3245: Results Age

Results Age

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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 is one of 46 incomplete explanations: This page was created BY AN INTERNET GRANDPA. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

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	Explanation given	Full Explanation
2 hours ago	A service outage. Not very long to fix - 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 new update just broke something big. High chance to be fixed, 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 finding a solution in replies	This problem is clearly not going to be fixed by the creators, judging by how long it's been there, and it possibly isn't an issue affecting everyone, or even a large proportion of users. However, people are innovative, and no doubt will someone have found their own fix, patch or kludge to get around the product limitations.
2 years ago	You've ran into an edge case. Low chance to be fixed, but there could be help in troubleshooting	An edge case is a rare situation that the developers did not think to account for, usually causing a logic error, where the program works, but outputs something unexpected which might cause an error down the line. Very few people will suffer from this precise problem, although others may have encountered similar issues on similar software, and noting how they solved their problem might lead you towards how to solve your own problem.
13 years ago	You're the only one with this problem. Very Low chance to be fixed, and the post is likely irrelevant	Given how long this 'problem' has been around without being fixed, it is likely the problem is a problem the user has specifically. Possibly through the tech being corrupted through use, or not being compatable with the thing itself. More than that, it suggests that your search has only found an old post that just happens to match your search-query, because there are no more definite answers to your precise question and the enquiry results in nothing more relevant to show you.
24 years ago	Oh god how is the Internet so old. Maybe whoever posted the message's children can help you out.	This is another comic where Randall makes people feel old. In this case by pointing out that the Internet is very old, and people posting comments in the early period of the Internet are now grown up with kids. Something Randall has repeatedly shown that he is uncomfortable with. 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. The Internet is in fact significantly older than 24 years old, being over fifty years old. 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) started working in the late 1990s. The biggest surprise might be that some information found on a web-page in 2002 (and still relevant to your search) survives on some still live web server (or as an archive of that original information on some successor site). For example, anything hosted on a GeoCities site would have normally been made inaccessible in 2014. Title text seems to be describing what a conversation with the child of that person could look like, it is phrased in a way a dramatic fiction would do it.

Transcript

This is one of 40 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

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 & what looks like a 9 & 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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Discussion

oh god these are uncomfortably accurate...though sometimes the post age is the next time rung down. i hit an issue recently which sent me to mozilla forum posts from 2008, migrated twice, where the people having the problem seem to have stopped caring about it a decade ago - Vaedez (talk) 18:43, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Man, I’m not even 24 years old 2A02:6B6F:E226:B00:803D:CE4C:ED8:DED4 18:45, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Can we block this IP address? 82.13.184.33 08:33, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I programmed a computer for the first time 55 years ago this month. --2A00:23CC:D248:8901:79C8:645F:821A:1BA3 08:43, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

I guess once we finish the table in the explanation we can convert that to a similar table in the transcript, rather than doing them independently. Barmar (talk) 19:13, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

No. Tables do not belong in the Transcript. It serves a different purpose. And it'll just be the text that's there, so would be far simpler (and more likely to be 'finished' any time soon) than the Explanation table which will get tweaked to add or clarify explanatory descriptions.

You could copy an Explanation table (having the comic text, in various rows and columns) to the Transcript then 'de-Table' it (remove the table-formatting) and 'en-Transcript' what remains (add the ":[This bit looks like..]" stuff). But that's not much less effort than rewriting such a relatively small comic's from scratch.

It can also go the other way, though... Someone gets the Transcript done, and then from that the base text of the Table is 'en-Tabled'. It'd depend on who visits the newly-created Comic page and what they decide to concentrate on to start up the otherwise blank page that the BOT put together. 81.179.199.253 20:56, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

I added the content of the table to the transcript based on the format of 3120: Geologic Periods which also has a table. --208.59.176.206 00:49, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I will add an explanation of an edge case SomebodyElse (talk) 19:40, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

If it's negative time old you are in a Tardis. If it's sqrt(-1) time old, give me some of whatever it is you are smoking. 64.201.132.210 22:02, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Which sqrt(-1)? If it's imaginary i then you're in weird territory, but if it's quaternionic i, j, or k, you can interpret that as a spacelike separation, so it just means that you've found someone with an FTL drive i.e. the flowchart arrow also goes to TARDIS.185.146.232.73 10:03, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Or if it is the engineer's j. Just realized that since if you restrict to the (1,i), (1,j) or (1,k) plane in the space of quaternians it's isomorphic to the complex numbers. So maybe the mathematician are just using the i quaternian and the engineers are using the j quaternian and they really are different.Lord Pishky (talk) 23:49, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Yeah it's even better when there's no god damn results at all.RG (talk) 00:29, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

