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And now for something completely different…

Yes, I am  Monty Python fan. So much so that when I was watching “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” with friends I was citing many lines as, or before they were being said, that they bet I couldn’t memorize the whole thing. That was a mistake. Before the internet, I had a VHS tape of it and did, indeed, memorize it. Still remember about 90% of it. And now, really, for something completely different.

A bit of irony or sarcasm follows.For the past 2 months or so, I have noticed quite a few people accessing my Profile. I don’t care, but it’s happening a lot. Both new people and old timers. Even people I’ve had long running conversation threads with. Hmmm. Then it happened. ODL! (Not OMH, ODL is “O dear Lord”). One of the triad checked me out. Scott Ott accessed my profile! Why? To turn the Right Angle into a rectangle adding me? Naw. Zoe would be better. Much better. (But maybe a pentagon? Naw. I’m not that interesting. ) Why else did Scott check me out? Oh no! I may be banned! Or censored! After all, I questioned Bills facts twice in posts I made. Once in my not that interesting Blog ” My encounter with Neil Armstrong” where I noted an error Bill had in his excellent “Apollo 11 what we saw” post about which college Armstrong taught in. He taught in the University of Cincinnati. Then I posted the blog “I love Bill, but..” Where I pointed out that Armstrong did not die of old age, but of “complications following heart surgery.” Basically, a really bad error resulting in a very quiet lawsuit. He could have lived longer. I mean, Bill had said if he could be proved wrong, he would go to what is right. But what else could it be?

Maybe Bill just can’t stand being wrong about Neil Armstrong? Twice especially?

Note this is just me being a goofball. I don’t believe either supposition. But I am wondering what the #$&@#% happened. (Replace #$&@#% with your favorite curse. If you are offended…what the hey? Its your own curse. Me, myself, put in “Hecky durn.” … As a joke.) 

And now back to your previous blogs. Carry on.

48 replies on “And now for something completely different…”

Interesting. I’ve noticed in the last several weeks, maybe longer, that I was getting a lot of profile views, and wondered why, since most of them were from regular commenters. Yes, and even Scott viewed my profile, which was a real surprise. I assumed I had made such an interesting, intelligent, insightful, original comment that all the profile viewers were inspired to find out more about me Ha hahahahhhhaha. Just kidding. But I, too, have been curious about this anomaly.

We played around with it and it doesn’t seem to be triggered inadvertently by user interaction. It appears to be a software glitch that has nothing to do with anything we do.

You can read the whole page to see what we tried but the condensed version is that in conversation between Ron and Scott the decision was made to turn the profile viewed feature off. Which is fine with me and I gave my reasons below if you’re curious.

Ron, I also clicked One ping, one ping only Vasily … I also replied to a different reply you made to me earlier. Let’s see if either one fires a “viewed profile” event.

I received the notifications of the replies by both you and Harry. Let’s go the next step and up vote a comment. I am going to up vote the one you just made to see if that causes a reply and view on your bell.

I did the same to yours. Plus this reply, of course. Replies don’t seem to be firing a “viewed profile” message.

Those to me were the typical things that could trigger a viewed profile, other than actually going to someone’s profile. Which I don’t believe is happening.

OK, let’s see I just edited a reply

Can you think of any other innocuous click that people do on a regular enough basis to trigger profile views?

If they click on your avatar they are taken to your profile. I’ve noticed this when I’ve tried to see someone’s avatar clearer, it’s all in the same link as your moniker.

For me, using a Marine Rifleman as represented in the Springfield Armory logo, it could be that there are plenty of people who don’t recognize that avatar and want to see it clearer. But I don’t really think avatar curiosity explains it all either.

If that’s what’s happening then the “viewed your profile” message is working correctly. It may not be a software issue, it might be a wetware issue.

I’ve noticed it a lot more during the last year since Bill’s membership drive. It might just be an influx of new people playing Looky-Lou.

Perhaps, and I thought that as well. But have you or Harry viewed my profile in the past week? My notifications say you have. It was you and Scott viewing my profile that made me think there was an issue.

Went back and edited the reply that I made to you above.

Maybe we’re on to something? Could editing a reply trigger it?

Just edited a reply to you then posted this reply. Did you get a reply and a viewed profile?

Not from you, at least not yet. I’ve noticed there’s some lag in the system . I did get a profile snoop by Road Rider though that is problem not something we’re doing here on this thread.

