3245: Results Age
| Results Age |
 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. |
Explanation
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This is one of 48 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 | 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 | 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 am issue affecting everyone, or even a large propotion 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 relevent 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 relevent 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
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This is one of 45 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
[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.]
Heading text: Implications of the age of the posts you see when you google an error message:
[Below is a table, with 3 columns, labelled 'age of post', 'what it means', & 'probability of a fix']
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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, Iโm not even 24 years old 2A02:6B6F:E226:B00:803D:CE4C:ED8:DED4 18:45, 13 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)
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)
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