What about when the post is more than 13 years old and you see that the post is from yourself, you had just forgotten about it? JohnHawkinson (talk) 01:52, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Same vibe as googling early warning signs of alheizmers for the first time but all the links are purple.RG (talk) 02:08, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I once discovered a scanned magazine article from 1999 or so that briefly mentioned how to use a hidden Mathematica feature that a) still existed more than 20 years later and b) was in fact directly applicable to my problem. Sometimes things do work out!185.146.232.73 10:03, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I actually made my first table on this one! It took a lot of trial-and-error. GSLikesCats307 (talk) 11:10, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

What's wrong with this is that the first search result is irrelevant, since it will just tell OP to use Google because the question has been asked before. --80.187.113.212 13:07, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

The Internet is not over 50 years old. The Internet as we know it came online at the beginning of 2023, when Arpanet switched from the old NCP protocol to TCP/IP. So I changed that explanation to "over forty years old". Although as far as modern users are concerned, anything prior to the WWW is mostly irrelevant. Barmar (talk) 14:07, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Really? I'm sure I remember using it way more than three years ago... 82.13.184.33 14:10, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Because of progressive interoperability over time, I'd say that you can't give a definite hard limit to the start of 'the Internet'. The TCP backbone itself was first implemented in 1974, and yet even in the early '90s I had to tunnel some 'internet' traffic through legacy systems that weren't using TCP/IP for the layer-3 OSI (that's alongside other 'similarly old' alternatives to TCP/IP like IPX/SPX). Battling with using ZMODEM (or one of the <FOO>MODEMs, maybe X or Y instead) over X.25 forms part of my early efforts (that I'd happily now forget) to learn how to do (as a 'new guy') what others around me were already perfectly at ease using. Even concentrating on layer-7 (user experience) or layer-1 (the physical infrastructure), the Internet-that-everyone-now-uses can be argued as to having started at different times (e.g. the arrival of Broadband, or perhaps even Mobile Data, as a mass-consumer product for a given territory, yet dial-up access existed before that, as well as permanent ISDN or T#-lines between institutions and businesses sufficiently invested in the need for interconnectivity).

Did you mean 1983, instead of 2023? That makes more somewhat more sense, all these further caveats aside. 82.132.212.205 17:20, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Yeah...must mean 1983. Because, well, it happened in 1983! It would be weird to declare a date (and reference 40 years ago) and be that wildly wrong. Yorkshire Pudding (talk) 22:35, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

25 years? Hold my beer. 25 or so years ago I found an answer to a problem I had in an online web archive of a post to comp.os.cpm from the early 1980s. Jgharston (talk) 07:37, 17 May 2026 (UTC)

I thought for sure that the title text was gonna be about how AI makes solving some problems trivial, while sometimes it sends you off the deep end even worse than a UseNet thread from 1994. blagae (talk) 15:47, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

For me, the particular aspect of "13 years ago" (or more likely "7 years ago") is You're the only person with this problem" - "The only hit you found is from a thread you yourself started." I've had this happen at least twice: look for a specific combination and the only posts are one on reddit and one on stackoverflow, both of which match exactly because seven years later you used exactly the same terms in your search as you wrote in your post. Still no solutions! Gidklio (talk) 12:50, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

My friend says Xkcd is stupid, should I slime him out?Commercialegg (talk) 18:10, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Well, "Xkcd" is stupid. But "xkcd" (or, at a push, "XKCD") should be ok. I'm with your friend, there.

As to slime... is that something you'd like to use? And your friend? It takes all kinds, I know, and there are so many kinds of potential slime, so I'm not sure what kind you're potentially working with, here. Enquiring minds may want to know more, though. 81.179.199.253 19:03, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Is this comic related to the at-the-time recent Instructure outage / cyber attack? If so, it should probably be added to the explanation. -- AndyShow1000000 (talk) 12:24, 18 May 2026 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
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