So I posted a reply to Harry and then edited it. We’ll see what he gets as far as notifications.

Had another view profile from ACTS around 345 eastern Friday. I was out of pocket at that time. What did you do?

By that time I wasn’t even on the site anymore. I have the site loaded in a browser tab(s) but I wasn’t actively viewing or interacting with the site and that/those tabs were not selected and active.

I was outside getting things battened down for that storm that hit us last night. Which we rode out without consequence BTW.

I haven’t gotten any profile view notices since we started trying to track this down, which as I write this is yesterday. I closed the ones showing in the bell control so I’d be sure to see new ones and nada, zip.

I have this site open in Chrome and Firefox on a PC (W10 Pro) computer all the time. The computer is my home network server that controls pretty much everything of electronic significance on the property. It reboots itself automatically at 5:30 AM after turning on an air gapped drive and running a backup. When the backup is done automation powers down the drive and reboots the machine so I start with a fresh boot every day. No browsers get loaded until I load them manually but …

It’s a disturbing thought that this site, or my computer, or both in concert with each other, are doing things I’m not aware of and have not given them permission to do.

Not trying to go to Paranoid Alley here but sometimes things like this are just the symptom you happen to catch and there’s more going on than is obvious.

I don’t think Scott Ott’s server/CDN are conspiring with my electronics to take over the world or anything like that. But it could be a glitch in the site software that no one has caught yet.

Remember a while back when they were upgrading the page layout and such like? When the little bell notice control was missing? I don’t know if the problem was occuring already then or if it cropped up afterwards. My memory isn’t what it used to be and unless I focus on something when it’s happening that sort of thing tends to get a little fuzzy timeline-wise.

Being as we now know of at least two instance where I absolutely did not go to your profile but you got a notice that I did… And that the notice can be triggered without any apparent cause or cross-linked control — It’s clear there’s a problem and this is not a legitimate, correctly working feature. So … bug report time.

We’ve done our due diligence and ruled out a repeatable trigger linked to anything we do specifically like click “read more”, edit a posted reply, etc.

That leaves us pretty much with nothing else to try from our end. The only way to track this down is to look in the server logs and find the code that is firing a notice, then confirm that the notice was not fired by a user and find what’s triggering it.

It’s a little annoying but now we know that at least some of the profile view notices we get are not genuine.

If I have to live with that I’m OK with it because the little bell notices are pretty much vital to my use of this site. Without them carrying on conversations is a real PITA because then I have to go look at everything I posted to see if anyone replied or wants to discuss what I said, or if I replied to someone about something and they had something more they wanted to say. It’s a real conversation killer not to have that little bell telling me when someone has replied to something I’ve said.

Didn’t you say you were going to send Scott a bug report? If so you might just point him to this blog post and everything we tried is documented here. If not, do you want me to write it up and send it to him?

I think there is a definite delay in the system in getting notifications. If I am online at the same time, I sometimes get notifications almost instantly. Sometimes it seems to take hours. Might just be related to the hosting.
I did sent Scott a bug report but with low priority. I think I will point him to this post as clearly it is happening to several. Interesting, though, that no one else has chimed in from the membership.

So it’s possible the profile view was triggered earlier but just reached you after I was AFK. That’s normal, for non-prioritized functions to be queued and then executed in FIFO (First In First Out) order as the que is processed.

In any event, I think we’ve established that it’s not working properly and is sending some profile view notices when none should have been triggered.

In a situation like exists here on this website, the enterprise (BillWhittle.com) pays for content delivery and for features available as add-ons to the basic package. They can check boxes on the things they want to add and the price goes up accordingly.

Real-time automatic backgrounded page refreshes and fully interactive chat functions are usually at the top of the list for expensive add-ons.

I’m sure our little notification bell that tells us when someone has replied or looked at our profile is something along those lines, but probably a lot cheaper option because it doesn’t need to be real time.

Like I said, it’s a minor inconvenience to me and now that I know it’s happening I can just ignore it but this isn’t about me …

It’s about The Guys getting what they’re paying for and if it’s not working right then they should be complaining to the CDN/Provider because they’re not getting what they’re being charged for.

Or not, if they don’t think it’s worth a complaint then that’s their call too. If we let them know about it then we’ve done the responsible thing and put the information in the proper hands. Once they’re aware of it, it’s up to them to decide if they want to spend their time on it or not.

 “Interesting, though, that no one else has chimed in from the membership.”

