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|< < Prev #3245 (May 13, 2026)

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	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

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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