I didn't want to post this in the Active PICAXE Forum as this isn't an important glitch, but something I wanted to point out anyway.
After this thread was bumped up with a new reply, I noticed the 'deleted by eclectic' post above by a relatively new member who I recall posted links to his commercial site - and posted five times but the moderators only edited three posts and deleted two.
But what happens is if you click on the 'View Forum Posts' link for the member, at the bottom it says "Results 1 to 3 of 5". If you press Reload then it changes to "Results 1 to 3 of 3" but it will be back once a new search is generated. It's not just for this user, the same thing happens for msbates - speaking of which, revisiting that made me notice that that user referred to a moderator as a nazi.
The problem isn't a new thing introduced with the forum upgrade as I took a screen shot of msbates' results page ages ago which shows this problem.
Presumably the moderators can still read the posts or they see the reason for deletion that normal users can enter when deleting their own posts.
The next glitch is about searching the forum - deleted posts are also searched using the feature so if a deleted post contains content you're searching for, then you won't see it in the thread. It could be possible for a program to be written to perform brute force recovery of deteted posts by searching the forum constantly with a slowly growing string of characters and seeing if the parent thread appears in the results. Of course, I haven't done that.
But a demonstration of this bug can be seen by searching for something 'memorable' from a post that you once saw but has since been deleted. Type 'herpes' into the search box and this is the only thread that comes up - but the word herpes does not show up on the page. It was from Madras' rant on the poorly formatted code and telling them to switch from perl to lisp. I did print screen the post - it was the first reply to the thread (before srnet) - but I'm not uploading it! The text is not present in the source code either, so at least the forum is secure to some extent. Yes I have posted about this before and if you want me to shut up about it then say so.
After this thread was bumped up with a new reply, I noticed the 'deleted by eclectic' post above by a relatively new member who I recall posted links to his commercial site - and posted five times but the moderators only edited three posts and deleted two.
But what happens is if you click on the 'View Forum Posts' link for the member, at the bottom it says "Results 1 to 3 of 5". If you press Reload then it changes to "Results 1 to 3 of 3" but it will be back once a new search is generated. It's not just for this user, the same thing happens for msbates - speaking of which, revisiting that made me notice that that user referred to a moderator as a nazi.
The problem isn't a new thing introduced with the forum upgrade as I took a screen shot of msbates' results page ages ago which shows this problem.
Presumably the moderators can still read the posts or they see the reason for deletion that normal users can enter when deleting their own posts.
The next glitch is about searching the forum - deleted posts are also searched using the feature so if a deleted post contains content you're searching for, then you won't see it in the thread. It could be possible for a program to be written to perform brute force recovery of deteted posts by searching the forum constantly with a slowly growing string of characters and seeing if the parent thread appears in the results. Of course, I haven't done that.
But a demonstration of this bug can be seen by searching for something 'memorable' from a post that you once saw but has since been deleted. Type 'herpes' into the search box and this is the only thread that comes up - but the word herpes does not show up on the page. It was from Madras' rant on the poorly formatted code and telling them to switch from perl to lisp. I did print screen the post - it was the first reply to the thread (before srnet) - but I'm not uploading it! The text is not present in the source code either, so at least the forum is secure to some extent. Yes I have posted about this before and if you want me to shut up about it then say so.
