Somebody has commented on your deleted story

THBGato

Litaddict
Joined
Jan 27, 2024
Posts
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So, a notification this morning ("Somebody has commented on your deleted story") has me a little paranoid. I've not requested any stories be deleted. Everything still seems to be there. I don't want anything to be deleted.

What? Anyone had anything similar? Is this what it looks like when a reader deletes their comment?
 
So, a notification this morning ("Somebody has commented on your deleted story") has me a little paranoid. I've not requested any stories be deleted. Everything still seems to be there. I don't want anything to be deleted.

What? Anyone had anything similar? Is this what it looks like when a reader deletes their comment?
Best guess is an admin error or something. There have been a few threads on this over the past couple of weeks. A quick search would probably get you the info you want.
 
I delete troll comments, and that's what the notification turns into after I delete the comment. Did you delete anything yourself recently?
Thanks. No, I don't think so - not intentionally anyway.

Phew, that's probably it.
 
It's a display bug. The notification is about a deleted comment, like ADirtyPerv says, not a deleted story.

What most likely happens under the hood is that the notification contains the ID of a nonexistent comment (because it's been deleted), so when the server tries to fetch it from the database, it fails. The logic then falls into some overly broad error handling routine that interprets any failed fetch as "no story", rather than handling this situation specifically (probably by just not displaying the notification at all, or using different phrasing).
 
So, a notification this morning ("Somebody has commented on your deleted story") has me a little paranoid. I've not requested any stories be deleted. Everything still seems to be there. I don't want anything to be deleted.

What? Anyone had anything similar? Is this what it looks like when a reader deletes their comment?
This has been a bug / mislabeled message for some time. Several people have reported it.
 
@Manu, that sounds easy to fix. (I don't actually know, but it sounds easy.)
The easy fix is to change the wording. Thing is, there is no good wording, because if you deleted the comment it means (1) you've already seen it and (2) you don't want to see / know about it anymore. So, at best, the notification could render as just <comment deleted> and nothing more.

A better fix would be to just the drop notification altogether, but I'm not sure how feasible that is. This bug started happening around the time of the notification infrastructure upgrade, which moved older notifications to a separate archive page and caused various issues with the unread counters (mine were pegged at 200 for weeks). I assume the new architecture is more scalable and therefore almost certainly write-only: once a notification is in the pipe, so to speak, you cannot retract it other than to display it to the user. You could drop it at render time, but this will cause phantom notifications, i.e., more shenanigans with the unread counter.

All in all, I'd just switch rendering to suboptimal (but clear) phrasing and leave the useless notifications around. A (more) proper fix would have to be added in several different places, be difficult to pull off correctly, and complicate things for pretty minor benefit.
 
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