I just noticed. Mr.Otte posted the sticky thread about forum policies five years ago. Then he replied to that post seven years ago. As modellers, we often go back in time, but really...
Well, that is an amazing trick.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
He just took a page out of Quantum Physics and leaped through the portal.
Ricky W.
HO scale Proto-freelancer.
My Railroad rules:
1: It's my railroad, my rules.
2: It's for having fun and enjoyment.
3: Any objections, consult above rules.
EnzoampsI just noticed. Mr. Otte posted the sticky thread about forum policies five years ago. Then he replied to that post seven years ago.
I hate to ruin a good opportunity to mock IT incompetence... but look more carefully at the two posts concerned. It looks to me as if this is the consequence of editing.
The top post is the 'revision'. The second is an earlier version of the 'official' MR TOS -- the one from 2013. Both of these posts would have been 'stickies' and both of them would likely have been locked upon creation.
What is most interesting about this is that it gives us an insight into how the site code extracts metadata differently for different functions. One function looks at the thread/topic creation date; one just scrapes the date on the last post and doesn't check anything else. To this we can add something queer: it may be that some of the 'logic' economizes by scraping the date of the first post and using it as the 'thread creation date'. This would be logical for IBM customer engineers and others of that ilk ... after all, why would the first post NOT mark the beginning of the thread? They did not envision a moderator using editing permissions to 'go back in time' a couple of years later and prepend a new post with later date.
Overmod wins the No-Prize! He's correct. The short version was created later for the benefit of people who thought "tl;dr" upon seeing the longer, original list of rules. Since those people probably wouldn't bother to scroll past the long version to see if there was a shorter version after, they were appended so the short version would be on top.
--Steven Otte, Model Railroader senior associate editorsotte@kalmbach.com
Unless someone models the present day, each of us has a Wayback Machine in our trainroom.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
Well I was neither mocking nor calling incompetence, it was just a fun observation. I assumed it was a cut and paste relic.