This Forum is Glitchy…

[Raven]

I tried responding to a post, but wasn’t published… There was a message come up that said the requested page wasn’t found- or something like that…

Also the responses from Eric say they were posted minutes ago, but it’s been HOURS…

[Raven]

My response to the other post just came through, but doesn’t show updated on the timeline…

[Eric Charles]

Hey Raven –

I’m glad to hear from you about this. I know you’re a long-time member and know how this thing *should* work. I would love your help figuring out what’s the matter with it…

Sorry to get into the technically guts of it, but a little background info is helpful here:

The site uses what’s called “caching” so pages come up fast. This means essentially when the website generates a page, it saves a copy of it for future users to see. This is so that the website doesn’t have to do the heavy calculations to regenerate the page from scratch every time it’s pulled up – once it’s generated once, it just serves the “copy” of the finished page, which is much faster and much less load on the server.

The downside is that the copy doesn’t reflect the accurate times of forum posts when you’re looking at the cached copy – those values are “frozen in time” from when the cache was saved. Caches can be up to 3 days old before they’re refreshed.

So that’s why sometimes the reply times look recent (minutes ago) when it’s actually a day old.

Now… sometimes old posts will get bumped up from years ago… in those cases, it’s a spammer robot that replied to an old thread. The spam gets nuked immediately, but the old post remains “bumped” on the sidebar. Annoying but not worth the expense of paying my genius tech guy to solve it. :)

Now… about the glitchy posting… I think I know what’s happening there. Was the error you saw a 504 server timeout issue? If so, I’ve seen that too and I’ll talk to my tech to fix it.

I really appreciate you alerting me to this… there was another forum poster that emailed us saying it was not allowing her to post, but it was unclear what the cause is. Your message gives me a great clue, and I think I can solve this from here…

I’ll let you know (once it’s solved I’ll clear this thread, too).

Thanks.

[Author]

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