Topic: Recent Visit Pill Color Reset Issue

I am working on the problem that I am having with the pill's colors resetting back to yellow as one would browse around the asylum. This error results from any form of navigation through the asylum, click on the "OZONE Asylum" or the "Forums" button to simply pressing the back button to the main page and the clicking on a different forum to visit.

I have this problem on FireFox and Opera under FreeBSD 5.2.1
Suho has this problem under Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP.

I believe Lacuna has this problem as well, if you happen into this thread leave me your specs.

If anyone else is having this problem please leave me your specs as well, the more info I have about the operating system you are using and the browser, the better. Also if you are making use of any plugins that might affect your browser behavior let me know.

I have so far re-examined the code that contol's the pill colors and have not found any issue with the code, it all looks correct at a good hard inspection. It also appears that cookies are being handled appropriately. At least they are on test pages.

Since the problem is replicated on very different system and on different browsers, this problem might be a very low level problem, or it might be a common settings problem. I don't think it is a low level operating systems problem, that would be too convienient. My current huntch revolves around the caching mechanisms that are being used here, and how different settings are handling it.

I am not sure when this problem might be resolved, it is a tricky one and I might have to do a good deal of down and dirty testing. If you have any sugestions please feel free to drop them, I will look into any and all information regarding this problem, and will take any and all advice you have. I hope this might be a quick fix, but it is not looking that way.

I have just tried the Grail in Netscape, and I have experienced the same behavior. Ditto for my attempts at the test grail. Still getting the disappearing red pills no matter what I do.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | Keeper of the Juicy Bits

Posting an update, because I am approaching total exhaustion and if I don't comment on it I will forget it.

Browsing around the asylum after making two posts following on another in less than a minute and I had no change from yellow to red. Less than 10 minutes later I post and browse and all the other pills went to yellow (maybe it was the 15 minute limit, I don't think so). But this new red stays red. Something to look into. How posting affects the color change in the code.

IE 6 + win XP

I've had this problem for the longest time. Ever since the DreamHost crash or the last major hack implementation. Can't say for sure, but it has been for a long time.
I just chaulked it up to something wrong on my end.
Before the Grail, I "fixed" it by adjusting my browsing habits. All was good.
But now my adjusted browsing habits doesn't seem to work and the foible is back.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

IE6+win2kpro

 

Seems that this is a whole lot more prevelent than I first thought. Still looking into it...

hm... is all I can say.

Can't think of anything much more insightful, either.

In the beginning, when the issue had been reported for the first time, I thought everything was working fine for me here, but I guess it was coincidence that the right pills were red when I was looking for them - I am now having the same problems you described, WarMage. The effect wasn't noticable when there were only a few testing posts per day before we made the switch, though, so it seems that new posts in one forum make the pills in all the other forums turn yellow again or something... but that doesn't make any sense as the code doesn't take into account what forum a post was added to. Really weird.

(using Firefox/WinXP, but I doubt it's a browser-specific problem.)

(Edited by kuckus on 04-15-2004 09:38)

I just experienced it:
With firefox 0.8 on win2k
could this be some kind of caching problem?

Here is a report on a litle experiment i did.

Step 1) opened the asylum in firefox.
Step 2) was saw some red pills and some yellow pills
Step 3) opened the ozone forum
Step 4) clicked on forums
Result: all pills where yellow.

Step 5) clicked three times on the 'back' button
Result: back on the first page from the asylum i saw yellow and red pills.

Step 6) swichted to mozila 1.5
all pills where yellow (i was logged out so this was correct)
step 7) openend the ozone forum
step 8) opened a thread
step 9) wrote a comment
step 10) navigated back the forums using the link on top.
Result: on thread with a red pill

Step 11) navigated back the the mainpage
Result: one forum with a red pill.

Step 12) i navigated back to the post i made the pill was still red.
Step 13) after repeating step 10to12 a couple of times my own posted thread was still red.

Maybe this will help solve the mystery of the lost red pills.

------------------------------
Do something usefull: support Justice for Pat Richard

I really haven't had time to look into this deeply, I am hoping to have some time this weekend. I have to say I don't fully understand all of the HTTP header commands, I might have to go into some RFC's to figure out how the spec works for caching options. I am also going to look into similar code bases to see how they handle the issues.

Hopefully I will have something more for you by monday.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Ok, I just pressed some ctrl-key sequence that closed my browser after I had nearly finished a huge post. So you get a breif version due to my stupidity.

I believe that the issues here might be caused by how the caching is working. I want to remove no-store and must-revalidate from the headers being sent by the server to the browser, these two headers have to be causing a whole lot of problems.

The must-revalidate will cause the browser to reload the pages even on a back and forward navigation. The no-store while it could be included might not be necessary.

So I am going to reccomend changing the header sections of lines 80-84 of grailapi.php from

header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate");

header("Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0", false);

header("Pragma: no-cache");

header("Cache-control: private");

to

header ("Cache-Control: private, pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0");

header ("Expires: 0");

header ("Pragma: no-cache");

I also added an Expires to make the page immediately go stale, it might help things out.

I want to hash this out with TP to actually see where his code was coming from before I go and make any changes. So after I discuss this with TP I might test it and see if anything good comes from this.

I keep throwing a lot of garbage out here. I changed the caching on the test forum, I don't think it had any real affect on it. This makes me a little upset.

But I found out the pages are being sent gzipped. Might this have some impact on the pill colors for the page? I have never experienced compressed pages before so I don't know much about this.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

the yellow and red pills are different gifs, with different file names. The image src is changed, not the images themselves.