by SavaTheAggie » Wed Oct 11, 2006 10:17 am
From my understanding, at some point around 2 pm EST, the server clock jumped forward 12 hours. Troy and I have not figured out just how this happened yet. During that time, people logged in, made posts, and left. Sometime later, the server clock jumped backward 12 hours to the correct time.
This caused time stamps to show future dates, which causes problems. You see, unread threads are marked unread by comparing the date of the last post in the thread to when you last entered the forum. If the last post in a thread is older than the last time you logged in, the server marks it 'read'. Because the post dates were in the future, you could never log in after the post was made and thus it would always be unread until the server caught up to that future date.
Likewise with the number of users. The server logs when you leave, so when the server's time jumped backward to the current time, everyone who had visited the forum during this time discrepency was considered logged in, simply because the records indicated they were still in the forum (last logged in greater than current time).
As for being unable to post due to 'high number of posts', I suspect this problem, too, was caused by a user making a post 'in the future', and then the server was judging their subsequent posts against that future post. Because the timestamp on that 'future' post was greater than the timestamp of any post they were trying to make, users were considered to be spamming (making posts too quickly) and were unable to continue until the server caught up with time stamps.
Hopefully now that the server has caught up, we won't have any future problems.
--Tony

Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day.
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.