Woah!

There it was Forrest, five minutes ago - that whacky phenomenon where every article and general thread had a red 'less than 1 minute ago' message next to it.

Then it was all back normal very quickly!

Ludwig,

Thanks for reporting that you, too, have seen that crazy phenomenon of the 'less than 1 minute ago' flags. Sometimes I think I must be imagining some of the things I think I have seen on OLO. Which is why I have taken to more frequent screenshotting, just to be able to prove that I'm not going round the twist.

Its occurrence does not seem to have resulted in the re-opening of closed threads. When I took the screenshots I posted as twitpics I didn't think to make sure I got a shot of a part of the index with closed threads. The flags were only like that for at most 15 minutes, maybe even much less than that.

I gather that it has been news to GrahamY, judging from his comment above.

Odd that it occurred again after being mentioned for the first time in this thread. Then again, perhaps it happens much more frequently than we might imagine. I've no idea of the traffic density to the OLO site: maybe the odds of anyone seeing this seeming glitch are relatively long.

I wonder what it all means?

This morning I am having difficulty getting the articles index to load.

Here is a twitpic of my screen: http://twitpic.com/273qyd

Strangely, after I hit the stop button, I encountered no difficulty getting the General Discussions index up.

I am a little surprised that the connection did not time out and a 404 notice come up during the attempt to access the Articles index. I wonder what determines how long it will be before any connection times out, because when attempting, over the years, to access other sites, connections seem to have timed out much sooner. I wonder whether this is something that is 'tweakable' from site to site, by 'Big Bruvver', or an even bigger bruvver.

Nothing is as paralysing of Forum traffic, I should imagine, than sheer apparent inactivity of the site.

I am pleased to report that it has all been working perfectly for the past week.

Yay!

A funny thing happened today on the Forum.

At risk of being a little bit off-topic, but not at any risk of derailing a currently spirited discussion, I am curious as to why the OLO posting pane does not seem to want to accept the deliberate use of the space-bar as a means to the manual introduction of a limited degree of text formatting.

Here I was posting the score on another thread, see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3834#94229 , and, like any good scoreboard poster would, I used the space-bar to align the 'Nil' vertically under the '1'. Upon refreshing the thread, I noticed that the spaces were no longer there.

A week or so ago I posted a quotation from the Constitution, and in doing so similarly attempted to format the quotation manually to replicate its precise appearance in the printed document itself. I have a recollection that when first posted the formatting was actually present in the post as it appeared, but on a subsequent visit to the thread I found that the formatting had disappeared. Now I can't be sure if I only imagined it.




Does the use of the space-bar pose an issue for the Forum?




Has any other OLO user experienced this behaviour of the software?

I can't say it is a huge issue for me, but I am curious as to just why it might matter. I strive to make the most of the 350 word limitation by making posts as readable as possible, and sometimes a little bit of formatting or use of blank space helps, IMO.