A number of times over the last week or three, many more than I can count but
not every time or even most, clicking on a thread-listing's (New) symbol, to send one to the first message not yet read, has seen me reading the very last message - much as per the icon in the Last Post column on the thread-list - and not the message that I think I should have been #anchored to.
I started to notice apparent non-sequiturs in latest responses, until I realised that there were posts before the jumped-to one that the jumped-to one was written for, but I hadn't seen
them as New Posts (they were datetimed as since my last poke into the thread, as much as I could recall) and I could thus scroll back to the last remembered post and re-read the conversation. But it's happening too much to be "my error", of any of kind.
Possibilities:
1) Mis-click. Except that there's a world of difference in screen-space between the (New) icon and the Last Post link (and the Page 1... N links are far more adjacent and do not give the same behaviour as observed). I really need to check the URL next time, I realise, to see what the query string segment looks like.
2) Login-stealer randomly reading posts under my name. Highly unlikely that this is happening and only this is happening, given the apparent lack of any other obvious activity not attributable to me. (And I can see the next most available hard-drive that has any chance of having a login-cookie on ig just to my left, unencumbered by any other PC hardware, the only other working machine I have logged in from is similarly unlikely to be currently be used, or have been cloned even, and even then I deliberately used an Incognito-style browser-respawn for that session, just to not interfere with the main user's session info.) If I've somehow instead been MITMed at some point then I'd similarly be surprised at the precise scope of my 'identity theft'.
3) Personal dementia. Always a possibility, but tallying up the things I might be being increasingly confused about, the status of my reading of messages on just this forum seems to be a highly specific forgetfulness with no other similar examples. (Unless I'm forgetting them, right now!)
4) Some variety of Forum Bug. A db-lookup error or cross-leaking data pointers or whatnot. Which surely someone else will have noticed, though maybe not felt a need to remark upon before now, hence this post, to put it out there.
(If it doesn't happen to you, right now there's no reason to say so. If it's just me then I'll have to live with it and just be vigilent for additional clues.
And, from now on, I'm keeping a closer eye on the URL query and even delving into the source of the page to try to ascertain what gets #anchor-linked to and where that #anchor-link ends up being.
ETA: And it happens straight away.
Sent to
www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=162538.msg7858236;topicseen#new...but msg7858236 was the penultimate message, not the one I 'arrived' at..
Viewed Source of page (with the risk that it resubmits the request with altered pointer data, but I don't think it does) and in there I see:
<a id="msg7858239"></a><a id="new"></a>...the message I jumped to.
So apart from the risk of resubmission having reset the "generate anchor" position, it seems to confirm a forum bug,
Author
Topic: Anybody else noticed this forum misbehaviour? (Read 1281 times)