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Bug reports: Leaving comments using CDMA technology

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    When using a CDMA USB-stick to connect to the internet, I am unable to leave comments on MathOverflow.

    If I turn the CDMA off, and connect via Airport (on a Mac) to a wireless network that's probably belonging to a neighbor who has forgotten to password-protect their network, then I can leave comments.

    Even using the CDMA, commenting *sometimes* works. Sometimes logging in with a different browser, or different OpenID, or maybe just logging out and back in, seems to help. But usually switching to Airport is the only way.

    It may not be relevant but here is a sample URL that is loaded when I try to post a comment and it doesn't work:

    http://mathoverflow.net/questions/38191/convergence-of-a-markov-matrix/38194?comment=I+would+just+as+well+delete+this+answer%2C+but+I+can%27t+since+it%27s+accepted.#38194
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    It seems really hard to diagnose this issue from a distance. Perhaps your apparent IP address is changing mid-session, and this is confusing the server?

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    Actually, at this point I have no good conjecture. I have been clicking back and forth between four questions to see if I could leave comments. Three possibilities occur:
    "0" meaning that no text box opens up,
    "1" meaning that one box opens up, and
    "2" meaning that two text boxes open up. (In case 0 and 2 it is not possible to leave a comment.)

    Here is the pattern I observed. The four questions are here referred to as a,b,c,d (the titles contained the words "tropical", "torus", "calabi", and "memorizing", respectively):
    2 a
    0 b
    1 c
    1 d
    1 a
    0 b
    2 a
    0 b
    2 a
    1 c
    2 a
    0 d
    1 b
    0 d
    1 a

    To be clear, the sequence of questions was chosen by me (mostly motivated by trying to obtain reliable 1s everywhere). "1 a" means I chose question a and obtained outcome 1.
    There seems to be no reliable pattern in the numbers...
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    I'm a little confused. When you say no, one, or two text boxes open up, is that in response to your pressing the “add comment” link? When you get two boxes, is the text box the only element duplicated, or are other parts of the form duplicated too? (Like the submit button and “Enter at least 15 characters”.) You do alway get this link, right?

    These aspects of the user interface are all controlled by javascript. Your problem smells rather strongly like a race condition to me. Out of curiosity, does the problem still happen if you exercise extreme patience, i.e., wait until the page is completely loaded and all the initial javascript running etc is likely to have finished, before trying to open the “add comment” box? If I am right and this is a race condition, it is going to be very hard for anybody other than the developers to debug. It will probably be hard even for them, since it may require simulating a slow network with just the right mix of delays.

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    Thanks for the ideas.

    I always get the "add comment" link, and only when clicking on it does the weirdness start. When I get two boxes, everything you mention, Harald, is duplicated. In addition to an "Add Comment" button on the right of each text box, there is still the clickable text below both boxes saying "add comment", and clicking that will cause another two boxes to appear.

    Patience does not seem to help. Interesting about the race condition. The network is not that slow (it's officially "broadband") but maybe still slow by some standards.

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