Why does the Community user's profile have infinity in its "reached" section? It's definitely not a number.
This is how it looks like:
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4Looks like this changed on October 13th 2023. Snapshot 2023-10-13 01:05:58 vs Snapshot 2023-10-13 20:45:47 (looking at SO instead of MSE since it has more captures).– Brian61354270Commented Feb 4 at 21:32
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22Just a bit of fun I imagine. It's not completely banned here you know.– Robert LongsonCommented Feb 4 at 21:33
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4@Brian61354270 It was right that time that the team started restricting access to the Community user's activity subpage, as can be seen in the crawls. I'm assuming that the queries to generate statistics about the Community user were timing out, so the team restricted access and hardcoded the infinity as an Easter egg.– Sonic the Anonymous HedgehogCommented Feb 4 at 22:18
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3Though we do hate it.– This_is_NOT_a_forumCommented Feb 4 at 22:23
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fyi: community has three posts on MSE: meta.stackexchange.com/q/296077/997587, meta.stackexchange.com/a/336174/997587, meta.stackexchange.com/a/384752/997587– starballCommented Feb 5 at 6:06
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Might also be a bug, i.e. actual calculation resulting in Infinity e.g. divide by zero. Added the tag just in case. (You can see example of such actual bug here)– Shadow WizardCommented Feb 5 at 7:35
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2@ShadowWizardLoveZelda Given that the algorithm to calculate people reached doesn't use division, that's most definitely not the case. Also, the support tag is the right tag for cases where you're not sure if something's a bug (possible-bug is a synonym).– Sonic the Anonymous HedgehogCommented Feb 5 at 7:48
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@Sonic well division by zero is just example, might also pass some "soft limit" in the code, i.e. there's a sanity check. As for using the support tag for bugs (possible or not), I disagree with this usage, but that's for a different discussion, not here.– Shadow WizardCommented Feb 5 at 7:59
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5It reached infinity and is on its way to go beyond ...– reneCommented Feb 5 at 8:20
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4@ShadowWizardLoveZelda 100% by design.– Aaron Bertrand StaffCommented Feb 5 at 14:50
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@Brian61354270 The October That Never Ended?– philipxyCommented Feb 5 at 15:26
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1 Answer
This is definitely not a bug.
You can probably put the story together about what data is associated with the community user, and the load this might place on its/their profile page - a Jon Skeet problem, but worse - using:
- Sonic's comment above;
- this comment from John Wright;
- this sort-of-related answer from Adam Lear; and,
- this comment from Andy Mallon.
Most internal Jon Skeet problems - where we have performance issues exposed by hitting "numbers of things" or "sizes of things" thresholds for the first time - have been solved by combinations of denormalizing, pre-aggregating, query tuning, aggressive indexing, and moving expensive queries to readable secondaries.
Of course, the most efficient query is the one you don't have to run at all.
Last year, after seeing a few timeouts on the Community User's profile page, I said to Adam Lear:
This data is useless and really expensive, because it leads to complete scans of several growing tables.
Since Community is supposed to be a bot, and since a lot of these things they “did” are reassigned activity from deleted users, should we just put N/A for a lot of this?
This was after a fix had been implemented to stop calculating reach; however, the other queries were still expensive.
In October, a PR appeared, with this description:
As time goes by, we're hitting performance issues with parts of the Community user's profile since it's our catch-all "if we don't know what to do with a bit of data, let's attach it to Community". [...] since none of the data for Community on public is actually valuable, the most expedient thing to do is to just not show it.
So, that's this PR. Specifically, we are hiding:
• the Activity, Mod Dashboard, and Settings tabs
• parts of the Profile tab that have to do with tag stats or posts (keeping badges because I like the idea of Community having [Not a Robot] on SO)
• any attempt at the "people reached" calculation
As for the infinity symbol, a reviewer of the PR said:
That's a whole lot of people! 🤣 Feels a bit odd. I've got no suggestions for a better thing to display here though
And Adam responded with:
Oh, it's definitely odd. But I find it mildly amusing, so I'm going with it and subjecting everyone to my sense of "humor" 😎
answered Feb 5 at 14:46
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1"a wild PR has appeared"! But, who submitted that wonderful pull request? ;) Commented Feb 5 at 15:09
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Can we just halt this? It's more than enough.– user1455377Commented Feb 5 at 19:46
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2@thesmartwaterbear Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean by "this." Or "we," for that matter.– Aaron Bertrand StaffCommented Feb 5 at 19:48
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@AaronBertrand It's just that this answer is MORE than satisfactory.– user1455377Commented Feb 5 at 19:49
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9@thesmartwaterbear I see. Well, most people seem to enjoy detail, the behind-the-scenes humor around a change, and the fun aspects like photoshopping Adam's head onto Buzz Lightyear's body. It's not for everyone. But I would argue that having a profile page for a background process is fun and humorous in the first place.– Aaron Bertrand StaffCommented Feb 5 at 19:52
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@AaronBertrand Me too, I guess. Anyways, I won't talk in this thread anymore because extended discussions on Stack Exchange are discouraged, unless we go to chat, but I am not doing that.– user1455377Commented Feb 5 at 19:55
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@thesmartwaterbear Blame the "meta effect". Ref. What is the "meta effect"? faq.– RubénCommented Feb 5 at 20:30
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@AaronBertrand well now that we got Adam in a suit, you're next! ;-) Commented Feb 5 at 21:15
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3It would have been nicer if following the old links to its removed pages would display an error message saying that access to those pages has been removed and why. I used to use its activity list for various reasons, mostly to track anonymous edits, "Improve Edit" and "Reject and Edit" reviews, and uses of the Share feedback button in review queues. It was also a useful page for me back when I was active here making anonymous edits (see link in my profile). I understand that database access can be a limiting factor, but it broke my workflow. Commented Feb 5 at 21:59
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1@Robotnik I'm not complaining about the removal; just the lack of communication around the removal. As an example, here's an email I received from another service when a feature I used was considered a bug and fixed. Commented Feb 6 at 0:27
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1@Sonic To be fair, Prezi detected your workflow. I have never considered this workflow and I don't know how we could have discovered that you used it. All the comments here about the community user's profile page have been about performance or UI oddities (like setting their profile to use dark mode). I'm sorry that our focus was on performance and not seeking out workflows that made use of the profile page of a background process.– Aaron Bertrand StaffCommented Feb 6 at 0:44
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1@Sonic We can't make a meta post for every line of code we change. Well, we could, but then we wouldn't have time to change any code. :-)– Aaron Bertrand StaffCommented Feb 6 at 0:45
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3@Sonic Where was this change announced? Like this one, in an answer to a post by someone who noticed the change. This post was probably overlooked in review because of the
status-bydesigntag. In any case, I now kind of regret offering any info at all.– Aaron Bertrand StaffCommented Feb 6 at 1:07 -
3Thank you for posting this! I find it funny, and I'm always glad to hear fun stories like this from behind the scenes :-)– 2br-2bCommented Feb 6 at 15:51
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2I second that, I don't really understand what is to complain here. It was a fun (and at the same time informative) read, please continue with those kind of insights! Not everyone hates fun here ;)– janwCommented Feb 6 at 15:58
