There is a huge gossip website that behaves very weird. Every time you refresh, it shows you a different state of comments, like different point of time. You see there are 30 comments. You refresh, it's 32. You refresh again, it's 29. Then again 30 etc. And it's not just about the counter, there are actually that many comments displayed. Also, the thumbs up and down seems to reflect that point of time too. And this website is like that for years now, despite being a huge success.
My question is, how common that issue is? Can that be called purely bad content distribution and/or caching? Or is it something that cannot be avoided in some projects?
It's really annoying issue. Sometimes you write the comment and it requires you to refresh several times to see it. And sometimes, if you refresh after seeing in, it's gone again. I guess it's not very common.
I would love to understand what can be some potential reasons for this behavior.
I don't remember ever seeing a site with that situation, so I wouldn't say it's common at all. It could be a lot of things including cache, multiple servers and they're not in sync and stuff like that. What site? You've got me curious. Is this something anyone (anonymous) can see without having to create an account?
Absolutely, you can see it. I didn't want to post the URL to avoid being called a spammer :D
The website is Pudelek (meaning 'little poodle' in Polish): https://www.pudelek.pl/
Hmm, well I've been refreshing it for a few minutes now and I'm not seeing any counters updating one way or the other. Been trying on the homepage as well as a few articles. The comment count seems to be consistent for me.
It's possible that it only works like that for new articles. I added one comment today and have experienced that, but also I've done the same in the past.
If you'd like to test, just casually open the website later today (they add news regularily), but keep in mind that it's now 3:34 am in Poland and they add news between 9 am and 12 am or something like that.
It's bad enough to be experienced even many minutes after the news has been added. I tried now too and it's consistent at the moment indeed. I guess their cache gets a lot of time to sync.
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