Bug or Design Feature?

The scribe ponders a moment and then pipes up:

Here's an odd behavior I've noticed:

At this point, notice that you're on a blank user search page for a different PM user.

The behavior appears to repeat each time you refresh Chatterbox until you go to a different node.

Is this an intended design behavior?

Comment on Bug or Design Feature?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Bug or Design Feature? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Oct 20, 2000 at 20:51 UTC
This is a design feature. The writeup search page is dynamic -- it takes CGI parameters and does a database call to generate whatever's shown. If you hit the 'talk' button, you activate a different form, which passes no parameters to the writeup search form. Thus, it has nothing to display. vroom put in the random user selector on a whim, based on who the popular users were way back then. (Yes, this implies that the Everything Engine is rather stateless, but it also means that you can pass parameters to dynamic pages via URLs. Big surprise. :)	[reply]
RE: Bug or Design Feature? by turnstep (Parson) on Oct 20, 2000 at 20:59 UTC
I brought this up a while ago in the thread Random User Writeups. vroom has an answer and explanation there among the replies.	[reply]
RE: Bug or Design Feature? by adamsj (Chaplain) on Oct 20, 2000 at 20:51 UTC
I've noticed this too, and I assume it's a feature, sort of an advanced type of "Not Really Random Nodes, since they all came from the same monk, but we picked the monk randomly, so wotthehell, wotthehell."	[reply]