stackernews
Eliminate duplication that can happen after clicking More when ranking changes over time
After an initial load of the front page, an item might move from a position in the top 21 into a lower position before the More button is pressed. Then when More is pressed, that item likely will appear again in the newly added results.
A solution is to exclude from the results for pressing more any items that already appeared in the results above that existed before More was pressed.
Do you have an example of this occurring? Afaik this shouldn't happen (I have a cursor), but I might've broken it at some point.
What I had seen was when I pressed More, the item that was in position at 21 was then also showing in position 22 as well.
I don't know how long it was between when the page was first loaded, and when I pressed More. Might have been more than 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, I wasn't watching closely. A cursor is held over that long of a duration?
Or, perhaps this is an off-by-one bug (since this occurred at the end of the set)?
A cursor is held client side so shouldn't be affected by the time you come back.
The cursor encodes the time the page's query was loaded. All pages (ie more) are scoped to the time the page is loaded - new items/votes shouldn't be considered.
Again, there might be a bug in the implementation.
Now that we've denormalized ranking scores, this is not going to be possible (if ranking changes there's no way to use ranking at time of page load) but IMO not a huge deal. Closing to clear up issues. We can re-open if this gets bad.
The only way to really eliminate this given the way we rank (denormalized values) is expanding the cursor to encode the items in the list that we already have, so that we can explicitly exclude them on the next page.