I have been noticing something interesting with the /all/upcoming/most pages. It appears that there is a in between virgo sort of realm where articles go for a couple diggs after they have left /page2 and before they reach /most (page 1).
So lets say you are on your way up the upcoming list on /page2 and you have about 72 diggs and your on the top of the page. When you get another digg and have 73 you will disappear off the list. Naturally you would go over to the /most page to see yourself climb on that page.
WAIT!!!. Your not there.. Panic sets in that you have somehow been buried and you begin looking all over. You check your profile to see you do have 73 diggs and so should no longer be on /page2 but why are you not on the /most page.
Then a few minutes later you will get a few more diggs and appear on the /most page as if there was no disconnect at all.
So where do posts go during that time between /page2 and /most. Digg only knows but i tried typing in a /page1-5 and got nothing.
Here are some pictures of the disconnect below.
Page2 where it has already disappeared:
/most where it should now be:
Profile page where digg count shows 73:
/most after a while and a few more diggs:
Your post seems a little alarmist to me. Has it occurred to you that Digg might just have periodic jobs that shuffle stories between the various pages, and that there is a small lag time when a story moves between upcoming and most? I know that other large websites, like Slashdot, sometimes have glitches as stories are appearing. (On Slashdot, the story page sometimes returns 404 for the first minute or so after the story shows up on the front page.)
I think it disappears to make room for yet another Ron Paul story or iPod announcement. You can never have too many of those on the front page.
Speaking as someone whose links (like that one up there on my name!) get stomped on harder than a substandard court jester’s crown jewels, I must say I cannot speak for any page other than the back cover of digg! Never mind front page the second page or even the upcoming page, where I think my best link lasted three seconds!
I also noticed that on some submissions, the page disappears from upcoming completely. I posted a story a few weeks ago, and it disappeared to never come back (it’s still available in my profile).
How did that happen? I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of censorship or something…
I have noticed that too. But if you log out of digg and refresh, it’s back again. It seems that it only disappears from your list if you are logged in.
Which brings up the matter that, there are actually different lists between when you are logged in, and when you are not. Although the two lists are very similar so it’s hard to notice. Things like certain stories disappear or appear lower on the list.
It’s probably caching. Digg must use memcached or even squid to reduce the load on their servers. These can be set to update the page every 5 minutes to reduce the load on the server which lets them decrease load times and serve more users.