Message composition bug fixed

richard on 2010/03/18 00:00

And also the RSS feed generation will work again ;)

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Cosmologicon on 2010/03/18 14:26:

Hey I'm noticing a pretty minor bug on the Messages page. The first few messages frequently appear out of order for me. Right now, they're like this:

Akake (20 hours ago)
Akake (81 minutes ago)

richard (9 hours ago)

richard (9 hours ago)

Akake (11 hours ago)

richard (14 hours ago)

richard (22:58 yesterday)

See, that top one should be sixth. I don't know if the timestamps are wrong, or the forum is actually listing them out of order. Anyway it's not a big deal, since the forum is so low-traffic, nothing has a big danger of being lost. I'm just saying.

richard on 2010/03/18 20:46:

That's odd. The highlighting is incorrect too, if your paste is accurate.

Cosmologicon on 2010/03/18 20:55:

The highlighting is sort of my fault. The highlighting on the messages page is fine, but when I tried to copy and paste from that page into the comment box, the second entry (the one that should have a gray stripe) simply wasn't there. Since it was also by Akake, I copied the first entry and just changed the time.

I would have noticed the highlighting was off, except there wasn't any highlighting in the comment box when I pasted it. It was doing some advanced HTML-y thing.

Anyway, they all seem to be in order now for me on the messages page!

richard on 2010/03/18 21:03:

That's extremely odd. The sorting should be deterministic! I'll have another look at the code to see if I can spot anything though ...

ninmonkey on 2010/03/18 21:08:

I thought I saw my post labeled as 9hours or more old, when it was less than 1. But it looks right now.
Maybe it had to do with the update, using an old cache or something.

Also, when I post, it always said something about broken, and email sent to admin. However I loaded message page , and it posted immediately. wierd.

ninmonkey on 2010/03/18 21:09:

note: the post before this line was the first one that worked fine. so maybe everything's fixed.

Cosmologicon on 2010/03/18 21:22:

Richard! I'm very interested in having an option to have the Entries page shuffled into a different order for each user! Would you be willing to give me or somebody access to the back end in order to attempt this?

I can discuss it by email if you would prefer!

piman on 2010/03/18 21:47:

Perhaps even better, the entry with the fewest ratings should be on top, with ties broken based on some consistent random seed like your login name.

There has definitely been a bias towards more ratings for entries starting with a lesser letter in the past.

Cosmologicon on 2010/03/18 22:19:

That's a good option too, assuming that the number of ratings for each entry is easy to get on the fly.

I also like mine because they'll stay in the same order over time. Not a huge deal, though.

richard on 2010/03/19 00:40:

Implementified.

Cosmologicon on 2010/03/19 01:46:

Outstanding, thanks! Great, now that I can expect more ratings, I actually have to make my game good this time! :(

richard on 2010/03/19 04:29:

Also, I've added deletion of diary entries :)

ServalKatze on 2010/03/19 15:33:

Excellent. ^^

mmkay on 2010/03/19 20:13:

Does the entries order shuffle only once for each user?

richard on 2010/03/19 21:32:

@mmkay no, the order will not stay consistent for a given user once rating starts

sjbrown on 2010/03/19 21:49:

thanks, richard. that's been the sole complaint i've had about pyweek.org for a couple cycles.

Akake on 2010/03/21 19:29:

My timestamps are still mixed up, though the posts seem to be in the correct order.

Also, I'm still getting the 500 error when I post... (IE: While my posts are successful, I get an error saying that they are not)

I'm liking the new look for the site, though. :)

richard on 2010/03/21 21:08:

It's some sort of encoding issue. I think I know what the problem is - I'll try to fix it later today.

richard on 2010/03/22 05:46:

Right, I think I've solved the encoding issue.

The message sorting one is very odd though. I just had an instance of it where the database listed:

title | activity
---------------------------------------------+---------------------------
A Wonderful Omen | 2010-03-22 02:32:56.227909

Warming up: scale demo | 2010-03-21 23:33:35.212543
Warming up: motion demo | 2010-03-21 22:10:20.915304
And in the interface "A Wonderful Omen" was listed as being 21 hours old (the others correctly displayed as being 3-4 hours old at the time). This is beyond my poor Django ken I'm afraid. I've forced the postgresql config to have the database work in "UTC" ... we'll see if that makes any difference at all (it doesn't appear to result in the attachment of a timezone to the datetimes coming from the database.)

I should note that after making the change the listing sorted correctly even though I don't believe I made any useful changes.

I should further note that I'm still running Django 0.96 so this is entirely likely to be a bug that's been fixed :-)

richard on 2010/03/22 08:19:

Oh, if you do get the mis-ordering again please send me the HTML source of the messages page (NOT a screenshot - I need the source). It might help :-)

Martin on 2010/03/22 13:48:

richard: It's doing it wrong for me.

I'm pretty sure the messages are in the right order (new messages are appearing at the top) but the times are wrong for anything from the last day or so.

HTML source at http://pastebin.ca/1849196

Cosmologicon on 2010/03/22 14:49:

To me it looks like a time zone thing. For me, it seems to think the local time is UTC-5, but be subtracting the UTC timestamp from the local time. For instance, it's currently 14:43 UTC. I see a post by tartley listed on the front page as "10 minutes ago". When I open it, I see that the post was made "on 2010/03/22 09:33", so it should have said 5 hours and 10 minutes ago. That sounds about right, by the way, I think that post was actually made about 5 hours ago.

Any messages posted within the past 5 hours would appear to be in the future, and it seems to be adding 24 hours to these. For instance, Martin's post, directly above this one, is listed as "19 hours ago" rather than "5 hours from now".

richard on 2010/03/22 22:16:

Agh. Something, somewhere, is doing stupid automagic and I can't figure out how to make it stop. My code is littered with datetime.datetime.now(UTC) ... the machine works in UTC, but sometimes for some users Django decides to shift some times for their timezone...

I'm trying another approach. I'm not sure it'll make any difference. We'll see...