PM Queue? Curious Why This Happens..

[Chung Tran]

I log in to ECCIE, and see, say, 3 PM's.. I start to answer them (I always answer the oldest first, if that matters), and within 30 seconds a 4th PM suddenly appears, with the current time shown beside it. I know damn well the PM could not have been written in 30 seconds, my logging in triggered its appearance.

why is that? that 4th PM could be hours old.. not that it matters, but I'm curious why does that log-in trigger occur (it does not happen every time, but often)?

[Crock]

Originally Posted by Chung Tran

I know damn well the PM could not have been written in 30 seconds, my logging in triggered its appearance.

I'm trying to understand what you're saying. Why would the PM have to have been written in 30 seconds? Is it not possible that someone was writing it for 5 minutes and they, coincidentally, hit 'send' 30 seconds after you logged in?

Or is it happening too often to be a coincidence?

Another possibility: ECCIE uses vBulletin for the forums, which is very common. There are scripts that people can run in their web browser that will customize the vBulletin experience for them. Maybe there's a script that checks to see when you're online before sending the Private Message? If it checks every 30 seconds, that would account for the timeframe. I'm just spitballing.

[Chung Tran]

Originally Posted by Crock

I'm trying to understand what you're saying. Why would the PM have to have been written in 30 seconds? Is it not possible that someone was writing it for 5 minutes and they, coincidentally, hit 'send' 30 seconds after you logged in?

Or is it happening too often to be a coincidence?

Another possibility: ECCIE uses vBulletin for the forums, which is very common. There are scripts that people can run in their web browser that will customize the vBulletin experience for them. Maybe there's a script that checks to see when you're online before sending the Private Message? If it checks every 30 seconds, that would account for the timeframe. I'm just spitballing.

no, it happens too often to be a coincidence, that they may have been writing for 5 minutes, then hit "send".. impossible. your second point has validity. I'm not sure what purpose it serves, but that does sound like a reasonable explanation.

[Crock]

Well, I know some of the ladies have a difficult time keeping their inbox clear. That type of a script might help ensure the lady sees it instead of just getting swept out with the backlog. It would have little purpose in talking to other guys, but would be incredibly useful for actually getting a Welcome Wagon girl to read a PM.

That said, I have no idea if such a script even exists. Just throwing out the fact that it might. But if post-login messages are coming from multiple people, then, again, that's too much of a coincidence. If many folks were using such a script, we would have heard of it.

Weird. I look forward to hearing site staff's response.

[gman44]

so when you log in you get

ex,

3 pm's that were written since logged out the last time
you answer the first 2 and then after you answer the 3rd you get a notification of pm#4 that just came in, whether or not it was sent to you after you replied to pm#3 or while you were offline.

Apparently there is a lag with those