[Ouroboros]

Just a supposition Ouroboros:  What is to prevent the same thing from happening to your new profile's inbox?

I'm not sure what's being theorized - but there's absolutely nothing to prevent the same bug affecting my pm account's inbox.

[Jubei]

I'm having this problem as well. I thought it was because of a few kinks that needed to be worked out with the forum still, but I now notice I've gotten 3 or 4 PM's since this problem started, including one from a mod, with no way to read them. I've already PM'd Matt and Gabe about this, so I'm hoping the issue gets resolved soon.

[Ouroboros]

Interesting changes are afoot. On a lark I went and checked the messages in my broken inbox and low and behold that quite a few have piled up. I can see messages all the way up to March 1st. However, I still can't read any messages if I click on them and I still have this php error message at the top of my inbox.

512: loadMemberContext(): member id 2758 not previously loaded by loadMemberData()
File: /data/bearchive/forum.bearchive.com/includes/Load.php
Line: 969

It's a small incremental step, but it's progress!

[Q_BE]

I must be one lucky fucker, but I haven't had any problems with PMs or The Chat or almost any other forum function, except for the Search function (of course), and other basic generalized functions that aren't user-specific.

Q-"Let's git'r done, Admins"-BE

[gonZo]

I've emailed the admins again about all these bugs (in PMs, search, and thread display) caused by "non-existent" user ID numbers.

[gonZo]

This morning, the admins inserted a blank user record for each of the "non-existent" user ID numbers, in hopes that it will stop the forum software from choking on non-existent user IDs when it encounters them in PM indices, search results, and message lists. Please let us know if it changes or fixes the problems you've been having.

[Q_BE]

This morning, the admins inserted a blank user record for each of the "non-existent" user ID numbers, in hopes that it will stop the forum software from choking on non-existent user IDs when it encounters them in PM indices, search results, and message lists. Please let us know if it changes or fixes the problems you've been having.

Well, as I have checked on three specific threads that have had the "errors" of which you speak, Gonzo, I can say clearly that the error messages are gone, but are any posts missing that should be in the threads based on those "non-existent" UIDs, or are the posts of those "non-existent" UIDs the ones that got fixed and are also actually supposed to be missing, owing to the fact they are former UIDs that are no longer with us for whatever reason, but by whom they should no longer be shown as a result of the former UIDs to which they were attached?

Q-"If you can understand that, you're a better man than I"-BE

[gonZo]

I can't give you an authoritative answer to your question, whatever it was, but the changes made today were performed on the user database (which contains each user's IDnumber, membername, displayname, email, etc), not the message database, so I suspect that any messages posted by users who were missing from the database will now be displayed. (The software was throwing errors when it would try to match an existing message to a non-existent user.) Those users' names might not be displayed anymore, though, because the programmer wrote dummy data into the name fields of the new user database records that were created for the missing users.

We don't know who specifically was missing from the user database, or why. There's no interface for deleting users from the user database, and the SMF forum software was (obviously) not designed to handle deletion of users.

You can see the user IDs that were patched into the database today here: http://forum.bearchive.com/index.php?action=mlist;sort=registered;start=0 .

[Q_BE]

We don't know who specifically was missing from the user database, or why. There's no interface for deleting users from the user database, and the SMF forum software was (obviously) not designed to handle deletion of users.

This answers my question (I think) , because it seems to indicate that the missing UID information is not, as far as you know, limited to previously-banned users only. Based on this assumption, I can't automatically know whether there are missing posts, and if so, whether the missing posts are "supposed" to be missing, that is, the posts/users in question were moderated at some point in the past.

I don't suppose you can provide any clarification for that.

Q-"But I can hope"-BE

[gonZo]

(I've shortened this post in hopes of making it clearer.)

The missing UIDs aren't related to previously-banned users at all. One of the missing IDs belonged to the BEA's owner, and I'm pretty sure he's never been banned. Something --probably a database-conversion problem-- deleted a small, random set of IDs, most likely during installation of new software.

All messages are considered public property once their posters' edit time-windows have closed, so when a user is banned, his or her posts remain accessible in the forum. Far as I know, no posts have ever been removed because their posters were banned.

Palomine agrees: this is my understanding too.

Now that this bug has apparently been fixed, if a post is missing and there's no posted explanation of the removal, then either the poster deleted it before his edit window closed, or a mod removed it and forgot to leave a note (which very rarely happens).

[Ouroboros]

My inbox is up and working again! Thank-you Palomine, Gonzo, Matt, the Admins, and pretty much else everybody else who listened to me complain about my broken inbox. It was quite the pleasant experience to log on and discover that it worked again.

Things do get fixed around here. It just takes a little while.