Topic: I've Made a Huge Mistake

[IceCold]

So. I was looking for the thread where Pale confirmed that the picture at the New York conference was, indeed, him - I was going to link to it from the Funhouse. After finding the thread (it was called "Conference Blog" or something) I wanted to link only to the single comment that Pale made. To do this, on the top right, where you choose which forum view you want, I clicked "Threaded (Single Messages)" instead of "Linear". A box is supposed to show up, which lists all the comments in the thread - you click on the message you want to have it isolated. However, the box was blank, even though there were 60+ comments. This hadn't happened to me before, so I tried to change the view to "Threaded (All Messages)"..

That didn't work either, so I decided to try out the "Branched" mode. Big mistake. As soon as I clicked on it, there was a message, saying something along the lines of "No messages. This thread will self-destroy in 5 seconds".. And it DID I went to Talkback and there was no trace of it. It disappeared!

I'm wondering if it's still there for you guys, or if I've deleted it for everyone. Also, if you can still see it, how do I get it back? And what's up with the problems I encountered?

Thanks

EDIT: Well. I found the article but, unlike all the other news articles, there was no option to discuss it in TalkBack, and no link to the comments! What have I done?  

[Jonnyboy117]

I think you have solved a very old Talkback mystery!  This seems to be what has caused our large Talkback threads to occasionally disappear without a trace.  TYP is working on a fix now.

[TheYoungerPlumber]

Sheesh.  No wonder we never figured out what was causing this problem.  It would explain why longer threads were more likely to succumb to undesired deletion.

I've done a sloppy fix of disabling that "Branched" option in the drop down menu when in the TalkBack subforum.  Not exactly ideal, but hopefully it will stop this from happening.  Some day I may actually figure out what information found in normal threads is missing from Talkback-generated threads, and reenable that option, but considering how rarely this bug has reared itself I'm not sure there will be many complaints.

[TheYoungerPlumber]

A moment of revalation and I've fixed the problem (hopefully).  All old and new Talkback threads should now have full browsing capabilities. *crosses fingers*

[KDR_11k]

Did the Australian Wii Details thread asplode that way?

[TheYoungerPlumber]

I hope so.  No way to really know for sure.

[vudu]

Congrats, IceCold.  You get a Scooby Snack.

The best part is, this has presumably happened a dozen plus times, yet no one's ever reported it.  It seems like they were all too ashamed/embarrassed to let the mods know they found the bug.  

[TheYoungerPlumber]

Yeah.  Frankly, I had never even noticed those alternate views.  One of the reasons I never figured out what was causing the bug!

[RickPowers]

I'm the one that bought and installed the forum software, and created the original TalkBackHack, and I never noticed those other views (or self-destructing threads) either.  Thank you so much for tracking down this long-standing (and absolutely infuriating) bug!