Quotes/replies with notification unassociated to an original thread

Semper · May 20, 2020

Browser, version and OS:
Firefox V 76.0.1 (x64) | Windows 10 Pro, v1909 (build 18363.836)

Steps to reproduce/what were you doing before it happened?
Check notifications, find quotes associated with threads that you're not associated with, and some ultimately aren't actually a quote at all, when further investigated.

What happened?

Infrequently (maybe once every few months), I'm receiving notifications of others quoting me on threads that I've not posted on. It's a bit difficult to explain, as I'm not entirely certain I have working understanding of what's going on. It's an issue that's difficult to reproduce as it appears as though reloading pages "fixes" the issue. In attempting to source the screenshots below, returning to the "actual thread" URL associated different posts to a different thread than when I originally started investigating. I believe I remember seeing a thread created about this at least once previously, however it hasn't been an issue for me, up until about four or five months ago, since around mid 2018.

What did you expect to happen?

To not receive a quote notification

Link to a page where it happened, if applicable:
This is the link the notification provides

where as this is the actual thread that the quote references.

Screenshots of the issue, if applicable:

Spoiler

Notification screenshot
----------

Actual thread screenshot

Spoiler

minibois · May 20, 2020

In theory it's entirely possible to quote a post of yours from another thread, in whatever thread you want. Here is a quote from yours as an example:

On 4/25/2020 at 9:22 PM, Semper said:

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/B450-TOMAHAWK-MAX#support-mem-14

There's multiple different SKU's for Trident Z series memory modules. You will need to reference an exact model (I.E. "F4-3200C16D-16GTZR") against the QVL for your series of CPU (2000 series linked)

Of course pressing the little 'arrow' icon in the top right will return you to where I got this from. Plus in theory I could edit this quote in whatever way I want, as a 'quote' in the forum software is just a bit of code saying: "This user <link> made a post at <date> in this thread <link> and then there is some text (that should be from the post)"

You just have to quote someone, press this thingy on a quote:

Ctrl+C and now you can paste this quote wherever.

Why this user has done that? I don't know.

On purposes or accident? Possibly either.

So I would have to assume this is just some 'weird' behaviour by a human user, rather than by the forum. I doubt this user pressed the quote button under another post in that thread which made this happen.

There are some quote deliberate actions you have to take, to quote a post from another thread.

Semper · May 20, 2020

8 minutes ago, minibois said:

*snip*

That's largely what I had considered was happening, and just let it be, until today.

I decided to bring up the alert of a potential hiccup because of what happened while investigating it, being that when I went back to what the original thread URL (while trying to figure out what was going on), the replies were different than when I was originally investigating (being my literal reaction was "this isn't the topic that I was reading before"). My web development skills are lackluster to begin with (think, high school elective HTML/Dreamweaver back in the early-mid 2000's), so I'm unable to clearly define what's going on here at a lower level, but on the surface, it's apparent that there's some crosstalk going on between independent threads.

givingtnt · May 20, 2020

The answer to this is very simple :
It's not a bug, more of a.. "we're too ~~lazy~~ efficient to fully update the notifications for this" part of merging/transfering threads to other subforums.

Whenever someone say, posts in Tech News, I get a notification. 80% of the time it's fine, 20% of the time people can't read the guidelines and repost something, so it gets merged with the original post.

The notification will keep the OP title, but link to the merged thread.

LogicalDrm · May 20, 2020

Re-written...

So this isn't actually a bug, but OP of the thread messing up something. You have replied to both of their threads, and cause threads are named very similarly (and them not been active since previous), they have clicked from notification, quoted, replied to correct thread and then edited post realizing they did something wrong. But since they don't know how to use forums, they have changed content of the quote instead of removing whole post (trash can icon) content.

Edited May 20, 2020 by LogicalDrm
Redo