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What browser do you use, kenziesmommy663?
Volunteer mod- I'm here to help! Email me for the best response: nambroth at gmail.com
My art: featherdust.comJennifer wrote:Tyrrlin wrote:This did not work. I PMed Snapdragon for help, but have not heard back.
Apparently I am the ONLY one having these difficulties? It’s REALLY hard to figure out which topics have new replies when the icon (the little sheet of paper or the yellow folder vs. the white one) disappears as soon as I click on the forum thread.
PLEASE HELP!
AND I keep getting the “Invalid Session. Please resubmit the form.” messages. I have to submit ANYTHING I type *three* times before it goes through.
Please, this is VERY frustrating, and it makes me miss out on things, as well as not being able to respond.
I don’t think anyone else has had problems, and we have quite a few active users! If anyone else has problems, please speak up so we know.
I regret that I know nothing about the Safari browser. Are you having problems using any other browser? It really sounds like an ‘old cookie’ problem but again I don’t know Safari so I don’t know how to help. You’ve tried clearing/deleting all of your cookies? I’m not sure then. You might seek help form other Safari users?
I’ve even tried downloading and using FireFox and I’m still having the problem… including the “Invalid Session” error messages.
Windstone collector in remission. 😉
So sorry you are both having this issue! I will research it and see what I can come up with.
Volunteer mod- I'm here to help! Email me for the best response: nambroth at gmail.com
My art: featherdust.comJennifer wrote:So sorry you are both having this issue! I will research it and see what I can come up with.
Thank you very much!
<3
Windstone collector in remission. 😉
I’ll try to keep this as non-technical as possible.
Short Answers:
Do I know what the problem is? Yes.
Can I fix it? No.
It is specific to each user? Yes.
Does it involve proxies? Yes.
Is it my ISP? Possibly. (If it’s AOL then OMFG YES)Long Answers:
The Internet is insecure. To protect forums and other authenticated systems we have accounts, passwords, cookies and session keys.When you login to the forum, the forum takes your IP address and the date and creates a 32 character hash out of it. This is your session ID. It’s stored both on the web server and on your computer as a cookie. It has a time limit of 43200 seconds (12 hours).
Every time you access a forum page, be it, load a topic, look at a PM, write a message, your cookie is compared to the session ID on the server. If at any time they do not match – your session is killed.
When your session is killed, your ‘last visit’ time is updated. This affects your topics that show as being last read. It also gives you the appearance of being ‘logged out’ .. since.. your session doesn’t match.
What causes the session to not match?
Your IP address changing, or cookies being deleted.Why would my IP address change??
Well.Technically ………. it’s NOT.
But what your ISP does to try and keep their traffic down.. is they run you through a proxy cache. ESPECIALLY AOL. THIS IS 100% ALWAYS TRUE FOR AOL.
Imagine this. Let’s say your IP address is 1.1.1.1. You connect to your ISP and you ask for “windstoneeditions.com”.
If your ISP runs a proxy cache, it will first check the proxy to see if it has a copy of the page stored.
(By the way, if you’re cluing in, yes, proxy caches are 100% useless for forums – they’re only even partially useful for static pages that the content doesn’t change on, and COME ON.. where does that happen anymore…)
The ISP will then query the page to see if it has changed since the cached copy was taken.
The ISP’s proxy cache does the direct communication to the web server – NOT your computer.
The proxy could and will have multiple IP addresses.
So to the forum… you could look like you are coming in from many different places, and not your real IP.
Now …. if this is a smaller IP and the proxy servers are on the same third octet subnet … (the first three numbers of the IP are always the same), then the proxy business generally … generally… won’t affect you. You might get the odd error.
But when you use an ISP like AOL… where they own THOUSANDS of IP blocks… you could pull forum pages from up to a couple dozen IP’s at a time.
Web accelerator programs do this too! The ISP will pull the page and images from multiple connections at once, and then feed them down to the client.
So the long and the short together. The forum can only tell if it’s you by a combination of your login and your IP address. The forum can’t keep knowing it’s you if you present yourself via a different IP address.
What can you do?
Well, if you’re having this issue, first find out if your ISP forces a proxy on your connection. Sometimes your browser will automatically configure itself — so look under your proxy settings in your browser and see if it’s got a proxy, or set to “Direct Connection”. Direct connection is what you want.
Talk to your ISP and see if they have this in place. Tell them it interferes with your authenticated browsing and have them place you in an excluded subnet that doesn’t force the proxy.
Outside of that, if your ISP is forcing a proxy and you can’t get them to exclude you, your only choice is to change ISP’s.
What, set computers on fire?
Snapdragon wrote:What, set computers on fire?
I’m going to do that when this desktop finally dies…. *bwahahahahahaha* I did figure out defragging though (more like, my fiancee showed me…)lol But I’m not using it as much either.
Dragon87 wrote:Snapdragon wrote:What, set computers on fire?
I’m going to do that when this desktop finally dies…. *bwahahahahahaha* I did figure out defragging though (more like, my fiancee showed me…)lol But I’m not using it as much either.
At least you are attempting to use it some. It’s a start. 😉Aha, here it is! You even stickied it for my silly self to find later! XD
Thank you for the explanation! I do not have AOL, but I believe my local ISP does that …thing… you described. I shall see what I can do to resolve my proxy settings.
…that might be what’s timing me out of Army Knowledge Online, too…. and since that’s for work, it’s TRIPLY aggravating.
Thanks again!
Windstone collector in remission. 😉
Glad the forum is back up. Ok, I have three tiny issues. Probably old news, but just in case…
1) On the login page, the text “Password”, “Username”, “Log me on automatically each visit”, and “Hide my online status this session” have the same font color as the background, so they blend in and cant be seen. Also, some text (like the message you get after you submit a reply) have a red font color, and red text is a little hard to read on this dark grey background. Maybe increase the font size, or just choose a different color.
2) The icon used to indicate that a thread has a new post is too similar to the icon of threads without new posts, making it very difficult to browse down the list for active topics.
3) Its nice to see who authored a reply before reading the reply (for me anyway). It’s a bit awkward having the posts’ authors’ names listed to the right of their post, since we all start reading on the left. Especially if the reply is very short or you have a widescreen monitor.
Otherwise, looks great!
Is there a way to see when someone was typed the last message you are looking at?
I do not see a time/date on anything
I’m also getting the white box I saw someone else talking about
There are more colors I think but MUCH more difficult, for me, at least to get to workThe lack of timestamps on individual replies is driving me batty! (Well, battier 😈 ) Or am I blind again and it’s under my nose?
Also, I noticed that certain checkbox options in the control panel are the same color font as the background so they have to be highlighted to be read. Just in case you’re not aware.
Thanks for all the hard work! 🙂
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