Something weird is happening

bUU

bUU

Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Joined
Dec 26, 2012
Messages
2,240
Location
Georgia
Something weird is happening. Things work fine in the lists of threads, but inside the threads themselves it seems to lose track of who I am.
 
It is just the NSA messing with you. Ignore them. :cool:
 
bUU said:
Something weird is happening. Things work fine in the lists of threads, but inside the threads themselves it seems to lose track of who I am.
Click to expand...

I see the same thing. I think they did a server update recently. Not sure if this explains this. Does not seem to affect posting or navigating thru the forum. Yesterday it was throwing me off the forum several times (lost site??). I try not to take it personal :)...
 
bUU said:
Something weird is happening. Things work fine in the lists of threads, but inside the threads themselves it seems to lose track of who I am.
Click to expand...
Same here. The quote button was there and worked, which is why I'm able to do this. But on the same page as the quote button, the upper right did NOT have "Welcome, sengsational" like it usually does (it does on this page, though). I'm not sure what's going to happen when I press 'submit reply'. If you're reading this, it means it worked ;)
 
sengsational said:
Same here. The quote button was there and worked, which is why I'm able to do this. But on the same page as the quote button, the upper right did NOT have "Welcome, sengsational" like it usually does (it does on this page, though). I'm not sure what's going to happen when I press 'submit reply'. If you're reading this, it means it worked ;)
Click to expand...
Well, not really. It didn't completely work. The post did show up (obviously), but when the page came back, it went into a JavaScript endless loop. This was using Firefox with NoScript configured to allow this domain (but maybe not all domains). The base problem, though, was happening both here on my desktop Firefox and also on my Android Tablet with Firefox (with no add-ins running).
 
When you log in, check the "Remember Me" box. That should take care of it.
 
bUU said:
Something weird is happening. Things work fine in the lists of threads, but inside the threads themselves it seems to lose track of who I am.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you are suffering from an identity crisis.......:angel:
 
Perhaps I'm being excessively paranoid, but I've always refused on general principles to use the "Remember Me" option for the web sites I frequent. I'm uncomfortable depositing my login credentials who knows where for a hacker to potentially exploit.

Regardless of the wisdom of this precaution, I don't plan on changing just because ER.org isn't working the way it should be. Please fix this problem instead of requiring everybody to use a work-around.
 
Another issue I hadn't noticed until recently is that the "last reply" is visible on the portal screen several minutes before it appears in the thread detail. The portal screen will show a post by MichaelB, for example, but when I click on the thread no post is there. A few minutes later, though, it does appear.

I don't know if this lengthy lag time is a recent phenomenon. Perhaps I just didn't notice it until now. In either case, it's pretty weird that parts of this site know more about what's being posted than others.
 
As a concrete example of this lag time issue, take thread http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f46/no-single-supplement-70308.html#post1407791 The first reply in this thread is timestamped 11:01am by jimnjana, and I did see jimnjana's id listed as responding to this thread at that time. But I wasn't able to click on the thread and see the actual text of jimnjana's reply until 11:04. Could one of the forum admins explain why this is happening?
 
karluk said:
Perhaps I'm being excessively paranoid, but I've always refused on general principles to use the "Remember Me" option for the web sites I frequent. I'm uncomfortable depositing my login credentials who knows where for a hacker to potentially exploit.
Click to expand...

It doesn't save your login and password. It sets a cookie that lets the system know that you are logged in or not. If it doesn't see the cookie it thinks you're not logged in.

Saving the login/password is a separate function in your browser.
 
karluk said:
Perhaps I'm being excessively paranoid...
Click to expand...
I vote yes.

The software is allowing you to agree to something (setting a cookie) that many (most) sites do without your knowledge or permission. It can't tell (and doesn't care) whether you have your pants on or not... :)
 
REWahoo said:
I vote yes.

The software is allowing you to agree to something (setting a cookie) that many (most) sites do without your knowledge or permission. It can't tell (and doesn't care) whether you have your pants on or not... :)
Click to expand...
Gotcha. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Is there an equally simple explanation of why I'm seeing a time lag before being able to read new posts?
 
I believe the time lag happens only when logged in and not using the "Remember Me" option. At least I haven't seen in the short time I've been using "Remember Me".

I guess I'm willing to believe that the option to not remember that a session is logged in from one screen to the next is a feature ER.org generously provides to its members which other websites mandate, but it's less clear why that option should lead to a several minute delay in the visibility of new posts, as I described above. I would tend to describe such behavior as a "bug", not a "feature".
 
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I certainly can't debug other people's sessions or decide for them what odd behavior is worth reporting, but since I didn't notice the lag time problem until the other "Remember Me" issues started happening a few days ago, I would speculate that the lag time is happening to everybody but was either unnoticed or went unreported because it was considered a secondary problem to the failure to carry login info from one screen to the next.

Then when the admins started recommended using "Remember Me", that fixed the lag time issue as a beneficial side-effect.

I would suggest, however, if you want to continue making "Remember Me" optional rather than mandatory, you should stress test it and make sure that it is working in a reasonable way for people who persist in keeping "Remember Me" unchecked.
 
karluk said:
I would suggest, however, if you want to continue making "Remember Me" optional rather than mandatory, you should stress test it and make sure that it is working in a reasonable way for people who persist in keeping "Remember Me" unchecked.
Click to expand...
Just so there is no misunderstanding, I'm an ex mod (note the "Emeritus" title above my avatar) and have no ability to make any change to the forum software. My questions and comments regarding this issue are for entertainment value only. :)
 
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I think I have always had to click the remember me box every time I cleared cookies and emptied the cache. I don't think that choice is a recent development and it is not unique to this website. I did get returned to the guest status momentarily a couple of days ago after logging in on another computer, but it quickly went back to logged in status.

I have not had the problem with posts showing on the portal list but not within a thread as quickly. I have opened a thread and found the portal had not updated itself to show the actual last post--I.e., the portal lagged the thread, which seems like the opposite of what karluk is reporting? But going back to the portal page, it then does show the last post to a thread. So it seems to me to be a cross posting issue in this case.
 
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I've always noticed some delays in threads. Polls, for example, don't load for a couple of minutes, so we see a thread announcing a poll but no poll. Sometimes a post takes a minute to load and people, assuming it got lost, post again. I once prepared a post and was using the "preview" function to see it but decided not to post, but it was still seen by others for a minute or two, and one quoted it in his post.

Having spent my adult working life in the murky world of IT I know that software is like a teenage child. It has an attitude and likes to do random stuff just to bother the rest of us, so I don't give it a second thought.
 
MichaelB said:
Having spent my adult working life in the murky world of IT I know that software is like a teenage child. It has an attitude and likes to do random stuff just to bother the rest of us, so I don't give it a second thought.
Click to expand...
Hmm, having spent my adult working life in IT, I know that computers do exactly what they are programmed to do, neither more nor less. We have here a clear, reproducible bug that nobody on the site seems willing to investigate. Very well, if it's not worth anybody else's time, then it's not worth my time either. I was hoping to give back to the site by helping to fix what is most likely a problem introduced by some software changes about a week ago, but it's not to be. We'll have to live with it, because software is "like a teenage child" with an attitude.
 
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