Forum users getting millions or billions of posts

xluk · April 16th, 2009, 06:34 AM

Since installing PP Classifieds, we've experienced some users post counts going crazy, for example in to the billions of posts. This is a bug that affects more than just our installation, I'm in the process of doing some research to help Chuck and the team. I have already found this report of the same problem with a user using PP Classifieds Post count going into Billions for some users! - vBulletin Community Forum and I'm investigating 2 other claims.

Chuck S · April 16th, 2009, 09:05 AM

Well I dont think your issue would come from classifieds in any way.

Very very explicitly we only call the inc post function when a user uploads an ad and a user places a comment.

now here is a portion of that code

Code:

Content visible to verified customers only.

I dont think an update mysql command to increase posts by 1 or decrease by 1 that is only called once during an ad upload or comment is going to increase posts any more than that.

So unless you have users a making billions of ad posts or comments its not going to happen. You also can turn off the ability to increase posts on the forum. I would suggest you do that and see it still climb thats gonna tell you its something else and also rule out classifieds.

xluk · April 16th, 2009, 09:47 AM

Thanks Chuck, that's very helpful. I've gone ahead and turned off the option to increment the post count for comments and ads. I'm not sure why it would be having this affect, perhaps if the user encounters a problem during the uploading of the ad. If I find more webmasters (other than the one above) have the problem then I'll let you know asap.

Chuck S · April 16th, 2009, 09:51 AM

yeah I would suspect some other plugin personally.

The query we issue is quite explicit

xluk · April 16th, 2009, 03:16 PM

Hi Chuck, another confirmed one just came back:
Weird PostCount Issues - vBulletin Community Forum

I've investigating a couple of other cases.

HTH

Chuck S · April 16th, 2009, 05:54 PM

There are no issues with our code that I see here.

xluk · April 17th, 2009, 04:49 AM

The thing is that in all cases so far the person reporting strange post counts has either PP Classifieds or PhotoPost standard installed, so I wouldn't want to rule anything out. I will continue to update this thread with any progress in establishing more cases, thanks.

Chuck S · April 17th, 2009, 09:37 AM

Your forgetting here is there are tons other hacks programs the guy has installed.

I am merely posting based on classifieds and the code to increase a users post it is by 1 so there is no bug in the code that I see. I run all 3 of our programs and I do not have users with billions of post counts. Infact we run photopost right here in this site and have no users with billions of posts.

auto_freak · April 17th, 2009, 09:45 AM

I have faced this issue about 5 times already with many new registered users having 4 or more billion posts in their count. I do have photopost gallery and photopost classifieds integrated. Along with the integration, I also have the user posts incremented by comments in both the gallery and classifieds script.

I am running on vb 3.8.2 and photopost pro 6.2.2 and photopost classifieds 3.1. I haven't seen this occur in the last two weeks, and by that time I have also upgraded to vb 3.8.2. I dont know but its strange how such numbers arise in the first place.

Chuck S · April 17th, 2009, 10:32 AM

I understand what your saying but any supporting documentation you have provided also states how users are using lots of other vb hacks and such.

I am merely pointing out that on stock installs like here my site and we have over 10,000 installs this is the first time I have heard of this.

Looking at our code there is no way a users post increment more than one.

I would suggest anyone who thinks they have the issue turn off our increment thing and then see if it continues or the opposite way leave ours on and disable any vb3 hacks.

xluk · May 1st, 2009, 12:23 PM

Just to confirm there must be a bug in PP Classifieds as disabling the post increment feature in PP Classifieds stopped the error. I appreciate you don't want to hear that, but that's the situation here.

Chuck S · May 1st, 2009, 04:15 PM

Looking at the query as posted I see no way this can happen and this code is the same since Photopost gallery was introduced 6years ago. I find it extremely strange that of all the thousands of users we have only 2 people report this and have extremely modded sites.

I dont really see anything I can do here because that query is absolute it adds 1 post increment.

xluk · May 1st, 2009, 04:32 PM

Chuck, there are more than 2 people - that's why I posted links to other threads. If you want to ignore this (or if you really believe it's a coincidence and/or another plugin) then that's fine, but don't try to belittle your customers

Chuck S · May 1st, 2009, 10:23 PM

I am referring to here. There are two of you who have stated to have an issue otherwise no one has ever posted a thread here.

I beleive I have suggested multiple times there is no way our code can do what your suggesting. Please refer to post 2 which is the initial response in this thread it explains how the code works. I have tested this over and over and I see no bugs or issues.