Comments order not sorting correctly

New Member Joined: Apr 18, 2006 Posts: 3

Hi I'm having a problem with my comments not ordering according to tid or date. It doesn't seem to happen until there's over 10 comments.

Here's a post example: http://wow.linuncensored.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=484

You'll notice that a comment on July 15 is above the comments on the July 11.

I'm using 7.6 v2.02.02 and the comments.php file has not been touched in any way.

Thanks in advance, hopefully it's something really simple.

registered · Posted: Sat Jul 29, 2006 2:30 pm

Ok, I have looked at your site and the code and I am wondering if these users are in different timezones? It is picking up the topics that are directly tied to the parent story and then for each topic, it will cycle through the "child comments" until done with the topic and then move on to the next.

The query for pulling the list of topics (highest level comments) is sorting in descending order of date (system time) and then the dates are being displayed given your timezone.

This may be giving it the "illusion" of being off in time sequence.

Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 3:52 am

This doesn't explain how a July 15 post is above the July 11 post.
As for the post date, they are all MST in the database. So shouldn't matter where the posts are from, if it's being sorted by that, should it?

I guess I'll fiddle with the order by condition and see if it even changes the posting order.

Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 5:53 am

Yeah, something about that has been bugging me ever since I wrote it. There is a function which is formatting the date and IF it is formatting the date based on the poster's locale, the behaviour I described would be correct, however, I have not had time to really dig into that function.

Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 12:38 pm

ok I did some fiddling and found out what was causing this.

Quote:

if ($order==1) $q .= " ORDER BY date DESC";
if ($order==2) $q .= " ORDER BY score DESC";

What seemed to be happening to me is the $order value seems to be set to 0 if there's no predefined value, which cause the ordering to be whatever the default order the database is in.

Before this

if ($order==1) $q .= " ORDER BY date DESC";

I added

if (!$order==1 || !$order==2) $q .= " ORDER BY date DESC";

It's not pretty but it works. I tried setting all the $order=0 to $order=1, but that didn't seem to changed anything.

Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 9:44 pm

Not sure the "other effects" of using the "OR". Maybe this would be better:

if (empty($order) || $order='') $q .= " ORDER BY date DESC";

Regards