Strange topics appearing

[Timbo]

I have been noticing a few strange topics appearing lately with people posting in them who shouldn't have the ability to do so. I noticed two days ago that there was a topic I had deleted with a post from Sage in the new Armes forum and today I noticed in the New Armes' leader's forum a topic that I deleted that had a post from highwind in it.

Both of these, when clicked, said that no posts exist.
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"There is no normal life, there's just life. Now get on with it"

[iscalio]

Those ghost topics appear due to the grand data loss; I think it has something to do with reused topic IDs.

[Vextor]

iscalio is correct. We'll continue to get them until we have more topics than we had before the great data loss, so consider it some sort of "aftereffect of the space/time shift" or some role-playing excuse/BS. You're seeing a vision of a future which has been lost.

Technically, this happenes because I salvaged old topics, but the text was lost. This means people have kept their topic count from the lost time (which is good), but these topics lost it's body.

[Parallax]

[Vextor]

I think this happens when the old topic ID is reclaimed by somebody else who make a new topic that overlaps the old topic ID, which means your old topics become over-written by somebody else. Didn't think of that possibility. I have no idea how this can be remedied, though. I'll think about it.

[Parallax]

Is that why topics appear to have the most random people posting in them, as well? If my topic ID X gets claimed by someone who makes a new topic, then I might see a topid made by Goldmember in the Scarlet Moon Empire, despite him not having access to my forum?

I saw something bizarre like that this morning, and I mostly thought I was going crazy.

The strange part was, I believe it showed a ghost of a topic I had made about nation mods during the time of the data loss, and then (as Timbo described) there was no post ID to it, and it vanished immediately afterwards, though it showed the author as Goldmember.
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He's a victim - not a perp - and I'm choosing to let him go.

[Vextor]

That's probably it.

[fuji]

To fix it, the topics table uses an auto_increment value if I'm correct. Just change the auto_increment value to something > than the last known topic id. For example, pre-crash the last topic created could be number 12100 (example). If this is the case, changing the auto_increment value of the new topics table to 12101 should make it so that no other topic id's are reclaimed.
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______ "We're still flying"

___ "That's not much"

"It's enough"

[fuji]

To fix this you need to do the same operation to the POSTS_TABLE as well. Could just set it to 310000 and nobody should lose anymore "Topics Started" data. A new member has one topic started even though they've only made 1 post (at this time). This means that the POSTS_TABLE needs to have it's auto_increment value increased past where it was before. I figure 310000 is a good number to go with.
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______ "We're still flying"

___ "That's not much"

"It's enough"

[Vextor]

Actually, what I was planning is create a new stat augumentation table (which I already have for a future "stat stones feature") and plug in the old topic count in there. I still have the old data, I believe. But this should also work! Thanks Blas!

[kuwaizair]

weird, gues thats why It said I created the "best Sienfiled character" poll in Harmonia
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