User talk:D. Matt Innis/Archive 8

Text in Internet article has mysteriously disappeard

Matt,

Something mysterious has happened. Between two edits by Howard on the current Internet article, a large amount of text has disappeared. It doesn't appear Howard deleted it, since the change doesn't show a radical decrease in the amount of text in the article. However, it just isn't there any more. The two edits are text there and text not there. Dan Nessett 18:08, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Dan, this is an (occasionally) recurring problem that crops up once in a while, generally on Talk pages in which people are making rapid responses to each other. For some reason yet undiscovered text will sometimes disappear. At first (about 8 months ago) this appeared to merely be hearsay anecdotes but it happened to ME a couple of times and I KNEW that I wasn't deleting other peoples messages. Unfortunately, it was happening on talk pages that were quite contentious (homeopathy? child-abuse cults?) and it was easy for one Citizen to believe that some other Citizen was maliciously deleting his text. Somewhere in the Forum, probably in the Technical or Bug sections, there are a couple of threads about this. As I recall, we never did figure out precisely what was happening. We did, however, finally document it enough to be certain that it really was a bug of some sort and not "enemy action". Hayford Peirce 18:17, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Well, that is somewhat of a relief. I thought magic gremlins were at work :-D. So, how should we handle this? If I rollback the changes Howard made in his last edit, he might think I am getting out of line. There are reasons (which you know) why I don't want to do anything that may appear hostile. Dan Nessett 18:25, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Howard will understand, he was part of the issue last time it happened. Just make sure to leave a message int he edit summary and on the talk page and you'll be okay. I seem to remember that it had something to do with the servers not being synchronized and the times were off. Sometimes, two edits will actually appear out of order, too, i.e. a resposne to a question may show up before the question. D. Matt Innis 18:36, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

We don't know all the conditions that produce it, but, for example, if you open an article section for editing, make no changes, and save, part or all of the rest of the article may disappear. While section editing is convenient, I often force myself to try to do full article to work around this bug -- that also helps, incidentally, on being able to see whether citations work correctly.

Hayford, it might have been Satanic child abuse with homeopathic doses of strange substances while under a hoaxed new moon. Howard C. Berkowitz 18:40, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, at the same time that Martin Cohen was trying to move it into the Philosophy Workgroup. Hayford Peirce 18:45, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

More seriously, yes, I think Howard is correct in saying that the bug *mainly* appeared when people were making edits within *sections* and not within the entire article. Exclusively? I can't remember. But not editing sections by themselves seemed to make the problem vanish -- I haven't heard anyone bringing it up for several months now. Hayford Peirce 18:47, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) At least in this case no mystery happened. The diff between the two versions shows the text: It has not disappeared (and if you click edit the text is also present. It only does not show on the page! Why? The diff shows the reason in red: Where the displayed text ends a <!-- is inserted, i.e., a comment begins which has no corresponding --> , so that the comment runs to the end of the page. Peter Schmitt 20:40, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Haha! And there you have it, another example of the dangers of assumption! D. Matt Innis 21:04, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Good eyes Peter. I didn't even consider that. Dan Nessett 21:58, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Just one more remark on the bug: As I experienced it, it happens if one edits a section, makes no changes, but saves it anyway. Then only this section gets saved - the rest of the page "disappears". Thus the file always will be smaller (a subset of the previous revision). I do not know if this happens every time when this situation occurs, or only occasionally. Peter Schmitt 23:10, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, has this been reported as a bug to bugs@citizendium? Dan Nessett 23:27, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

(EC)Thanks, Peter, I do remember that. I hadn't realized that the section was the only thing remaining. It has been a while since it's happened to me. I might have been like Howard and just got in the habit of editing the entire page, bt I also sometimes hit "cancel" if I changed my mind.

Dan, at the time it was happening, we all flooded Larry, for sure, with emails and I can't imagine that we didn't drop a note to bugs, but I think we stopped complaining once we found out what was happening. D. Matt Innis 23:31, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

PS, I tried the section edit on this talk page and, sure enough, everything dissapeared but this section... it might be every time... (it also felt very strange to hit the save key when I made no edit, so I assume I rarely do it. D. Matt Innis 23:34, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

[unindent]

Well, when I left the last comment, I did edit the section and it didn't remove the other text on the page. Is there anyway to reliably force the bug to occur? I have just downloaded the CZ MW software and as we speak am figuring out how to modify the page table layout so the install script works correctly. Once I get that to work and have downloaded the CZ database dump I can work on the bug. However, it is hard to find bugs that are not reproducible. Dan Nessett 23:39, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

That's because you *did* edit the page. This time, click to edit the section (but don't make any changes), then click save. I'll bet $50 the rest of the page dissapears  ;-) D. Matt Innis 23:43, 18 September 2009 (UTC)