'Blank' Forum Pages

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Recently I was looking at the oldest threads in the forums on WP, and I found something I'm quite curious about. I'm not sure whether I am the only person to experience this, or if it is a phenomenon common to all users of the forum, or to all users of one internet browser). This might be an old issue, because I only gave a token look to see if it had been brought up before. If it is an old issue, I apologise.

In several forums, when I moved to the last page of threads, the page was empty save for any announcements that had been made in that forum (because announcements appear on every page of their relevant forum). If I wanted to find the oldest active threads, I would have to cycle through one or more 'blank' pages. This surprised me, because I would have expected the last page of threads to have the oldest threads, and I don't see what the use of these 'blank' pages would be.

I'm not sure how well I'm communicating here, so I shall include some pictures.

This picture is of the 308th page of threads in the Random Discussion forum, a forum which has a total of 311 such pages. As you can see, it is empty save for an announcement. The three pages following it are also empty.



And here is the page before it, 307. You can see the oldest thread in the forum here (there is only one thread there because of the number of threads in the forum when I took the screenshot)



Now, because I had nothing better to do, I went through every forum (barring those invisible to me) to see how widespread this phenomenon is - I even braved the fetid depths of Adult Autism Issues. If you are as thrilled by lists as I am, then here is a treat for you -

Key: Forum Name - last page with threads/first page without threads/total pages

• General Autism Discussion - 625/626/635
• Getting to Know Each Other - 180/-/180
• Autism Politics, Activism, and Media Representation - 30/31/31
• News and Current Events* - 106/106/107 (and no announcements)
• Bipolar, Tourettes, Schizophrenia, and Other Psychological Conditions - 2/-/2
• Random Discussion - 307/308/311
• Off the Wall: Forum Games, Quizzes, Roleplaying, etc. - 59/60/61
• Members Only Discussion - 102/103/104
• Parents' Discussion - 90/91/91
• Love and Dating - 139/140/140
• The Haven - 136/137/137
• Social Skills and Making Friends* - 82/83/83
• School and College Life - 51/-/51
• Work and Finding a Job - 46/-/46
• Health, Fitness, and Sports - 27/-/27
• Games and Video Games - 55/-/55
• Television, Film, and Video - 84/-/84
• Art, Writing, and Music - 98/-/98
• Computer, Math, Science, and Technology - 80/-/80
• Politics, Philosophy, and Religion - 122/-/122
• Adult Autism Issues - 69/70/71
• Women's Discussion - 19/-/19
• In-Depth Adult Life Discussion* - 20/21/21
• Adolescent Autism Forum - 20/-/20
• Kids' Crater - 13/-/13
• WrongPlanet.net Discussion - 46/47/47
• Stats - 2/-/2
• Español, Nederlands, Deutsch, Français - 4/-/4

The "-" that appears amongst the numbers represents a forum with no blank pages. The asterisk next to a forum name designates those forums that have both blank pages and no announcements. I singled these out because if a forum has no announcements, then when I find myself on a blank page I receive a message telling me that the entire forum is empty. This is noteworthy because this page did not present me with any links to navigate to another page of the forum, which meant that I had to exit the forum and re-enter it (or click 'back' twice).

Here is a picture of this page -



EDIT - killing those typos

Last edited by McTell on 09 Oct 2010, 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

must be deleted threads, there was a lot deleted at the beginning of the year

there has been a lot of moved threads over the years, but they were moved to non public viewing.

This was a suspicion I had, but I thought that if that were the case then PPR would have at least one blank page, and I would imagine Adult Autism Issues would be missing more pages than the Games forum, when in fact they both have the same number of blank pages.

So, this isn't just something on my end then?

The PHPBB2 software maintains various counts in the database, to save recalculating them every time a page is requested.

For example, take the "Posts:" figure given for each of the 15 contributors on a typical page of posts.

It would be wildly inefficient for the software to need to make 15 requests on the database, each scanning every post for a given user, and counting them up, before it could sent the constructed page out.

In fact, the "Posts:" count is taken directly from the users' profile entries (in effect), where it is just updated when that user makes a post, or a post of theirs is deleted.

Immediately, there is an anomaly that you can see with this particular count. Although it reflects the posts held by that user in the system, some of those posts may be in forums that are inaccessible to some users. The count itself cannot do much about that. If you use the search facility to see a user's posts, the count given there will often be lower. Currently, for me, I see "Posts:10197", but when I use the Search on myself, I see "Search found 8454 matches". This is mainly because about 1,500 of my posts are now hidden from me. I recall that my count was also in error by about three posts, which I'm sure were the result of old WP crashes.

Anyway, in theory, the "Posts:" count should be maintained correctly, but there are several reasons why it can go wrong. One can be bugs in the software (it has many). Another can be when WrongPlanet crashes. Also, posts can be removed by deleting them directly from the database. Finally, the count itself can be directly modified (e.g. as stated in the rules, under "Spamming").

Similarly, the count of threads in each forum is held in the forum's database entry. Again, it saves recalculating it every time. Once more, this count can go out of step with reality. The count is handy for calculating how many pages of threads the forum contains. Or rather, how many pages it is THOUGHT to contain. When you actually go to view the pages, that's when the database is scanned to actually find the threads that belong to the forum. When it turns out that the actual count doesn't match the expected number, the software has to do the best it can to recover.

There are tools built into the PHPBB2 administration to repair these anomalies, but Alex won't use them.

Isn't there a way to repair or optimize the board at least like they do with vBulletin on this 10 year old software?

Sometimes a similar thing happens if you go to the last page of your posts or new posts since your last visit too. As lau said, it's just how the forum's software works.

phpBB2 is seriously outdated, BTW.

This is too many, Lau.

It would appear so.