Comments are out of order

[polsvoice]

I notice that, many times, comments on posts from JoinDiaspora show up out of order on Diasp.org (or are missing!) This makes it hard to follow conversations. Here is an example from a recent post by Sean Tilley.
Here's how the comments look on JoinDiaspora:

On diasp.org:

May be related to this issue?

[jhass]

We recently discovered that we do not federate the created_at timestamp of comments. Doing that should greatly improve the situation.

[Flaburgan]

Nice idea! Does anyone want to work on that?

[oliverbarnes]

I do, it'd be a great way to learn how federation works

[jhass]

The only issue is that it is an assumption. We have no way to clearly reproduce the issue to test it.

[oliverbarnes]

How is federated content tested currently? And if not possible presently, would there be a downside to federating the timestamps?

[jhass]

I see no downside to that at all. @Raven24 would you?

We have no reliable testing environment for federation yet, apart from a few developers pods running on the develop branch.

[oliverbarnes]

Cool, going to dig in to implement this then, and try to think about ways to test this in a viable way

[ghost]

@oliverbarnes How is it going? Any progress on this? :)

[oliverbarnes]

@skogshjort unfortunately no, ran out of time to dedicate to diaspora back then. I'm coming back this week though. Were you interested on working on this?

[oliverbarnes]

@MrZyx back with some time to contribute, but behind on the state of affairs. is this a current issue, or are there more pressing things I could help with?

[Flaburgan]

This is an important issue so it's nice if you work on that.

[oliverbarnes]

@Flaburgan cool, I'm working on #3664 , and once I'm done I'll pick this one up again

[svbergerem]

Still an important issue. Just found another example: This is the same comment on three different pods

[oliverbarnes]

@svbergerem @Flaburgan Sorry but I haven't had the time to dedicate to this issue. Anybody else interested, please feel free to take it over

[polsvoice]

Here's a related(?) post: this one is over a month old, and hasn't updated with comments yet. Of the 9 comments posted (all ~a month old), zero have transferred over to diasp.org. Note also that the old name "Diaspora HQ" is still displayed on diasp.org (instead of the updated, lowercase "diaspora* hq").

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/3446648
https://diasp.org/posts/2597401

[Flaburgan]

Looks like it's not only comment, I just had the problem in the private messages:

My message is displayed after his answer.

The weird thing is, it's only with one other person in the conversation: it's obvious that my message was written first, and we can't say that my pod received the answer first, because I wrote it on the pod itself before (my message was not federated to my own pod). Maybe it's a clock problem of my server? Looks like it's not federation fault.

[goobertron]

This happened to me the other day – in a conversation in which you were involved, Fla, so maybe it's you [stern look].

I had started a conversation, received an email notification that one of the participants had replied (with two messages in total), went back to the conversation and posted a response. When I did this, my response appeared above the two messages about which I had been notified before I responded. Like Fla, this was a conversation started by me, so on my pod, and as my pod had already notified me of the other person's replies, it had obviously received the messages itself.

I've never noticed it before - not that I've used the conversations system a huge amount - but the fact that it's happened to me and to Fla within the space of a few days suggests it might be recent problem. The pod I'm on runs 0.3.0.3.

[JannikStreek]

I will have a look at this in the next couple of days.

[goobertron]

An example of the extent of comments not federating. The same post on orkz.net and diasp.org

https://pod.orkz.net/posts/1512224
https://diasp.org/posts/3570058

These problems always seem to involve diasp.org - perhaps a pod-specific issue?

[Flaburgan]

@JannikStreek any news?

[SuperTux88]

Fixed with #7436