Erratic time logging

[davec]

As I noted in a post, I saw on the board index that PeterSF was the last person to post an entry, but when I read the thread, in fact ST was the last. I returned to the board index to find that PeterSF was still listed as last.

Now, twice, I have found that the board index changes the claimed time a post was made, both times to an earlier date.

Thas' a bit rigwelted, I think. Tha' mon upskittle it...

[chris]

How very strange. Let me see if there's some setting about "randomise time zones" or some such...

Chris

[davec]

The post times changed by some odd number of hours and minutes both times, not just an even number of hours. It happens when I'm done with one section of the forum and go back to the index to see what's up in the others.

[SepticTone]

To be honest, I think, now the spammers have gone, it'd be more positive to allow free access to anyone registering, as I think the delay in seeing their posts, after being approved by a mod puts new people off.

Spam is easily removed, by me, within a day or two, chris.

[chris]

Alrighty, I switched the bugger off. If there's a giant leap in spammers then give me a yell and I'll switch it back on!

Chris

[davec]

Erm... it still does it. Your message was logged in for Thur Mar 10, but after logging in and returning to the board index it's now down as Wed Mar 9. Are you sure that message approval has anything to do with it?

It's not a serious problem so far, and probably not going to do anything nasty. But you know how bugs are. If you don't know the exact cause, you don't know how bad it really is. It's not going to wipe out anyone's credit history, but I'd hate to see the site crash.

I'm remembering the time I asked a colleague at work, a sys admin, to show me how to monitor disk space usage on a DEC mini system I was using. He said, "Oh, sure, it's easy." A few quick keystrokes brought up a display that caused him to gasp as if he'd swallowed a wasp. "NINETY EIGHT PERCENT FULL!!! WHAT?????"

Turns out that he had a job that ran every four hours, which kept a log file. In the command line parameters for the log file, he had accidentally typed an 'a' instead of an 'r'. So, every time it ran, it didn't (R)eplace the old log file, it (A)ppended a revised copy. Therefore, the log file was at least doubling in size every time the job ran. If I hadn't asked that innocent little question at just that time, the job would have run again while we were all home enjoying dinner. Hard crash city.

The job seemed to be running OK.