VirtualBox Update -- 4.1.22

The time is now 08:47 UTC -- 20120910

I submitted this for review at 06:22 It appears to have been approved shortly afte 08:00 UTC The heading shows "Posted by vagabondo on Sep 10, 2012 12:04 PM UTC" As this is a time in the future it will not appear on Lxer until after 12:04 UTC.

I am not sure , but I think that I might be able to vary the time discrepancy by changing the time-zone in my Lxer profile.

I noticed before that my suggestions took about 18+ hours to appear, and could be overtaken by the same or similar article posted by an editor. This suggests that it is not worth making a suggestion until until it is a few days old, and has obviously been missed by others.

Also, the day after this Vbox announcement, there was an announcement for version 4.2.0RC4. This was declined, despite Lxer having carried announcements for VBox release canditates. Could someone please explain the rules for approval? I do not like getting it wrong.

Would it be better to post links to interesting articles here (on the forum) so that someone who knew what tod do could submit them to Lxer proper?

It's very simple. If I recognise your user id, I approve it immediately, and it goes into the approved queue in the same order it was posted to pending. If I don't recognise your userid, I check to see if the article is spam, if it isn't I approve it, and it goes into the pending queue in thsame order itm was posted to pending. If it's spam i delete it.

In my experience It appears on the posted queue as much as 14 hours after it was posted to pending, sometimes more, depending on how many articles are on the approved queue.

Does that help?

Thanks tracyanne.

I suppose that as I made two suggestions, both VirtualBox announcements, the second was mistaken for a duplicate.

There is definitely something weird happening with the site/server time though. When a post is placed in the approved queue, it should not be given a time in the future. I am convinced that if it was given a true times-tamp, it would appear soon. This particular item was (I think) approved at 08:04 UTC, but given a time-stamp of 12:04 UTC. It was definitely published on the site at 12:04 UTC.

Forum time seems OK. I am an engineer, not understanding what is happening bugs me!

> I noticed before that my suggestions took about 18+ hours to appear,,,,

The few stories I post seem to take well over 12 hours, so that seems about right.

> seem to take well over 12 hours, so that seems about right.

I can understand a delay pending approval, especially for those of us in different time-zones to the editors. What I do not understand is the post-approval delay, which appears to be related to the approval time being some hours in the future.

As far as I can tell (aka "my best guess"), the posting queue software tries to automatically spread submitted/approved stories so that they appear at suitably spaced intervals.

@BernardSwiss, correct

Quoting:the posting queue software tries to automatically spread submitted/approved stories so that they appear at suitably spaced intervals.

I am not in favor of such "feature", why is it so important?

Fettoosh, to help the editors, who are not paid. And to help readers by not dumping giant steaming batches of stories on the page all at once. If you want to manually schedule stories ask Scott, we can always use more volunteers.

Thanks TC,

I will get in touch with Scott.

Hey sorry I am late to the conversation. One of the reasons for the sometimes long delay is that we have on any given day (except into late Sat night and Sun) anywhere from 5 to 15+ articles waiting in queue to be posted so to not see your article on the newswire right away is normal.

I do a lot of rearranging of the queue depending if I think an article should hit sooner rather than later but even then it can be several (or many) hours especially on the heavy news days during the middle of the week.

Our goal is to always have articles in queue waiting to post so that the newswire sees as little 'downtime' as possible. It is challenging on the weekends for sure but in making the newswire active 24/7 it keeps the website active and engaging no matter where you are on the planet.