? meant "why am I getting this when I'm not doing any of the things I would expect to trigger a DDoS defence" but that takes too long to type.

I am a front-end dev. I specialise only in the things you see and touch, and leave the server stuff to the server experts. My knowledge of hosting infrastructure is general at best, and my knowledge of back-end development is more or less limited to what creates a good front-end (and what doesn't).
Your explanation came across as throwing numbers at me to fob my question off rather than explaining why hitting the homepage once in 10 minutes from a web browser behind a seriously well-defended firewall might get picked up, and why the fact that I should be coming in with valid authentication credentials still isn't enough to convince it that I am real. I was going to write that last time but your tone pissed me off.
And you've met me enough times surely to know that if I'm coming back with quips that means it's all good?

Someone. Please.

And you've met me enough times surely to know that if I'm coming back with quips that means it's all good?

Heh, remember I'm a little autistic and work hard to try and pretend I'm not. It makes me prickly, it's probably my fault but I tend read words literally. By the time I get to a swear word I picture the other person as having an apoplectic fit:

It really is not a bug, it cannot and won't be fixed.

I think that in order to fix this bug you should employ a team of monkeys that go round to people's houses and scroll down for them.

By not hiring these monkeys you are demonstrating that you just don't care about your users. You swine.

I love that gif!
I'm really fucking sweary. Blame my upbringing. A cross between Scouse dockers and truckers (my mums side) and proper posh (my dad) with no middle class moderation in between means no one ever taught me not to be. Throw in the dyspraxic inability to really care that much about being genteel and you have the BQ language filter. Anyway, it's punctuation to me and I'm too old to change now. I think society will be a better place when Trevor MacDonald says on News at Ten "Some cunt robbed a fucking bank this morning".

I am a front-end dev

You're a designer who understands Javascript.

No, your a designer etc...

Your mum's a designer.

YouTube embeds won't be double-embedded any longer. Neither will maps, etc.

In fact... embeds should only embed once.

The only exception is for AC/DC Thunderstruck as that is awesome. We'll embed that over and over just for the intro.

Oh, and I've gone back and updated every old comment that had an embed too.

Example of a single embed... just your standard YouTube link...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy1dYFGkPUE

Example of AC/DC...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM

Haha, good to see you're having some fun...

Out of interest in lay mans terms why did that happen?

Because he forgot that Back in Black is better, otherwise he would have linked to that instead.

Out of interest in lay mans terms why did that happen?

There were two potential issues, one confirmed and the other a possibility.

The confirmed one was a cartesian join on the links table for a given comment when multiple revisions of the comment existed (we keep old edits for liability reasons and to support wiki style behaviour in future).

That meant that if a comment had been edited three times, the link would be returned three times and the item embedded thrice.

This never occurred during testing as during testing we were not editing the same comment over and over... we just created it and viewed the output.

The second factor was a race condition scenario. We generate HTML when a comment is first inserted into our database, but... there are some scenarios in which the HTML may be deleted and we would then not generate it until the comment is requested. i.e. When the embed code changes for gpsmadeeasy.com we'll go and wipe the HTML for all comments that have links to gpsmadeeasy.com. And then... when pages with the comment are requested, we'll re-generate the HTML from the original markdown, and do the embeds.

The race condition occurs when the page on which the comment exists is called simultaneously by multiple people, and thus triggers multiple processes to find the empty HTML and determine that they need to generate the HTML and perform the embeds. Because of the way our system works, not all of that process occurs within the same database transaction, and so it's not a case of "Last update wins". There is a real possibility that the timing is such that both processes could win and a double-embed would occur.

So... the solutions:

1. Remove the cartesian on the query.
   
2. Add an attribute to the <a href=""> tag embed="true" to indicate when we have already embedded a URL, and then don't embed if that exists.
   

And interestingly, you could visually tell which scenario had occurred.

If there were two embeds... it was probably the cartesian join and a single edit.
Greater than 2, if there were an odd number of embeds... it was probably the cartesian join, otherwise if there were an even number of embeds repeating... it was probably the race condition.

And I can't explain "cartesian" in lay mans terms, except to say that it's almost a multiplication... everything from two database tables, multiplied by every answer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_product

If there was a thumbs up emoticon I'd use it now.