A Question Of When (Not About The Calendar)

[JimLucas]

Note: since we have a pretty clear winner this month, I'm posting this a few hours early so I can go celebrate New Year's Eve. After all, it's January already in Europe!

I've been waiting for Jim's posting of the Tune and Theme of the Month for January 2015, checking regularly in my "New Content" listing and wondering why he hadn't yet posted, since I saw at least one other post by him today. Then, checking on something else, I found that he had posted the Tune of the Month announcement, but it was at the bottom of the page, with a date (see the above quote) of December 29. Yet his text makes it clear that he thinks he's posting late on December 31 (American Eastern time). When I look more carefully, I see that he edited his post at that time, yet I never saw it appear before the edit.

 

But still no announcement of this month's Theme of the Month. Or maybe... Yes! It is there, at the top of the third page of "New Content"... with a date of December 22!

I don’t know about you, but for me, there’s nothing as much fun to play on concertina as a good hornpipe. ....

Huh? I usually check my New Content several times a day, and I'm sure that post wasn't there on the 22nd, nor at least up to the 25th, when it would still have been visible on the first page of New Content listings... if it were visible. And this one was also edited, today.

 

So what's going on here? It looks to me as if Jim has a way to compose a post, then "post" it without it being visible to the rest of us (I won't presume that I'm being given special treatment), but make it visible only at a later time, with last-minute edits, if needed. Unfortunately, it seems that the post is sorted into the New Content list according to the date it was originally "posted" rather than the date that it became visible... and that means that it doesn't come to the top of the New Content list until someone else discovers it and replies.

 

Well, now I know that I may need to look back in time as much as 10 days (or more?) to be sure I find posts that didn't become visible until today. But I wonder how many others have been caught out by this, and I wonder if it shouldn't be possible to have these posts sorted into the New Content list according to the time they actually become visible to the public.

[Ken_Coles]

Jim Besser is a moderator, so like the admins he can compose a thread or post and hide it until later. As we have seen, he is always on top of his deadlines with a thread ready in advance. We don't, to my knowledge, do this pre-post-and-hide with any other threads. So until this unexpected feature changes, a quick check of the Tune of the Month subforum will reveal the only backdated items we're getting here, and my guess is the first of the month is the one time you'd need to check.

 

I notice there are options for what View New Content fetches for you ("new since my last visit" isn't the only way to use it, as the column on the left in New Content shows), but that may not offer a solution this issue.

 

Musically,
Ken