vote fairy goofing off?

Twice in the past 10 days, I've been skulking about the Monastery for an hour or more in a time frame spanning my local midnight -- ie, at more or less the time the vote fairy normally replaces my un-used votes with a fresh batch.

In both cases, I awakened the next morning to discover that she'd passed me by: I still had whatever (few) votes I'd had left just before my local midnight, but no fresh ones (and we all know that finding only stale votes in our stockings is less satisfactory even than week-old trout). So, some possible surmises include:

Perhaps the VF has adopted the "Santa Claus rule;" that 'good children should be tucked snug in their beds when she vists' or...
perhaps I've offended her or...
maybe Vroom gave her a holiday.

But I'm inclined to suspect a glitch beyond my competence to find (never mind to suggest a fix) -- perhaps in allocateVotes.pl which is "Permission denied; tough beans" to me and thus, possibly, to all devs.

Have others experienced this? Lately? Or -- better yet -- is there a diagnosis or Rx hidden somewhere in the twisty passages?

Comment on vote fairy goofing off?

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Re: vote fairy goofing off? (classic) by tye (Sage) on Dec 06, 2009 at 05:37 UTC
I've certainly been a part of and observed quite a few conversations about this, but none of them recently. But from searching, it looks like the knowledge of this phenomenon was mostly unwritten and remains mostly undocumented. Voting/Experience System coyly references the phenomenon but provides no explanation. The skipped days, skipped votes thread explains it a bit but mostly links to an explanation of the underlying problem. In particular, (tye)Re: Last checked flag not updating? explains the underlying problem. To fix the problem, I've rewritten the node cache. And I (and others) have spent a lot of hours trying to get it deployed. I still hope to do that. Right now I'm rather busy getting settled at my new job (I use my company-provided laptop for accessing PerlMonks as my other two personal computers are very often being used by other members of my family and this new laptop doesn't even yet have the keys needed for doing such serious work on the PerlMonks servers). But I'm always looking for a big enough block of time to work on deploying this again. - tye	[reply]
Re^2: vote fairy goofing off? (classic) by ww (Archbishop) on Dec 06, 2009 at 12:31 UTC
Thank you. (tye)Re: Last checked flag not updating? is particularly illuminating. Its admonition to "study Everything/NodeCache.pm" is well taken, as that's one I had not studied before (and which I still have to chew on a lot more). FWIW, "skipped days" (as I should have noted in the grandparent) is not relevant here.	[reply]


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