Comment Upvotes Broken?

Over the past few days I have noticed that there have been no upvotes for any comments posted under articles. Is the feature broken? Is it working for anyone else? Did someone dick with my account to where I can't see any upvotes because I made a post about wanting to turn off auto upvoting one's own comment? I can't see them using ie or chrome.

@pornadius: Same boat here, all comments don't have any upvotes for some reason and when i sort by upvotes it just sorts by latest instead.

Are you able to test the upvoting feature now? I responded to a post in this review, and my post was automatically given an upvote. I also gave the person I responded to an upvote and it seems to have stuck.

@Kuromino: Still not showing up for me.

I am able to view upvotes on an article I participated in last Monday. It shows upvotes all throughout the article: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/bethesda-ported-skyrim-to-xbox-one-but-only-as-a-t/1100-6431961/

@pornadius: I had BrunoBRS check it for me as well and he only shows an upvote for his own post. So from what I can gather, users will only see the upvote the system gives their own posts and any upvote they give to other users. All other upvotes will not show up. Upvotes made before the issue came into effect can still be seen by everyone it seems.

@Kuromino Every comment either has 0 or 1 upvote (mines). It seems upvotes aren't being saved/counted anymore.

I've enabled "Sort by Upvote" several articles to check, and all the top comments have 0 upvotes.

I have the same problem. I would like to know why this happens.

same here, broken sh*t

Yep it's broken. Should've kept the old system.

@WhoIsTheDrizzle: You mean the one that hid your comment on a permanent pending status because you said the word "Jack" or "wet" in it?

No thank you. Just fix this one.

Thanks for reporting this. I'll alert the developers about this.

@elheber: that was easy enough to get around, all you had to do was find the offensive word/s, copy, delete and then paste the revised version ( no it should not have gotten to that point). but instead we have a comments system that has lead to another mass exodus. 30 comments is avg or there about. the top games get 2000+ if lucky, TW3 is the last big game before the change its well over 10k we will see how long it takes fallout 4 to get there if it ever does :(

11/16/15 Update

Apparently, upvotes actually only sync to the database every time there are 100 total new upvotes for performance reasons.

This is generally pretty quick, but there can be times when you upvote something and come back to find that it appears as though your upvote didn't go through (even though it did). I believe a fix is on a road map but no confirmed fix date.

@digitaldame: That is terrible news. It means the developers don't even know that there is a problem.

DD, do me a favor so you can see this problem. Go to this article from October 26 and click on Sort by Upvotes. Notice how it works. The top comment has 20 votes. This means the site's vote sorting system works.

Now go to this article from 3 days ago and click on Sort by Upvotes. Notice how it only sorts by most recent... however, we KNOW the sorting system works. The only explanation is that all comments have 0 upvotes, despite the article being 3 days old.

And it isn't that there are 0 upvotes in the whole thing because I know there is at least one comment with at least one extra vote. I voted up one comment and it's still there.

The site remembers I voted for it. Somewhere in some folder under my user ID is a history of my upvotes (likely to prevent me from voting multiple times), but that list of votes, along with everyone else's, have not been counted in the articles themselves.

Upvotes just aren't showing up. Period. The delay isn't the problem.

@digitaldame: I don't know how much you know about the development side of things, but as a developer myself, I can't imagine how the simplest feature on this site could possibly cause server performance issues.

This site gets a -lot- of traffic. I'm not staff nor am I in any way involved in the development of any code on this site, but performing a single write query -every- time someone clicks an upvote button could result in tens of thousands of write actions to the DB in an hour. Reducing 10,000 DB writes into batches of 100 would reduce the number of write actions from 10k to 100, and that's not counting all the other DB-related traffic going on (like the forums).

-Byshop

@Byshop: I don't know, I doubt the site gets 10k upvotes an hour anymore, it didn't even get 1k comments in the whole day. If you're waiting for 100 votes, on 920 comments(currently), assuming people are using the system which appears broken from every angle, it only updates once every one to two hours? And that's only if the calcs are done site wide and not individual posts, in which all but 2 posts failed hit that magic number. And I know you probably think 150k queries an hour is a lot, but to a dedicated server, it barely tickles.

Whether 150k is a lot of writes (not queries, writes) in an hour depends on numerous factors that neither of us know. I work in enterprise IT consulting for Fortune 500 companies so large scale is something I understand very well. GS sees up to 1.5 million unique IPs visiting on a daily basis, and up to 11 million pageviews daily so if you're just looking at the load generated by the comment upvotes that's only a small part of the total equation.

However, all of this is academic because the only thing that's absolutely certain is that nobody can troubleshoot or critique code that they have never seen.

-Byshop

@Byshop: To a degree you are correct, I can't say 100% for sure the exact reason the code is causing problems. But that doesn't mean another programmer cannot trouble shoot or critique that code. Nine times out of ten a co worker will ask me for help on a project I have never seen before, and eventually we figure it out whether or not I looked at the code. You don't have to know how something is coded to follow the logic behind it, or at least some of us don't.

And anyone can critique the code behind any program or script, because when it doesn't work, it doesn't take knowledge of any programming or scripting language to know that it's broken.

I think you missed the part where I said you can't troubleshoot or critique something that you haven't seen. Let's be honest, here. You have no knowledge of how the site works, what the backend hardware looks like, what the load points are, or where bottlenecks may be occuring. Hell, you don't even know what language the site is coded in on the server side or what DB engine its using. But if you feel like you have sufficient understanding of Gamespot's inner workings because you have visited the site, knock yourself out.

-Byshop

Heads up, comment upvotes are still broken. A comment by @LarkAnderson made in this thread made it seem as if would be fixed soon. He said (emphasis added by me), "after making a few tweaks, most notably the addition of comment upvoting (which will be fixed today, by the way!), we made the decision to release this to everyone." This was almost 4 days ago.

I'm actually a little afraid that we've forgotten how to upvote. If it starts working, we may not know for a long time because people stopped upvoting because it hasn't worked for so long. The only way I'm nearly certain it still doesn't work is because I went into an article with 300+ comments and scrolled through to see if I saw any single comment with at least 1 upvote. There was nothing.

@elheber: Unfortunately, the fix we deployed for this on Thursday didn't fully fix this issue. However, we know what's wrong here and should have this fully resolved in the next day or so. Sorry for the delay, and thank you for your patience.

Just to follow up here, this issue has been resolved as of last night, and upvotes and sorting by upvotes is now working as expected!