Trace of a Bug Observed: Unsent Forum Messages

[jostpuur]

The typing window, which on top of it has the text "Have something to add" and also the arrow pointing downwards, sometimes behaves slightly unpleasantly if you have multiple tabs open on the browser. It could be that I write something in one tab, change my mind, and erase what I wrote without sending it. Then I click "reply" in other tab, and the message I had just myself rejected appears again, and I have to erase it for the second time.

You can tell that the forum remembers unsent messages somehow, and always it doesn't work perfectly with the browsers. Well that is only slightly unpleasant, but not yet very serious.

Anyway, a moment ago I just saw the most amazing and distressing thing, because while being logged out, I opened the Math Challenge by QuantumQuest #1 thread in one tab of my browser, and I saw somebody else's unsent message in the typing window! I had just spent lot of time thinking about the thread's topic, and I know well some mathematical topics related to it, so I could easily see that this unsent message was a serious message related to the thread, and it was written by an educated person, but I could also see that it was not written by me.

I took a screenshot and closed the tab. The message I captured has still not been posted to the thread, and cannot be seen anywhere now. I would guess that if I disclosed the message I captured, the person who first wrote it, then changed his or her mind, and decided to not send it, would get severely spooked. I got a feeling that there was something unethical about the incident, although it was only about mathematics this time.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Thanks for the report, I will send this to the developers of the core software.

 

[Charles Link]

@jostpuur What you might have seen, (perhaps it was something else) was two unfinished messages that I started in responding to fresh_42 that came on the screen with my response to someone else, (after fresh_42's) question had already been answered. When I posted, I was surprised to see the two unfinished messages to fresh_42 appear in my response as well so I quickly deleted them. Such a busy day...

 

[Charles Link]

A follow-on: It appears to be a very useful feature that you can put replies to multiple persons in a single message, but I will need to watch more carefully in the future that unfinished and/or extra replies don't wind up in a response that I post. The inputs were coming in very quickly in that discussion, and I thought if I set aside a reply and replied to another, that the previous reply that I started would not wind up in the same reply.