There is the same problem on reddit, so they brought it here too so new users won't be disoriented (/s)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Didn't that have something to do with shadow bans on Reddit?
Or comments pending of mod approval.
I mod a few communities and haven't seen anything relating to comments pending mod approval. The only related setting I have on the communities is to restrict posting to moderators (comments on the posts should still be open to anyone).
It's pretty easy to see on r/askeconomics. All top-level comments there require mod approval, but will add to the number of comments while waiting for approval. So it's pretty common to see posts with 10+ comments listed, but nothing besides the pinned automod comment is visible.
Oh you meant on Reddit. I was talking about here on Lemmy we don't have anything like that.
Are you and OP on the same instance? If not, the phantom comment could be from an instance federated with theirs but not yours.
I accidentally made a post that has -3 comments.
This happens because Lemmy does not count the actual number of comments that there are under the post, but instead there is a counter per post. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does not seem like the counter is every synced with the actual count of comments.
I think I noticed that if a commenter deleted their comment then the total comments would go down by 1. On a post with only one comment that also got deleted, it made it show as -1 comments.
What does counter per post mean?
Also, I always thought that was because they have to "call home" to get updated and there's time in between.
Ok, so basically, there is multiple ways one could comment count. The most obvious option is to count the actual number of comments under the post. This might be in practice slow, as you must load all comments under the post. An alternative approach is to have a count variable for post, which is increased or decreased by 1 if post is added/removed. It's way faster to retrieve that variable, instead of getting all comments and counting the number of them. The problem starts if some anomaly happens that is not accounted for, so for example, if I request the same comment to be deleted multiple times. So that counter can be decreased more than once for the same comment. This could be fixed pretty easily:
if comment_to_delete is deleted {
// Do not do anything
return
}
post.comment_count -= 1
delete_comment(comment_to_delete)
And yeah, I thought so too, but ever since I stumbled upon this bug, I think the way the comment count is stored is through the counter variable.
Have you disabled viewing posts from bot accounts? It’s one of the user settings.
If you have disabled viewing posts from bots, this is what you would see if a bot commented.
This could be due to federation. Maybe they.are federating with servers that you aren't.
But Reddit also had a lot of this and people always blamed shadowbans.
comments removed by mods would always show up in the count.
idk why they didn't just fix that, it made people crazy for no reason.
Do you have a client that shows top comments with a time frame like “last 6 hours”? Maybe the comment is older than that.
I doubt it is a federation issue. The number of comments will be worked out by the number of comments in the local DB. So the count won't include comments not received.
As to why they're not showing, as mentioned above, hiding bot comments, or perhaps deleted comments still appear in totals (not sure about lemmy, on kbin deleted comments have their text changed to indicate they were deleted).
Being the only person on my instance subscribed to certain communities on other instances, I am pretty sure it is a federation issue. When I look at the comment counts for the same post on two different instance accounts, they are not the same. They often share the same comments, but not all of them. Sometimes the number shown below the post reflects only the comments from the instance you're viewing it on, sometimes it shows all of them.
For example, looking at the Baldur's Gate 3 community on Lemmy World when logged on to Lemmy World, the top post has about 36 comments but counting them in the post there are only 30. 3 of those comments are mine, and they aren't being shown to my Lemmy World account. When I view it from Yiffit, only my 3 comments appear, while it also says there are 36 total. According to the subscriber count, I am the first person on Yiffit to subscribe there, and that was about an hour ago.
Different comment counts between instances is a federation thing, yes. But showing a number of comments different to the comments shown on the same instance, not.
There are reasons for missing comments, especially on communities from lemmy.world right now. But that's not what is being reported. A federation message for a post does not contain the number of comments (and that would be a totally pointless property to send). It's also quite common that certain comments don't make it over federation.
The screenshot is showing a comment count without comments, that means the instance has one comment locally but for some reason is now showing it. That's not a federation thing.
Says the comment posted 107 minutes in the future, apparently
This is a known kbin/lemmy thing. Kbin sends dates with a timezone attached, lemmy expects UTC. I actually keep meaning to set the server to UTC to stop this happening.
Iirc the Lemmy devs are aware of this and working on it.
Yeah, we can also solve it by setting server to UTC. Hopefully the time on this comment is better.
EDIT: Apparently not. How odd, I changed the server timezone.
I have seen this happen entirely contained on a single instance (community and my account on the same instance) I don't have bots blocked.
So I suspect something is funky somewhere, will try to see how it displays in other apps(and kbin etc later)
Is it sync? If any case, this kind of questions are usually better in the app community
