Fanfare posts showing as deleted but aren't March 26, 2016 7:31 AM Subscribe
There are posts in Fanfare showing as deleted, but there is no deletion reason showing, and if I click on them they are open for comments. Currently, Two-Lane Blacktop, Horror Club: Calvaire, and Shut Up And Drive show as deleted (from the top few posts.) Firfefox 44.0, Ubuntu latest version. (I have clicked for community input to see if anyone else has this issue on other browsers and OS's.)
Details of which:
Every post on every part of the site gets a subsite-specific post id, and these scripts look for deletions by scanning the front page of a subsite for gaps in the continuity of the postids. On the blue, that works really well: the only way two postids won't be consecutive for front page posts is if a post in between them got deleted.
Current example: Renting a Friend... has a postid of 158165; Way to give... has postid 158163. The script scans the front page, notices there's a one-id gap there, and does a query for http://www.metafilter.com/158164, this one, and fetches the deleted posts info and displays it however that particular script chooses to.
The problem arises for subsites where we don't always display every post on the front page. In the case of FanFare, for example, we assign postids from a single pool to both media posts (TV, book, etc) and to FanFare Talk and Club Talk posts. But we don't display Talk posts on the front page of FanFare, and so you end up with postid gaps on the front page that the "gap means deletion" script metric mistakes for post removal. Hence the false positive when e.g. this Two Lane Blacktop movie post, 6313, has a postid one less than this "Shut Up And Drive" Talk post, 6314. The front page of FanFare jumps straight from 6313 to 6315, a post about a House of Cards episode.
(This used to, years back, be a problem for Ask MetaFilter to for the specific case of Anonymous questions, because they originally reserved a postid at submission time and so would appear well out of numerical order once they went through. Eventually we fixed that because it was a headache for more than one reason. But you'll still see the same issue with Music as well, since we share postids between both Song and Music Talk posts.)
Again, no good simple quick fix for that; the assumption that a gap is a deletion works for some subsites but not for others as a result of different basic rubrics for displaying kinds of posts, and it's not something we're restructuring on our end and also not trivial for a lightweight script to sort out on the client side.
That said, just about nothing gets deleted from FanFare anyway other than development test posts, so no loss there.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:48 AM on March 26, 2016 [7 favorites]
Every post on every part of the site gets a subsite-specific post id, and these scripts look for deletions by scanning the front page of a subsite for gaps in the continuity of the postids. On the blue, that works really well: the only way two postids won't be consecutive for front page posts is if a post in between them got deleted.
Current example: Renting a Friend... has a postid of 158165; Way to give... has postid 158163. The script scans the front page, notices there's a one-id gap there, and does a query for http://www.metafilter.com/158164, this one, and fetches the deleted posts info and displays it however that particular script chooses to.
The problem arises for subsites where we don't always display every post on the front page. In the case of FanFare, for example, we assign postids from a single pool to both media posts (TV, book, etc) and to FanFare Talk and Club Talk posts. But we don't display Talk posts on the front page of FanFare, and so you end up with postid gaps on the front page that the "gap means deletion" script metric mistakes for post removal. Hence the false positive when e.g. this Two Lane Blacktop movie post, 6313, has a postid one less than this "Shut Up And Drive" Talk post, 6314. The front page of FanFare jumps straight from 6313 to 6315, a post about a House of Cards episode.
(This used to, years back, be a problem for Ask MetaFilter to for the specific case of Anonymous questions, because they originally reserved a postid at submission time and so would appear well out of numerical order once they went through. Eventually we fixed that because it was a headache for more than one reason. But you'll still see the same issue with Music as well, since we share postids between both Song and Music Talk posts.)
Again, no good simple quick fix for that; the assumption that a gap is a deletion works for some subsites but not for others as a result of different basic rubrics for displaying kinds of posts, and it's not something we're restructuring on our end and also not trivial for a lightweight script to sort out on the client side.
That said, just about nothing gets deleted from FanFare anyway other than development test posts, so no loss there.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:48 AM on March 26, 2016 [7 favorites]
Okay, thanks. Did wonder whether it was a problem with the deleted posts script. On the subject of development tests, what was the FPP test about the other day, just out of curiosity. (I love the deletion reason for that one!)
posted by marienbad at 8:52 AM on March 26, 2016
posted by marienbad at 8:52 AM on March 26, 2016
Dunno! I think gnfti and lungful must've talked about whatever that was over mefimail.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:58 AM on March 26, 2016
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:58 AM on March 26, 2016
I always wondered about this, but was too lazy to ask. Thank you!
posted by Melismata at 9:39 AM on March 26, 2016
posted by Melismata at 9:39 AM on March 26, 2016
I made a few small tweaks to the deleted posts script to exclude FanFare and also fix the malformed footer line . You can grab it here.
posted by casaubon at 1:46 PM on March 26, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by casaubon at 1:46 PM on March 26, 2016 [8 favorites]
Thanks, casaubon! Works great!
posted by Frayed Knot at 8:50 AM on March 27, 2016
posted by Frayed Knot at 8:50 AM on March 27, 2016
Again, no good simple quick fix for that; the assumption that a gap is a deletion works for some subsites but not for others as a result of different basic rubrics for displaying kinds of posts, and it's not something we're restructuring on our end and also not trivial for a lightweight script to sort out on the client side.
Since I'm not responsible for implementing anything on either side of this I'm free to make suggestions: You could flag deleted posts in some conspicuous way (stick something in the header), and the deleted user scripts could check for that *after* fetching the possibly deleted page (maybe there's enough data in the post page to figure this out already). Can't save the bogus request, but at least you'll get correct behavior from the user perspective.
posted by Dr Dracator at 4:52 AM on March 29, 2016
Since I'm not responsible for implementing anything on either side of this I'm free to make suggestions: You could flag deleted posts in some conspicuous way (stick something in the header), and the deleted user scripts could check for that *after* fetching the possibly deleted page (maybe there's enough data in the post page to figure this out already). Can't save the bogus request, but at least you'll get correct behavior from the user perspective.
posted by Dr Dracator at 4:52 AM on March 29, 2016
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Unfortunately, because of the way those scripts work, there's not a great lightweight way to make them not incorrectly report deletedness in some cases. So it's just sort of a script-user beware situation.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:35 AM on March 26, 2016