[Imc-web-editor] Re: [UCIMC-Tech] Houston, We Have a Problem

[Mike Lehman]

Josh,
Sorry I was so brief in the message this morning, but I was heading out 
the door for campus when I found it. Here are some more details.

The new problem this morning was at this link:
http://www.ucimc.org/admin/content/comment

I was getting an error message this morning for the issue with 1. When I 
went to the recent articles that I knew the comments were posted to, 
there were no comments! They'd gone missing.  Now it's OK, so something 
you've done since has fixed it? I would suspect a database issue, but???

The recently hidden articles reappearing/old articles being hidden 
problem was in 2. This seems related to my message over the weekend, 
although it wasn't as bad as it was this morning. The relevant link is here:
http://www.ucimc.org/admin/content/node

As you can see with some poking around, there is a mix of mostly old 
articles mixed in with the occasional new post, which seem to get there 
simply because that's where it's interleaved  when gets posted among the 
mess of old stuff.

When you went to one of the old stories that should be published, you'd 
see that they were hidden and they had a current date stamp, along with 
the original date of posting. More irritating were the articles that 
originally were hidden, but now were visible in the editors screen. 
Fortunately, these did not pop up on the mainpage. I don't have the time 
to dig back  to see if they were visible in the archived posts that have 
slipped off the front page.

The fact that there were things being changed makes me think that  some 
sort of process was underway that could be causing the issues that were 
visible. This had been going on for a week or so when I sent my message 
about it over the weekend. Now things seem to be back in order since 
this morning. You may want to document whatever you did that seems to 
have fixed things, as it may come in useful in the future.

For editors using a specific screen among those I just noted, it could 
be disconcerting. The only way I could be sure about what was visible 
was to log out and look at the mainpage to confirm that things I thought 
I was seeing was not on the mainpage. However, when I got the error 
message on the comments page, I couldn't see the recent comments. I 
wasn't logged out, so maybe if I'd done that I would have seen the 
comments correctly, don't know.

In the correlation is not causation category, we had a Dan Spam/SFnessie 
imposter posted this morning at this link:
http://www.ucimc.org/content/just-update-my-readers

You may want to check that post for the logs to rule out any hanky-panky 
related to our problem this morning. Whoever is posting those has been a 
PITA since the first year we had the website up. He has made repeated 
attempts to attack the website, although he hasn't been much of an issue 
lately. Maybe he has some new toys he was trying out?
Mike Lehman

Josh King wrote:
> I'm on it. Can you provide a link(s) to articles that were hidden and 
> are no longer? It's difficult for me to get a birds-eye view of 
> content on the site over time, since I'm usually looking at it with an 
> eye towards technical issues rather then the actual stories. Have you 
> checked to see if the articles or comments in question have ended up 
> in the spam filter? I'm concerned that the spam filter's algorithm 
> might be over-zealous in marking things as spam, and it would probably 
> good if the editors get in the habit of checking it for things that 
> don't look like spam and either re-publishing or hiding them. It has a 
> bayesian spam filter that's supposed to learn, so if we mark articles 
> to tune it, it'll become less of a big deal over time. But as it is, 
> I'm considering disabling it.
>
> Mike Lehman wrote:
>> I was just poking around on the website. We have two significant 
>> problems.
>>
>> 1. Comments to recent articles are disappearing!
>>
>> 2. Recently hidden articles are reappearing!
>>
>> This appears to be related to whatever flaky has been going on with 
>> the editing screens, but may be something else. We need to figure 
>> this out asap.
>> Mike Lehman
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>