Label contents jumbled up

[Haibane]

I never saw a discussion about it, but following the move to the new server was the subject of PMs being moved between labels mentioned? I ask because I just decided to do some housekeeping on my PM labels and going into some that I have not visited for months I find those PMs allocated to one are now in another and so on. While some are correctly linked others are randomly muddled up.

Has this issue been raised before?

Its no huge hardship to me, I was going through everything anyway and so can put them all the messages where they should be but I thought it was worth bringing the issue up.

EDIT: Um... this is bizarre. Stuff has moved AGAIN since I moved them a few minutes ago. It's like I have playful poltergiests in my labels folders. Help!

[Vekseid]

If you hover your mouse over a post subject title, you'll see the post id in the url of the direct link to it.

Can you give me a few ids of the messages that are screwed up?

[Haibane]

Unfortunately - and this makes me look a complete idiot - I tidied all the messages up after I raised the issue. Since then they have stayed in their right labels but that might be because I'm not deleting any more labels. What I did notice was that if I deleted a label, its contents went into my inbox and if I deleted a message from a label it too was not deleted but reverted to the inbox. I then had to delete them from there.

[Vekseid]

Ah right.

Labels are not stored in such a way as to make deleting them sensible. Better to rename them.

[Haibane]

Okay, I see. I have a tragically tidy and fastidious mind though and have trouble allowing un-needed labels to exist! I suppose I could just delete posts from labels. Should I never delete labels at all? Might the weirdness have been a result of doing that?

[Vekseid]

The labels are stored in a comma-delimited column in your member table
So you have a column with

Problems,Evangelion,Tentacle,...
Corresponding to
0,1,2,...

-1 is for your 'inbox'.

When you get a message, your labels apply a similar comma-delimited list
-1,0,2 - would be something in Tentacles and Problems, as well as your inbox.

So let's say you delete 'Evangelion'.

It has to go through and do a full renumbering of -all- labels below that, and track it across all received pms with non-inbox labels. And renumber each of them. You probably notice that it takes a second or so. But it's doing a lot of operations in that second or so, and those operations are not particularly clean. When operations are not particularly clean, you get bug infestations.

No, it's not particularly smart. It's actually better than some other forums, but it's still insane. The schema has ten-year old bits left in it, from back when doing a normalized design was simply not feasible.

And people wonder why I'm asking for money so I can build the new software : /

[Haibane]

Thank you for the explanation. I think I will leave them alone and just wrap them up snug for the winter!