1

I have noticed this bug for as long as I have been on wikiHow, but I have only recently started getting screenshots of it. It appears that in the unanswered questions section of Community Q&A, when you click on the Show more unanswered questions button, it will display the first 1 or 2 unanswered questions listed again, and then show newer ones, and this will continue indefinitely no matter how many times you show more questions. The bug appears to be random as in it sometimes happens, and sometimes it doesn’t, and able to occur on any article in any category, as long as there are enough unanswered questions to cause a Show more unanswered questions button to show up. Below are some screenshots that I took:



These are just some examples, some articles that I noticed it appearing on were:



Side note: I also noticed an error where sometimes the Show more unanswered questions appeared, but when I clicked it, it just disappears, and no new questions loaded.

2

Hmmm… There is some weird formatting in my post, I only meant for the links to be links, you can ignore the fact that some of the other text appears to be links, I can’t figure out why it looks like that.

3

I’ve seen this happen on a bunch of articles, like ones on the popular crush and relationship topics. I think there was some sort of error some time back that resulted in old questions getting duplicated for some reason that has likely since been fixed (since all of the duplicated ones seem to be old questions), and Anna was able to get someone to kick a page or two and clear the duplicates on the page I found, but I haven’t said anything about the other ones I found because there’s a lot of them and I feel like there has to be a better way of solving it than just passing her every page with duplicate questions one-by-one.

4

Hmm, tricky to tell whether this is true duplication of the question in the system, or a glitch with how it loads up. I’ve seen it here or there but only a question or so at a time, so it hasn’t seemed like a big deal. What happens after you flag or answer one version of the question - do both go away, or does the second one stay? (Keeping in mind, a question needs two flags to go away, so you might have to reload and do it again before it’ll take effect.) 

One big hurdle for Q&A has been building a system that can call forth all these items out of the Q&A tables in the database without causing page slowness for the given reader/editor or, more importantly, overloading the servers for everyone else (and making the site slow or bringing it down). To that end, I believe the unanswered Q&A don’t all load when the page loads, but only when the reader “asks” for them; this reduces the amount of work the system is doing when we’ve got thousands of readers loading up thousands of pages. 

So the second thing you mentioned, R2 - about the “show more” link being there even when there aren’t more to show - is a known side effect of that approach. The system doesn’t know if there are more until you click that link and “ask” for them, so on a few pages here and there (when there are exactly 5 unanswered questions at the time you click), you’ll see the link show but then disappear after you click, without there being any more questions to display. As I understand it, that’s a quirk we’ll probably need to live with.

The first issue might be something fixable, but in the grand scheme of engineering priorities, I’m not sure how high priority this bug squash would be, since it’s intermittent, only happens after you click “Show more” (something relatively few people do), and doesn’t actually stop us from answering questions. Let me know what happens when you flag/answer one and not the other, though - that might help us figure out if it’s cases of duplicated questions, or something to do with the “Show more” action itself.

5

@Galactic-Radiance vague memories of what you’re talking about but fuzzy on the details now. Was that several questions at once on the page, rather than 1-2 like this? Can’t remember exactly.

6

OK, next time I see this issue I will try to flag the question and see what happens.

7

I also want to say that I have seen a similar issue happen in the “Made Recently” section. (And I know that it is showing duplicates because the links on the images lead to the exact same URL).

Should I create another thread for this?

8

Definitely a separate issue but no need for another thread - noted, thank you! I suspect, given the fact we need to spend our limited engineering resources in the most impactful places possible, that’s just the kind of quirk we’ll live when it comes to images. It’s not a situation where it’s getting in the way of folks contributing; it just means you’ll sometimes see the same image more than once, which seems ok in the grand scheme of things. But if there are any stubborn ones where flagging doesn’t remove them (or the problem recurs after flagging and force refreshing), feel free to send me the links on my talk page and I can investigate some more:slight_smile: