I didn't create this status

I posted this in the contests forum, but have received no reply. It may be a bug. This recently appeared on my profile status:

I finished the @comicvine scavenger hunt to win free comics! [cbishop]

Woohoo...sounds cool and all...but I have no idea where this status came from, or that I had completed a scavenger hunt. Can someone tell me how I did that, and if there are indeed free comics involved?

(And P.S. Since I didn't change my status, who did?)

Thanks,

cbishop

@cbishop: there hasn't been a scavenger hunt in years, did you win it in the past?

@pikahyper: No. I've never even participated in one. My previous status was half-a-complaint about the picture copy/pasting not working like it used to, for blogs. I figured someone got tired of seeing that, and took it upon themselves to replace it. Kinda shady, someone else dipping into an area no one but me is supposed to touch. A PM to me would have worked just as well, but okay.

@cbishop: unless your account was hacked nobody associated with the site would have changed your status, very few people could even change your status, it would have to be someone that can manually edit the database and that's not many people and they are busy with other things. Status updates get stored in the database for one week and then it reverts to the "X hasn't updated recently" one, if you had posted that as an update in the past I could see some glitch re-adding it from the database somehow but if you've never added it I'm leaning towards someone hacking your account, you should change your password and maybe even the email associated with your account to be safe.

anybody else seeing this issue?

@pikahyper: That's a totally reasonable explanation... but why would someone hack my account, just to change my status update to a comment about a contest that doesn't exist anymore, and notchange anything else? (And no, that's never been my status before)

@mrpibb: not that I've heard of but since we can only see status updates when we go to a users page people don't really notice update problems.

@cbishop: no clue, to me it just seems odd that it would tack on your username at the end, only other thing that would make sense is if it is part of the database table like instead of their being a field for an id and the update and a timestamp it has fields for username, update and timestamp and then something got corrupted and somebody elses old status update got associated with your username and it had no timestamp so it showed up as new or somethin

@pikahyper: <tilts head sideways while reading your reply> Sometimes, I think you must drink while you consider the problem, and the longer the conversation gets, the more technical and twisted the answer gets. Don't get me wrong: you're very helpful...until you start speaking Geek. ;)

@cbishop: well something like that you can't really explain in plain English :P you can visualize it like this though:

This would be a table in the database that stores all status updates for everyone, the ID field has to be a unique number that is generated sequentially, the User ID number is the corresponding ID for each user and they are unique (70215 is you), Update would be the actual status update and then Timestamp is obvious. When anyone loads your profile a query goes to the database requesting the newest update for your account and then displays it, sometimes data can get corrupt though especially after a huge changeover of data like the site had so the User ID portion could be jumbled up as could the timestamps since if I remember correctly the timestamps are not formatted the same now as they were in the old system, bing bang boom you get someone else's old update, not sure why your username is outputted afterwards though unless instead of a User ID field they just have a Username field and it lists your usernames instead of an ID and the corruption jumped columns and tacked on the username with the update text.

And I could be wrong this could be some other glitch but this kind of thing makes the most sense.

@pikahyper: o.O Now you're just screwin' with me.

lol, no, seriously, thanks. Very helpful, even if I'm not technologically savvy enough to understand it all. ;)

@cbishop: I do the best I can :)

having a problem with my status so i thought i'd just post in this topic...........my status keeps resetting back to a one i wrote a month ago usually a day or two after i update it with something else.

What is up with this crud?! I keep getting that same danged status on my account! I have changed it four or five fricking times now! (Please replace pseudo-cuss words with actual cuss words - thanks.)

hmmm, do you have a twitter account hooked into your account? And if so, has it not been updated in some time?

@mrpibb: I don't know if it's still hooked in or not, but I set a Twitter account up some time ago, as part of a CV quest, but it's probably been over a year since I even logged into it.

@cbishop: if you go to profile you'll see either a sync or unsync twitter. If it's unsync, that means you're probably pulling the twitter status. I'll talk to the engineer because this is a bug which we should fix, but the quick fix is to unsync the twitter account for now.

@mrpibb: Yeah, I had to unsync the Twitter, but there's still a problem: even if it's pulling the status from the Twitter account, I never had that status on my Twitter either. I've never participated in the CV scavenger hunt, unless it was an automatic thing, like randomly running across quest answers, and I have definitely never won free comics from CV.

@cbishop: that's really wierd. I'll dig into this a bit more to see what the reason could be.