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Admin
On the release date one, TRWTF is not the fact that the dates are sorted alphabetically; it's the fact that they're not even stored in a date field as you can see by the last one having April spelled out in full and having a leading 0
Admin
I talked to a dev after the D3 launch fiasco about their operational strategy when it comes to servers and his response was basically:
Yeah, they know the capacity is way beyond what is required for launch days and they actively not adding more resources and let PR fix it with proper messaging.
The reason why they don't do it, is simply because after a week or so people stop logging in on mass and it's not worth getting more hardware resources for those two weeks. It saves them a few bucks basically, nothing major - but it's to much hassle (aka would bind resources) to add/remove capacity just for two weeks.
D3 was special, there was still more demand after two weeks than usual ironically because of the wide press coverage and so players kept trying. They decided to increase the server limits (max amount of players) beyond what the server could handle and changed bounds for the client-side latency indicator drastically so that suddenly high latency was indicated as "good".
Admin
And that's why there's something called "the cloud". One of the advantages being that for launch events where you might temporarily need more computing power, you rent it. Then when the masses stop trying to overload your servers, you stop renting them. You don't have to buy more hardware to handle the overflow - you just scale up temporarily, then scale down as you need.
That's the whole point
Admin
Someone probably tried to make it sort correctly by putting that 09 in there.
Admin
The dates are simply sorted as strings, since in that case, 17 < 3 < 09. Either they’re converting dates to strings before sorting them, or more likely (given the 09) they’re just storing strings instead of dates.
Admin
When Hearthstone launched, EU realm was hosted on same servers as Diablo III. Guess what happened. (Free hint: Logins were fine...)
Admin
Worked in one place with the most incompetent Head of Engineering ever (employed because of a DEI policy) and there we had full dates (dddd) sorting so any date that was a Friday threw the billing out. When I say out I'm talking negative commission...
Admin
Um. No. Simple string sorting would give
09 < 3 < 17.Admin
Clearly the reason the 09 sorts to the bottom is that it is "April 09 ..." and the others are "Apr 3 ..." or "Apr 17 ..." The "i" in "April" sorts after the " " in "apr ".
Simple lazy workmanship in having a user selectable script-driven sort feature that operates on the display formated text, not the corresponding underlying strongly date-typed data. Oh yeah, in browserscript, everything is stringly-typed text. I forgot.
And that ladies & gentlemen, is the real WTF. The lack of real typing in browsercript and server-browser communications.
Admin
Actually it would sort as 09 < 17 < 3 as the first char is nough to detect order when using strcmp or anyting other similar. If your choice of language does it differently please warn us please so we can avoid such language.
Admin
Ah yes, text placeholders. I usually try to make them so obviously grotesque that I hope it's really really clear they need to be adapted, and then one day "meteorite strike takes out primary data center" appeared as a heading in our public outage feed. (Let's see how much of my "service outage: coffee machine is broken" sample text makes it into production.)
Admin
Would be cleaner to prepend each string with a variable number of zero-width spaces.