Has anyone noticed that on the customized jerseys on store.nba.com, when you go to customize it will always have "15" or "52" pre-entered in the custom number section, and will sometimes have "Tebow" or "Saddler" already put in the custom name section?

Saw "9" with "TEACH" a few times. Just got "0" with "S FULLER" and "01" with "KINGS".

Here's what may have happened...

For high volume websites, companies usually have caching servers geographically spread all over the country. For example, the NBA's main server may be in NYC but that could take too long for somebody in CA to hit. (By too long means fractions of a second.) So the NBA has a server which caches the content of the NYC server in CA. Instead of going to NYC to grab the content, the user's browser just grabs it from the closer CA location.

But the first time a user in CA views a page after the servers have been reset, the caching sever doesn't have a copy of the page. In that case the caching server goes to NYC to grab the original. Now say a user put in "Tebow" and "15". When that CA caching server grabs that page from NYC, it is going to use that page as it's cache. If "tebow" and "15" are in there, than that's what future users who hit that caching serving are going to get.

Because there are multiple caching servers, not all of them will have gotten their initial cache page at the same time and so will have different cached versions. That's why sometimes you get "tebow/15", sometimes you don't, and sometimes you may get a different "name/number" combination altogether. You're likely hitting a different caching server.

Now these caching servers should only be serving up the static (non-changing) content from the main server. But likely the developers fucked up and they cached user inputted data. The developers needed to tag the jersey number and name fields as something to not be cached.

This happened to one company I was at where a number of customers hit the checkout page and the billing address was pre-populated with a different customer's info. Much worse of a fuck-up than this.

/r/nba Thread