Greetings, Cranky Users! It's been an interesting few days here! Some things that happened made us less cranky, and then, some made us more cranky. Let's see what we've got.
First, early Tuesday morning, elfling published a diary with some good news we've been waiting for: Search was fixed so that
- When you get search results, you can copy and paste the url and someone using the link will get your results, not a blank search screen
- If you click on a search result and then click your back button, you return to your search results
This is enormously helpful, and it resolves the most important outstanding items about Search. elfling is interested in hearing what other issues we have remaining with Search specifically, because they'd like to continue cleaning that up. If you have such issues and did not respond in her diary, please communicate them to her in some way.
Here's an example of the first bullet point. Let's say I do this simple search:
Before, if you wanted to see the results of the pictured search, you'd have to type the same thing yourself. But now, I can give you this link to the results and you can easily go there and see what I see. So, follow me below the squiggle!
Did you see what I did there? I segued into our next item of concern. On Tuesday afternoon, triciawyse was innocently greeting her friends in the day's pootie diary, when blammo!!! She was suddenly banned. Full-on banned, bony mojo and all, without having a pie fight, proposing a conspiracy theory, getting hide-rated, or having the slightest idea what had happened.
When word of this got out, there was quite a hubbub. So many efforts were made by triciawyse's friends to contact the site's management and the developers, I regret to say that kos was forced to call poor ct at home, as he was trying to get his son to take a nap, and urge him to untangle the situation.
After diligent effort, and in the face of considerable rancor attributed to small mammals, ct was able to get triciawyse unbanned. She and we learned many interesting things in her return process, such as, when you're banned, your sig goes away. You are removed from membership in all your groups. If you are the only admin in your group, the group is left with no one who has the power to add you or any other member. And, while immediately-conferred bony mojo was once a sign of manual banning, it now appears for autoban as well.
So why am I cranky? Well, I'm not really so satisfied with the explanation. The explanation, outlined in ct's diary and comments, was:
she managed to post so many comments in a short period of time, she triggered the posting timeout. When this happens, if you keep trying to post comments it'll double the timeout, until such time that you exceed the maximum timeout and you get autobanned.
Nothing nefarious, here, and it's very hard for a human to trigger the timeout. It only looks at the number of comments in a very short time, not how many you've posted overall. Those of you who have managed to post 40,000+ comments are safe (unless you tried to post them all in five minutes).
It makes sense that the site would have software like this, that watches out for machines trying to overwhelm the site by running a script to post a flood of comments. It makes sense that the triggering event is a large number of comments posted in a short time (the time was acknowledged in the diary's comments to be two minutes. The number of comments was not specified, but it was said to be large, so large that an ordinary human would not have to worry about it.) We made a number of little jokes about triciawyse's superhuman qualities.
But the more little jokes we made, the more unlikely it sounded that she would be moved (or even able) to unleash this torrent of comments inside of two minutes. It bothered me for a day, and then I finally ran that search I linked you to above. And it showed that she'd made 15 comments in all of Tuesday, seven of them before the ban. (These seven are at the bottom of the linked search results, because what the url doesn't do is preserve my sort order.)
Here are the times of the pre-ban comments:
Tue May 17, 2011 at 03:15:13 PM EDT
Tue May 17, 2011 at 03:16:41 PM EDT
Tue May 17, 2011 at 03:27:32 PM EDT
Tue May 17, 2011 at 03:40:16 PM EDT
Tue May 17, 2011 at 03:57:17 PM EDT
Tue May 17, 2011 at 04:01:22 PM EDT
Tue May 17, 2011 at 04:03:07 PM EDT
So I posted my search url, and asked her, were there a lot of other comments besides these that you posted or tried to post in the runup to the ban, that aren't showing up here? And she said no. So, unless she's wildly mistaken, I'm supposed to believe that the dreaded "posting timeout" is triggered by 7 comments in just under 50 minutes, and that no one has ever done that before. I must say, I don't believe that. I am not sure what's missing from this story, but something is missing.
And the main reason it matters is, the concern of the commenters in ct's thread was that they not do something to get autobanned by mistake. If it's not the case that triciawyse was doing something extraordinary, then we're back to, What happened here? Can it happen again? What if I get accidentally banned and I don't have several hundred pissed-off friends vigorously petitioning for my reinstatement? If anyone stopping by can contribute to our education on this point, I'm sure we'd all feel better.
The last thing that happened that day was, ct published an additional update diary. By that time, everyone was so excited that two different people queued the diary to Cranky Users. One published it, and the second, unable to publish, was also unable to remove things from the queue, so there sat the extra copy in the queue the next morning. Naturally, I wanted to remove it, by clicking Remove. Well, that removed the diary from the group entirely! I don't see any other way to clean up your queue, but if you have that situation, be prepared to republish again.
As always, the comment thread is available for your thoughts on these events or any other topics of DK4 crankiness. Please post your questions and help other people if you know the answers. Ideally, we should all be able to learn what any of us may find out about DK4.
UPDATE:
In lengthy comments HERE and HERE, ct and rs offer further discussion on the issue of the Mysterious Banning. I hope I will not mangle their meaning too badly in trying to rephrase it. My own clarification added to beginning and end.
- The "comment timeout" being discussed means, if the software thinks you're an automated spammer, it prevents you from commenting for some amount of time. If you keep trying, it keeps doubling the length of the timeout and eventually bans you if you don't stop trying. The theory here is, a person could stop trying, but a machine must just keep going. Obviously, for a human user to avoid the ban, s/he should be shown a warning (which a spammer would not see because it's an automated process).
- There doesn't appear to have been any opportunity for the software in question to malfunction, except there's a variable (like a little bucket that can hold a number) that controls the triggering of the timeout. IF this bucket somehow got a bogus number or no number in it, it could have started the timeout process. As clarified by ct HERE, this would make the triggering process think that the maximum number of comments allowed in 2 minutes is zero. It's this timeout onset that we previously had no theory to account for.
- As mentioned Tuesday night, the warning that should have been displayed to a human user wasn't working, apparently the victim of a later software update. So, once the timeout started, even continuing to click Post on one comment that was stubbornly refusing to post for no apparent reason would be enough to keep doubling the timeouts and eventually cause banning.
- Working theory is that a cosmic ray struck the computer memory containing the variable in question and "flipped a bit", triggering the timeout process. (I have sometimes held this theory myself, about stuff of mine that's gone west for no reason. Another statement of the same thing is, shit happens).
- Repair steps being installed, likely tonight, are to force the process to reset the variable if it sees something's wrong with it, and to make sure the warning is shown once the timeout is triggered.
- There is a database table that keeps track of users who have triggered the timeout -- it was here that ct learned what was going on to begin with. Had this happened to anyone else, they'd have been found in the table also, but no one was, so we know that this has not happened before.
- If you are having trouble getting a comment to post, you might consider stepping away for a while, so that, if you are being timed out, the timeout can end without incident. Should you see a warning pop up about a comment timeout, you should definitely stop, and you should if possible take a screenshot of it or write down what it says, and file a bug report (unless you are a robot spammer -- then, tough luck, get lost.)
Many thanks to the developers for helping us to understand what happened.
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