2

Sorting error

When querying /questions and sort them by creation in descending order, the creation_date drops very rapidly.

I was looking for questions in the [php] tag on Stack Overflow. There are over 1000 php questions asked today, but I received questions that were asked 2 years ago when I get to about 400 items.

This query reveals that they are not really sorted by creation_date at all:

Sorting error

Plotting the creation_date of the first 700 items produces the following graph. You can see there is a weird drop in creation_date all the way to 2008 before going back to normal again.

graph

This problem isn't always present though. I encountered this issue at around 3:45 PM UTC for two days in a row but not during other times of the day.

Filtering error

Another problem with /questions is that if I specify fromdate, todate, min or max when sort by creation, it no longer returns any negatively scored questions.

With this query, I was able to find the typical bad questions in the [php] tag. However, specifying the fromdate has a side-effect of eliminating all the bad questions (click on the image to enlarge):

Filtering error

0

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.