remaining time for oponent changed drastically

My opponent was about to time out - i.e. over an hour ago had ~85 minutes of time left. An hour laterhe has 23 hrs of time left and he never made a move. How could this happen? Is this some perk of a diamond membership?

http://www.chess.com/echess/game.html?id=46334457

Ever since the 24 hour vacation minimum was introduced there's been a bug in the time remaining calculation after someone comes off of a vatation that lasted less than 24 hours.

Well I think he came off of vacation at least a day ago. So is the value I'm seeing currently the correct one or is it a result of this bug?

Actually, as I understand it, that is "working as intended."  The idea being to give the player enough time to make moves in their games before hitting auto-vacation again.

While I understand and even agree (somewhat) with this, I disagree with giving them the full 24 hours back.  The 24-hour vacation minumum was supposed to be a punishment.  Give them an hour or two back so they don't hit the auto-vac wall while trying to catch up on games, but not a full 24 hours.  That just means they can delay games just as much as before.

I've never bought that it was intentional, but I have heard that rationale for not fixing it.  It's a pretty clumsy kluge if that's the intent.  The two issues are only very loosely related, and vacation time and game time should not be fungible like this.

I've always thought the best way to handle the other issue would be to allow people to make conditional moves when they were on vacation, and to have those moves automatically played as soon as they turned vacation off.

This is happening again. The guy goes on vacation for a couple of hours, while having 9 hrs left, comes back, bam 26 hrs. I think there is something wrong with this system. :/

Yes, there is.