…and, worth repeating, it all looks exactly how I want it to look and behaves exactly how I want it to behave. Here’s another action shot!
Credit:
Lee Hutchinson
The final product. She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.
Credit:
Lee Hutchinson
Problem spotted
Armed with my handy-dandy log colorizer, I patiently waited for the wrong-comment-area problem behavior to re-rear its still-ugly head. I did not have to wait long, and within a couple of days, I had my root cause. It had been there all along, if I’d only decided to spend some time looking for it. Here it is:
Credit:
Lee Hutchinson
Problem spotted. Note the AppleNewsBots hitting the newly published post before Discourse can do its thing and the final version of the page with comments is ready.
Credit:
Lee Hutchinson
Briefly: The problem is Apple’s fault. (Well, not really. But kinda.)
Less briefly: I’ve blurred out Eric’s IP address, but it’s dark green, so any place in the above image where you see a blurry, dark green smudge, that’s Eric. In the roughly 12-ish seconds presented here, you’re seeing Eric press the “publish” button on his daily forecast—that’s the “POST” event at the very top of the window. The subsequent events from Eric’s IP address are his browser having the standard post-publication conversation with WordPress so it can display the “post published successfully” notification and then redraw the WP block editor.
Below Eric’s post, you can see the Discourse server (with orange IP address) notifying WordPress that it has created a new Discourse comment thread for Eric’s post, then grabbing the things it needs to mirror Eric’s post as the opener for that thread. You can see it does GETs for the actual post and also for the post’s embedded images. About one second after Eric hits “publish,” the new post’s Discourse thread is ready, and it gets attached to Eric’s post.
Ah, but notice what else happens during that one second.
To help expand Space City Weather’s reach, we cross-publish all of the site’s posts to Apple News, using a popular Apple News plug-in (the same one Ars uses, in fact). And right there, with those two GET requests immediately after Eric’s POST request, lay the problem: You’re seeing the vanguard of Apple News’ hungry army of story-retrieval bots, summoned by the same “publish” event, charging in and demanding a copy of the brand new post before Discourse has a chance to do its thing.
