LogFAQs > #962136890

The zero post topic glitch was not just a temporary error, it persisted until gamefaqs was separated from gamespot again. The Officail 500+ Team noticed something was up when the actual post count of their topics differed from the number shown on topic list. These ghost posts were viewed as a seemingly random coding issue until the team found out they could consistently break the post count with messages that had a high character count - the longcat ASCII was typically used to break it.

When this glitch occurred on the first post, it would end up creating 2 topics on a board: the real one, and then a second zero-post topic with the same title that would permanently hover in the space between active and archived topics. These zero-post topics continued to build up over time until either someone else posted in them, or they finally disappeared after gamefaqs de-linked from the gamespot boards. For the former, if you know where to look you can still find some archived topics where the TC doesn't match up with the TC on topic list. This is because someone posted in a zero-post topic back in the day.