Sorting mystery partly solved

[Kath-H]

Occasionally a thread from some time ago jumps up the chronological list. I think I know why. It's just happened to a post I had not started, but had contributed to. Although the last reply was a few days ago and not by me, the thread was shown ahead of many more recent posts, and I was allegedly the most recent contributor - not so.

I had just received an email about a rejected claim of abuse against me in that thread. So, some action by a moderator pushed it out of position and messed up the 'last contributor' indication.

Probably something similar explains why a 3-month-old post is currently showing at the top of the Testing sub-forum. Another jolly little quirk

[Ramón G Castañeda]

Kath,

Yes I had already observed and reported on the anomalies when abuse has been reported.

Additionally, if a post gets deleted for spam,  the thread will still be at the top even though the last of the remaining posts is months or years old.

[Kath-H]

Also, where posts have been deleted, the number on the last displayed post will be lower than the total number displayed on the thread list. This can mean that a 2nd page has been created but it now redundant. I clicked on 'Next', wondering what was going on, and got an error message. Then realised what had happened.

[Kath-H]

Of course. I wouldn't expect any results from it though - although I was reported for a much milder post than many of his arrogant and intransigent ones.

[Ramón G Castañeda]

Incidentally, Kath, have you noticed that there's a Report Abuse button in all of van Dieten's posts too? 

[Jochem van Dieten]

That is one of a host of bugs in moderation and content editing that affect dates and counts. CS-11281, CS-12734, CS-12879, etc.

Most of these have been fixed in ClearSpace version 2.5.11. An update from the current 2.5.7 to a more recent version is rumoured to be in the works, but Community Experts / hosts are not being kept in the loop on the schedule.

[Jacob Bugge]

I reported the removed spam effect a  while ago. I reported a spam post, and the newest post in the top thread was 1 year ago.

Another set of strangenesses is caused by editing posts:

In recent threads, the editing of a post brings the thread to the top and causes the editing poster to become last, but the post remains in place. In the days of the fair forums, the original time of posting was kept, and a note was supplied stating the time of (latest) edit.

In older threads, an edition just changes the time stamp of the post in question.

In both cases, the time stamp causes an apparent mess in the posts, the edited post seemingly being later than the following ones. On one occasion, the changed time stamp an insignificant editing made the subsequent poster complain about pointsgiving (as opposed to thanksgiving).