As some of you may have noticed, there have been some issues with the rating system and some unexplained movements. I have been tracking this and I am 99% sure I know what the problem is and where it comes from.

The problem that I have been having is with handling different time zones. You see the current collection system collects one days worth of posts at a time. Another words it will collect from 00:00:00 - 23:59:59 for the current day. Total them and then send them back to us. We do a calculation to determine how many posts have been made since the last update to properly assign post points. The problem that was occurring is that day change was happening at different points. So the script that we use to calculate was calculating incorrect. Initially it was giving fairly significant negative values, which I would spot and hand fix.

Well in came bright idea number one. Use the returned unix timestamp from the remote site to determine day change. Well unfortunately for me I neglected to think about the unix timestamp and what it really did. Which is calculate the number of seconds from a certain point in time. The problem is that when you do that calculation any where but the actual system it came from the timestamp becomes unreliable. Thus we ended up with a compounded issue. Now we were giving very high positive numbers at day change and occasionally they would be level set by the appropriate negative number. Unfortunately this was not happening as often or as predictable so that we could just let it correct its self.

I was hoping can you tell?

So now I am using a straight mysql timestamp that will give me the textual date/time indication for the site. Now I should be able to accurately determine day change and it should be handled correctly. Problem with this is that it will take every person that has joined a forum to make a post in that forum before this fix will kick in and really start working. Once that one post has been made and recorded the system will have a reference point to work from and should do all calculations correctly. We have made the choice to leave the bugged posts in the system. They will simply fade out over the next 30 days. The reason this decision was made has to do with the extreme difficulty in attempting to locate and remove these anomalies. I apologize about the issues. This just never came up in testing. It sux and I hate bugs more than anyone else. Over the next 24 hours the rating system should start shaking it's self out and I will need to see day changes to be certain it worked.

LarryB

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good stuff, will get posting again then

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I'm happy to report that of the subscribed members that have posted since the last fix went in, all of them have worked as expected and are having no issues with posts not updating correct up to this point.

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