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Facebook's privacy settings have a ton of bugs. Here's another one: 1. Make a stupid status update post. 2. It appears in all your friends newsfeed. 3. You real
by surferbayarea 14y ago
Facebook's privacy settings have a ton of bugs. Here's another one:
1. Make a stupid status update post.
2. It appears in all your friends newsfeed.
3. You realize you said something stupid and private.
4. Panic. Delete post
5. Breathe sigh of relief that it is no longer showing up in your profile.
6. But wait a minute! It still keeps showing up in all your friends newsfeed.
7. Now that you deleted the post, you can't even modify it's visibility settings. Heck you can't even get to the url. But all your friends continue to see the post in their newsfeeds
So the way facebook implements a delete of any activity(status post/like/comment) is that the owner stops seeing it but everyone else keeps seeing it. That is simply the most retarded delete implementation ever!
- nthj 14y agoto be fair, cache invalidation is hard.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoAnd naming things.
- Laremere 14y agoTogether with off by one errors, they're the two hardest things in computer science...
- mibbitier 14y agoAll they need to do is add a new "message" to say "y'know that message number 4029375 in the cache, yeah that ones deleted, ignore it". This is not hard.
- natrius 14y agoThis arrogance is baffling. What makes you think you know enough about Facebook's infrastructure to make such a claim?
- mibbitier 14y agohuh? Infrastructure is totally and utterly irrelevant to the problem. I know enough about common sense to make such a claim. Just send a new message, exactly as you would post an original item/comment/etc, but have some special text/field in there that says "please ignore the previous message". The UI would then hide the previous message. eg COMMENT: {id:9374758, from:"mibbitier", data:"I hate you all!"} COMMENT: {id:9374759, from:"mibbitier", data:"*IGNORE_MESSAGE_IN_UI* 9374758"} Nothing whatsoever to do with infrastructure. Nothing to do with caches. Purely to do with the UI. Not rocket science. Granted, it's a poor way to do it, but it's better than nothing, and easier than trying to invalidate caches etc
- mh- 14y agoI'm sure it's already rendered to a static presentation-level (HTML/template language du jour) form at that point. That wouldn't work.
- mibbitier 14y agoJust put some more javascript in there to deal with it. I'm sure it's not the hardest problem in the world.
- engtech 14y agoGreat, you've hidden the message with javascript, but now it's still in view-source and in search results for bots. It's also still visible if someone is using noscript (actually, I have no idea if Facebook works with noscript, probably not). The solution you are suggestion doesn't solve the problem and injects more corner cases.
- pbz 14y agoI suppose they made it work the same as email. Once you sent something you can't take it back, but you can delete your copy if you want.
- codewright 14y agoMumble mumble mumble eventual consistency mumble mumble sharded MySQL mumble mumble
- surferbayarea 14y agoThis isn't a case of eventual consistency. They don't bother to update the cache(if that is the reason) or update the database used in newsfeed. The deleted posts persist in the newsfeed database many hours(maybe forever) after the delete event.
- codewright 14y agoCaching is a conscious decision to take advantage of eventual consistency.