Comments count is off

[burntcookie90]

story 10963568 from /news shows 187 comments but hitting item/10963568 shows only 9 for comments_count

see: https://whispering-fortress-7282.herokuapp.com/news
and: https://whispering-fortress-7282.herokuapp.com/item/10963568

[cheeaun]

So let me explain this; the cause of the bug is mainly from Firebase HN API sometimes returning 401 (Permission denied) responses for some of the comments. For the past few changes that I've committed, I purposely set a timeout for every single request to Firebase. If it's too slow, due to too many comments, it'll just silently fail. If it's 401, due to Firebase's weird bug, it'll also silently fail.

Before this solution, the whole request on the API (this one, not HN) fails, so I decided that it's still better to return some comments rather than none. Thus, explains why the comment count is wrong.

I'm not sure how to fix this, but hoping that it'll be fixed on Firebase side. Probably this one: HackerNews/API#6

[burntcookie90]

Yeah I figured it was something similar, with the lack of updates on the hacker news firebase side, does it make sense to not use a scraper?