Dindee Dee did drop a comment just recently. The fact that there’s little other interaction from other members might be they don’t understand what we’re on about, don’t care, or it could be that the only flies Harry caught with “And now for something totally different” headline is us Monty Python geeks.

I did get this reply notification from you. I also viewed your and Harry’s profiles to see if you stopped getting notifications of that activity.

Interesting crossing of the streams, as I had just commented here and by time I viewed your profile, I had a bell notification of your reply.

After some discussion with Scott, I asked him to disable the profile view notification while maintaining the comment reply notification.

I’m fine without the profile view thing too, so that’s a good call as far as I’m concerned. To me it’s just a bothersome distraction anyway. I got a notification that you’d replied to me too. so that appears to be working right.

I don’t really care if people look at my profile, that’s what it’s there for. When the bell goes DING! I go look to see if someone is talking to me and when it’s just a profile view that’s not helpful anyway.

So for my part that was exactly the right call. And …

Like I said before, sometimes this sort of thing is just a symptom of a different or larger problem. It could be that some of the slow page load issues are related to database scraping looking for profile views. Or something like that.

I’m fine without that feature and I really like and want to keep the bell notice for replies.

This is a test post to check my hypothesis.
I am going to write a long enough epistle to have the “read more” show up. Please click on read more, but nothing else. No up vote, no reply. Just view the whole post. Then add a note at the top of this blog post that you did so. I want to see if the clicking on “read more” triggers a notification that you viewed my profile.
Again, only click read more. No upvote, no reply to this posting. One ping only, Vasily.
I need to write something else to make sure that this is sufficient characters, so I will just say while the white snow out my window is lovely, I left NYS twice to get away from cold weather. I don’t like temperatures in the teens. I want to sit outside and enjoy a cocktail by the fire, it is way to bloody cold for that.
Whisky is meant to be savored and if my gonads are ice cubes it is not conducive to savoring.
Joe Biden’s “press conference” was a joke.
Oswald acted alone.
Just thought I’d put some truths out there, this should be sufficient to the task.

I have been wondering about that too, due to the little bell thingy. I read your conversation with Ron SAE and Mark below and I don’t think it’s an upvote thing either. I get more upvotes than I get notifications of someone accessing my profile.

It’s very curious and kind of a PITA. Because I use that bell thingy to see when someone has replied to something I said and go read the reply to see if there’s a conversational need or it’s just a comment that stands on its own without a response from me.

So I’m not real happy about it but not unhappy enough to do more than this minor, tepid complaint either.

If it was just a profile view every time someone left a comment, it would not matter at all. It would just be double the notifications. But it’s not that. I will change the level of my bug report and let Scott know that we are all seeing it.

So I am going to try a little experiment. My hypothesis is that clicking the “read more” in order to read longer posts is what is triggering the “viewed profile”. On my new post here, click on “read more” and do nothing else.

Roger that. You should see this reply from me as an “ACTS replied to …” and I’ll just click the “Read More” on the “This is a test post …” comment above.

It would be nice to figure out what’s going on, even if it’s not something that can be fixed. I’ve been wondering why so many people are so interested in my profile and now I know “it’s not just me”. I’ve seen people I’ve been conversing with for a long time “view my profile”, including you … and can’t figure that out as it says the same thing it’s always said.

Until Harry started this blog post I thought it was just me, so that’s more information than I had before and it’s welcome.

If we can nail this down, it would be an interesting but trivial data point to know that someone thought enough of what we said to click the “Read More” control.

Hi Harry – This seems to be happening quite a bit. In fact, according to my little bell thingy, you accessed my profile yesterday. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that an upvote leads the system to register this as visit to a profile. Unless you did access my profile. It would be interesting to know. I submitted a bug report for Scott to track in his spare time, but listed it as low priority. According to the little bell, about 10 people visited my profile in the past week, including some whom I have been corresponding with on this site for years, and yes, including the webmaster himself recently.
Good to know others are seeing this.
Although, there is always the possibility that “they” are stalking you 😉

Not the only possibility, might just be a glitch of some other type.
As a data point, did you either actually go to my profile yesterday or up vote one of my comments? I did get a notification that you viewed my profile.

Oddly enough, #1675 you were the last one to view my profile. Never did get that into “The Prisoner” perhaps I should. I hadn’t known the member directory shows our member numbers in it’s search results before. I gotta run, the bubble thingy is after me.

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