The Curious Case of the Missing Journal Entry

What started it all:

On 2019-08-24 13:02:01 UTC an accusation (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=884682#commentwrap) was made that a journal entry "It would have been posted before 6 hours ago" (i.e. posted at approximately 2019-08-24 07:00:00 UTC) was deleted by a member of the staff at SoylentNews. The circumstances surrounding the making of the Journal Entry are elaborated upon in this comment. (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=885191#commentwrap)

I have been with this site since before it went live. Its founding principal has been the making available of a forum whereby the community can submit stories - and post comments - to predominantly tech-related items. Further, each logged-in user has been made available the ability to post entries to their Journal.

As Editor-in-Chief I took this allegation seriously and performed an independent and in-depth investigation. My findings are presented below.

Note: It is not lost on me the futility of trying to prove a negative. It is for good reason that the criminal justice system in the US is founded on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." It is not up the the accused to vindicate themselves, but for the accuser to bring sufficient evidence to bring about conviction.

NB: In the course of writing this, I discovered a bug in how the site displays wide elements contained in an ECODE element. It incorrectly wraps the text onto the next line (leading to a jumbled mess) when it should, instead, provide horizontal scroll bars. Please accept my apologies for its current appearance.

Executive Summary:

An in-depth investigation making use of: external resources, the UI presented by SoylentNews, and ad-hoc queries of the site database (DB) failed to locate a "smoking gun", i.e. found no clear proof that a Journal Entry was posted to the site and subsequently deleted by anyone other than an author.

It is my estimation that the user submitted an entry, but the site failed to receive and save it correctly. In other words, the user tripped over some kind of bug be it in the site's code, communications between the user and the site, or something else.

Recommendation: When a user completes making a Journal Entry and submits it to the site, the code should respond by using the newly-created journal parameters in conjunction with the normal journal-loading code to present the journal entry to the user as confirmation that the entry was properly received and saved. That is to say, affirmative feedback of receipt, storage, and accessibility of the entry

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