As designed New Posts block and the ignore function

[imthebest]

Today there was a spam "attack". To deal with this I ignored the spammer, however I noticed something strange in the "New Posts" block:



Let's say the spam attack started after the post on "Wow 4 pages of spam and growing". After ignorying the spammer, I was only able to see the first two entries (from top to bottom) in the block. The other 3 entries got hidden probably due to the fact that I ignored the spammer (which was occuping those positions on the block).

 

[Chris D]

In this particular circumstance, it is expected.

When fetching posts for the New Posts block, we "over fetch" so we deliberately attempt to select more posts from the database than we need. So, we actually fetch 10 posts for this block, and display 5. We do this so that if there's a couple of posts from users you are ignoring, or similar, then we filter those out, and we can still show you 5 posts.

In this case, however, the user had around 200 posts, so you end up seeing less than 5. We could fetch more, but realistically in terms of performance vs the rarity of such an occurrence it isn't worth it.