Herbert Breunung’s The Pearl Metaphor has been at the top for days. Did he manage to break it just by writing a post with a future date?
October 28, 2010 by Jared
Herbert Breunung’s The Pearl Metaphor has been at the top for days. Did he manage to break it just by writing a post with a future date?
Yes.
Well, since you ask, the code does assume that we’re all honest and nice people and that we’ll use good tags and the correct date…so, yes, he did get to the top I believe by setting a future date. there is an upcoming code-blitz as part of the North West England hackathon – see: http://northwestengland.pm.org/meetings/023.html and http://mdk.per.ly/2010/09/07/nwe-pm-this-years-hack-day/ – so if you drop into northwestengland.pm on irc.perl.org and let mdk/mst/idn/acid2 or ocharles know as well then we have covered all bases :).
Though telling people to use the correct date might also work :)
Really. I don’t think he was dishonest. He made a mistake that happened to break the assumptions of Ironman. We already saw a couple of people taking over the entire front page of Ironman several times by updating the date of all their posts to ‘now’.
For example this happened to MST several timea due to some bug in his blog engine or rss feed generator which I think has been fixed since then.
I also do not think it was deliberate. But it is still worth making a simple check for future dated posts in the code.
I find a future dated post much more annoying than taking over the front page of the ironman. The latter will last a couple of days before they drop off due to new posts. Every time I go to ironman I’m confronted by this Pearl Metaphor post which 404s.