An update after an interesting morning.
I was wrong about two things
This was wrong, I was misled by a seemingly unrelated weirdness. (that sent me off on a tangent for a good while)
What I had assumed to be post ids are in fact topic ids.
For whatever unknown reason both my topics and posts tables “skipped” ids.
In the topics table ids are serial from 1 - 166, then skipped to 1796, 1797, then skipped to 1830 and have been sequential serial values since.
Likewise the posts table ids are 1 - 188, skip to 2708, skip to 2747 then sequential since
I don’t know what happened, but I was exploring the differences between
“Global Notice” vs. “Banner Topic” vs. “Global Pinned Topic” vs. “Pinned Topic” so maybe that has something to do with it.
Topics
166 Pinned Stats query ^^^^^
2016-05-04 07:12
1796 Banner Poll results
2016-05-06 01:40
1797 Limit Banner Use?
2016-05-06 07:15
1830 Topic for moved PM testing vvvvvvvv
2016-05-06 20:48
Posts
888 Pinned Stats query (3) ^^^^^
2016-05-04 08:42
2708 Banner testing - take two (13) 7d unbannered may 6 unpinned
2016-05-05 06:34
2747 Going off the grid for a while (35) vvvvvvvv
2016-05-05 09:19
* created at datetimes
Anyway, I was also wrong about
Topic ids were actually being used as user ids, but because there were actual users with those id values it didn’t look obviously wrong at first.
The incorrect user ids are in the Postgres table and not a result of how Data Explorer works with the data
user_id | topic_id | posted | last_read_post_number | highest_seen_post_number |
---------+----------+--------+-----------------------+--------------------------+
56 | 56 | f | | |
last_visited_at | first_visited_at | notification_level |
----------------------------+----------------------------+--------------------+
2016-05-12 17:47:06.711945 | 2016-03-14 19:18:55.588447 | 1 |
notifications_changed_at | notifications_reason_id | total_msecs_viewed |
--------------------------+-------------------------+--------------------+
| | 0 |
cleared_pinned_at | id | last_emailed_post_number | liked | bookmarked
-------------------+-----+--------------------------+-------+------------
| 434 | | f | f
I don’t know how or why the topic ids could be getting used as user ids, but my feeling is it has to do with “no owner” posts. eg.
system = user id -1
“small actions”
anonymized accounts
I was alarmed when I saw that a March “post closed Flagged” message to FluffGuy1 with topic id 52
had RoyalGuy1 user id 52 as a topic_user.
But luckily RoyalGuy1 has no indication of it’s existence displayed anywhere, he is not included as a user in the message, and going to the URL gives “no permission”.