Random User Writeups

I noticed the following odd behavior, and I cannot decided if it is a bug, or a feature. Go to someone's home node, then click on the "Writeups" link. You get a list of the user's recent writeups. No go into the chatterbox and hit the "Talk" button. Yuor screen will be refreshed, but their will be a different user in the writeups box! (And the list will be empty, you have to click the submit button to actually see any writeups)

Clicking the Talk button repeatedly cycles through some monks, but it sees like about the same 10 or so (I am not one of them). Cannot find any rhyme or reason to it, so I throw the challenge to my fellow monks: why does this happen, and how are the "random" monk names picked?

This rings a vague bell, and may have come up many many months ago...could I be overlooking something obvious?

Comment on Random User Writeups

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RE: Random User Writeups by vroom (His Eminence) on Aug 28, 2000 at 05:22 UTC
Actually I stole the user search code from Everything2 and nate had a random user from a list show up so I just substituted a list of the most active users at the time I added the code. Basically if you click thru on a writeup number on someones home node it passes a param for the user you want if that's empty it picks a random user from the list in the box. When you click the talk button the user param isn't passed because it's part of another form so you end up with a random user from the list in the code. vroom \| Tim Vroom \| vroom@cs.hope.edu	[reply]
RE: RE: Random User Writeups by N-Wing (Deacon) on Aug 28, 2000 at 09:48 UTC
How difficult would it be to make everything on the same form? That would solve problems like that (a similar thing happens on other "very" dynamic pages). /me starts thinking out loud... since the submit form buttons already have a unique name, it would be easy to determine which subform to take action on. Of course, somebody should decide if filling out multiple subforms (like voting and talking and submitting a search on the same page) would do all of those activities, or just the one the button was pressed for (just the one would definitely prevent clashes, although maybe several that don't clash could be done at once). `--== <a href="http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=N-Wing&type=user">N</a> ==--`	[reply]
RE (tilly) 1: Random User Writeups by tilly (Archbishop) on Aug 28, 2000 at 04:29 UTC
merlyn has been making a game of this. :-) We have suspect that it is global data left in mod_perl, so you get whoever someone else looked at recently. On a busy day you can get a variety of people, but ones that you would expect people to look at come up more often. And yes, I have seen turnstep quite a few times. :-)	[reply]
RE: Random User Writeups by athomason (Curate) on Aug 28, 2000 at 04:28 UTC
I haven't seen it documented, but it's a "feature" of the Perl Monks User Search page. Go there without specifying a `usersearch` parameter (which is what happens when you submit the form on the page), and you'll get a random user.	[reply] [d/l]