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Title text: Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file.

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Explanation

This comic shows how likely it is that a bug reported will be fixed, based on the age of some past post that matches your search for details of the problem.

A table is shown below of the explanations of each table row:

Age of post	What it means	Probability of a fix	Full Explanation
2 hours ago	There's an infrastructure outage	Very High - Just wait	The recentness of the information implies that it has just happened, and other people have noticed it and started to post about the issue. Large-scale problems like a service outage are obvious priorities, and will (hopefully!) be fixed quickly.
5 days ago	A recent update just broke something big	High, but you might have to wait for a patch	Similar to before, a large breakage would be very high priority to be fixed. However, as it's been five days since reporting it, the bug is likely taking a while to be found, so - as pointed out in the comic - you could have to wait a bit longer for this one to be resolved.
3 months ago	A new product isn't working for some users	Decent chance of a solution in the replies	This problem is clearly not considered a priority for a fix by the creators, judging by how long it's been there. It possibly isn't an issue affecting everyone, or even a large proportion of users. However, people are innovative, and someone may well have found their own fix, patch or kludge to get around the product limitations.
2 years ago	You've run into an edge case	Low, but the replies could help with troubleshooting	An edge case is an unusual set of circumstances in which a system is asked to operate. These can cause an otherwise well-functioning system to behave in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Because such cases will occur very rarely, they may not have been foreseen or tested by the developers, or they may have considered it not worth the effort to cater for them. Very few people will suffer from this precise problem, which may mean that it's not considered worth the effort to apply a fix. The developers or other users may have encountered similar issues on this or similar software, and noting how they solved or worked around those problems might lead you towards how to address your own.
13 years ago	You're the only one with this problem	Very Low - post is likely not relevant	A post of this age likely predates the software you're using, or at least the current version of it. It's probably a coincidental match to your search query, and doesn't actually relate to the problem you've encountered. Since no-one else has posted about this issue or anything similar within a recent timeframe, it's likely that you're the first person (or at least, one of very few people) to have ever come across it.
24 years ago	Oh god how is the Internet this old	Maybe whoever posted the message has kids who can help you	This is another comic where Randall makes people feel old, in this case by pointing out that the Internet is quite old. The children of the people who posted these comments are now likely to be around the same age the original posters were when they posted them (and may now be posting themselves). It is also (presumably) rare enough to be a DenverCoder9 situation, and 13 years is longer than the time in that comic, so 13 years might be such a situation too. It is possible that Randall could be referencing this comic, as the thread that DenverCoder9 posted on was last posted to in 2003, 23 years before this comic's publication. If DenverCoder9 posted to the thread in 2002 and the thread happened to continue into 2003, then it would perfectly match the age. The Internet is, in fact, significantly over forty years old, based upon original infrastructure and methods that were set up for perhaps up to two more decades previous to that. The World Wide Web (to many, synonymous with the Internet) hails from the early 1990s, and Google (one of the more commonly used search engines, through which this error search might have been made) was launched in the late 1990s, so are still practically older than this notional post. The biggest surprise might be that some information published on a webpage in 2002 (and still relevant to your search) survives on some still live web server (or as an archive/mirror of that original information on some archival/successor site). For example, any topical write-up of a then extant case of this issue, if documented upon web pages originally hosted by GeoCities, would have otherwise been made permanently inaccessible by the end of 2014.

The title text appears to be a conversation taking place in a distant future with the descendant of an ancient internet post. The 'last living descendant' is a common trope in fiction where arcane knowledge is passed down through a family line (often on the previous generation's deathbed). The suggestion is that the solution to the user's issue is a closely guarded secret that has had to be kept safe in this way.

Transcript

Implications of the age of the posts you see when you Google an error message

[A search engine prompt field is shown, containing part of an error code message (beginning with E-21, and what looks like a 9 and 3 next to it). Below this are search results shown as obscured text, except for a the phrase '3 years ago' in the first heading. This is expanded into an ellipse that obscures the rest of the search field.]

[A table, with 3 columns, labelled "Age of post", "What it means", and "Probability of a fix"]

[Row 1: Age of post:] 2 hours ago

[What it means:] There's an infrastructure outage

[Probability of a fix:] Very high -- just wait

[Row 2: Age of post:] 5 days ago

[What it means:] A recent update broke something big

[Probability of a fix:] High, but you might have to wait for a patch

[Row 3: Age of post:] 3 months ago

[What it means:] A new product isn't working for some users

[Probability of a fix:] Decent chance of a solution in the replies

[Row 4: Age of post:] 2 years ago

[What it means:] You've run into an edge case

[Probability of a fix:] Low, but maybe the replies can help with troubleshooting

[Row 5: Age of post:] 13 years ago

[What it means:] You're the only person with this problem

[Probability of a fix:] Very low -- post is likely not relevant

[Row 6: Age of post:] 24 years ago

[What it means:] Oh God how is the Internet this old

[Probability of a fix:] Maybe whoever posted this message has kids who can help you

---

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