"No posts exist for this topic" error

Shannymara

There is a bug in the message board software that sometimes causes the post count in threads to be larger than it should be. The software might think a thread contains 100 posts when in fact it only has 90, for example. When that happens, you will get an error that says "No posts exist for this topic" if you click on the "extra" page links, or if you try to go directly to the last post.

If you get that error, you can still view the last messages in the thread. You can either click on lower page number links until you see the messages, or you can manually decrease the last number in the link. For example, you could change

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic32079-30.html

to

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic32079-25.html

In that example, you're saying you want to view the thread starting with the 25th message instead of the 30th. Lower the number until you no longer get the error.

I am researching ways to fix this to suggest to the site owner, but meanwhile please use the above workaround if you get that error. Thanks!
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TWilliam · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Nov 28, 2004 Posts: 1341

Hi Shannymara,

The "bug" you're referring to is a result of posts being deleted from any particular thread showing this problem; apparently the database does not decrement the value in the field that keeps track of the number of posts when deletions occur. Tho' I don't know what the relevant field is named nor the table in which it resides, if this site is a typical LAMP-based forum (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Php), then it's not that difficult to access the database using tools such as MySQL Administrator to manually correct the increment. Of course, you need admin access to the database to do so...
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Shannymara

Yup.

Discussion about the problem, with link to a hack that will fix it.

I think manually editing the db would be too tedious, because there are so many threads with that problem, and we'd probably miss some as well. From what I can tell, that hack will correct all of the errors at once.

Thanks for your input.
_________________
I drink your milkshake.

Shannymara

"Bump" (pseudo-bump since this is a sticky) to let y'all know I'm still working on this issue...
_________________
I drink your milkshake.