Now and then, I answer some questions over at Yahoo answers.
Today, I noted an interesting thing. One of my answers suddenly had -1 comments!
How could this ever happen?
Well, I happen to know half of the story, so I can make up at least of part of the rest.
There was one comment there.
Then I responded to the first comment, but made a typo, so I posted again, now without the type.
At this point there were three comments. But I could really live without the second one, with my typo. And, guess what, when I hovered over the comment, a little button with an X appeared.
I clicked on it, but nothing happened. So I clicked again a few times. My comment was still visible. I figured it might be some issue with some script not executing correctly in Firefox, so I started another broswer (chrome), logged in and went to the answer.
And there it was: -1 comments! I reloaded the page in Firefox, and got -1 comment there, too.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a screenshot. I’ve manually painted around the offending part!
So it seems, that the button is tied to a script, which calls back in ajax-style to delete the comment on the server. But the button doesn’t make itself unclickable, once clicked. And the button remains on page, and can be clicked several times. And the comments aren’t referred to with individual, permanent addresses, but rather “delete the second comment please. And a dumb script on the server decrements the total number of comments without even reflecting that it was one and the same comment that was deleted a couple of times…
