Phantom posts causing thread length errors

[szatox]

[Administrator note: this post, and the first 3 responses, were originally attached to the Report violations, duplicates, misplaced posts, etc. thread. These posts had some content that might be of interest to future readers, so I split them off rather than leave them in that thread, where they would be deleted as part of routine cleaning. -Hu]

viewtopic-t-1150988-postorder-asc-start-99.html (link modified manually so it points to something that does exist)

This topic behaves in a funny way right now. Forum reports it as 5-pages long, but jumping to 5th page errors out with "No posts exist for this topic"
Things like that happen now and then in different threads; kinda looks like an incomplete deletion where the post found by search _should_ be at certain offset, but something else's been kicked out of queue and now the offset reported by search is out of bounds.

[Hu]

viewtopic-t-1150988-postorder-asc-start-99.html (link modified manually so it points to something that does exist)

This topic behaves in a funny way right now. Forum reports it as 5-pages long, but jumping to 5th page errors out with "No posts exist for this topic"
Things like that happen now and then in different threads; kinda looks like an incomplete deletion where the post found by search _should_ be at certain offset, but something else's been kicked out of queue and now the offset reported by search is out of bounds.

My understanding is that it is not an incomplete deletion, but rather an incomplete creation. One or more users attempted to post in that thread with posts that failed some aspect of validation (such as post title too long). Those failed posts exist enough to cause the thread to claim to be 100+ posts long, and thus offer you a link to page (100 / 20) = 5, but do not exist enough to actually be shown when viewing the thread, so when you try to start on post 100, the forum fails, because it cannot find sufficient preceding posts. I am not aware of a way (other than direct SQL updates) to repair such threads.

[Chiitoo]

viewtopic-t-1150988-postorder-asc-start-99.html (link modified manually so it points to something that does exist)

This topic behaves in a funny way right now. Forum reports it as 5-pages long, but jumping to 5th page errors out with "No posts exist for this topic"
Things like that happen now and then in different threads; kinda looks like an incomplete deletion where the post found by search _should_ be at certain offset, but something else's been kicked out of queue and now the offset reported by search is out of bounds.

My understanding is that it is not an incomplete deletion, but rather an incomplete creation. One or more users attempted to post in that thread with posts that failed some aspect of validation (such as post title too long). Those failed posts exist enough to cause the thread to claim to be 100+ posts long, and thus offer you a link to page (100 / 20) = 5, but do not exist enough to actually be shown when viewing the thread, so when you try to start on post 100, the forum fails, because it cannot find sufficient preceding posts. I am not aware of a way (other than direct SQL updates) to repair such threads.

This is true.

I clean up "phantom posts" causing that issue from time to time, when I bump into such topics, and I've made a note of this particular one to do so with it as well on the next dive.

[szatox]

Ah, so that's how those fuzzy threads I encountered previously eventually stopped being fuzzy.
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