This is a mystery for me. It is a problem with my comptuter because I have not encountered the problem using other computers while on the road.

When I post a message it does not immediately come up on the board. I tried the refresh feature to no avail. It takes varying times to finally see my post.

Furthermore, new posts made my others don't come up on my computer on a regular basis. There are times when I can read them and other times it takes a few sessions in a day to finally have them come up.

I know that my computer is the problem.

Any wisdom out there? Thanks.

PS: Edited for this second thought. I am also contributing to a professional bulletin board and I don't encounter this problem on that site. FT seems to be the only place where my computer acts up.

[This message has been edited by airbus320 (edited 10-15-2002).]

As an addendum, I cannot read at this time the edit that I just made.

Are you running through a proxy server? (Even if you haven't configured one yourself, it's possible your ISP is running one invisibly.) I have the first problem all the time with FT. As a result of the poor design of FT's software, a proxy server has no reason to think it needs to get a new copy of the page, so it doesn't do so.

As to the second problem, I'll guess you're using IE. Some version of IE have a known problem whereby they don't do a proper reload when you ask them to, when working through a proxy. (In Netscape you can force a complete reload of a page, ignoring caches, by using shift-reload. In IE, there's no way to do it, unless you clear out your cache.)

You are on the money. I am using IE.

Thanks for your response.

Another mystery. Everything is fine now.

I continue to have same problem.

On some occasions (can not figure out why or when) when a thread has new posts I cannot see them - I only see those previously seen. I open the thread with shift key depressed and I see the new posts.

Also, when I open a site from a thread (such as an article or image), the new post marker (yellow folder) disappears as if I just reloaded the page.

I understand that the cache is the problem but can not figure out what is the best setting (using Windows XP and IE 6.0).

Any help please...

How you configure your cache depends a lot on where you're browsing from and what you're looking at.

For instance, if you're on a dialup connection, you probably want to keep caching turned on, so that you don't have to keep loading in new pages on a 56K connection.

If you're on a broadband connection, though, it might benefit you to turn your caching off and have the page pull a new version from the server each time, since download time is probably minimal.

If you're browsing a frequently updated bulletin board, like ours, you may want to turn your caching off, regardless, so that you're sure to get the newest version of a thread.

Using Netscape 4.78 & MS Win, I generally always have to Shift-rightclick and select "reload frame" to see my new post.

Thanks pdhenry. Your suggestion helped.

How can you turn off your cache in IE6.0.

I can dial it down to 1 mb but does not take the problem away. I only seem to see new posting if I use the shift key.

Thanks

Something certainly has changed because I also need to refresh certain pages to see new posts. I tried this on 2 different machines here and they both have the same problem. When I go into a new forum (Omni for example) I need to refresh to update it.

Nothing's changed with our FT code since the summer at least, and even then it wasn't anything to do with caching. I can see about placing no-cache statements into the thread templates to hopefully keep the pages from storing on your browser.

FromYXU, can you set your cache to 0 MB?

UPDATE: I've added a META Expire tag to the page headers. We already had a META no-cache tag in place, though, so we'll see. Rather than shut the board down and update all the threads, I'm going to let the pages self-update for now as they're replied to in order to see if anything bad crops up because of this. You may still have to do the shift-reload thing for a little while until all the pages adopt the template change...

[This message has been edited by dan at WebFlyer (edited 11-21-2002).]

Dan,

In IE6.0 the cache can only be "dialed" down to 1.

It's highly unlikely you'd want to take that advice anyhow. Crippling your browser's performance just because of one web site (unless FT is the only site you ever use) seems a bit extreme to me.

I've done some more investigation on this. While the httpd-equiv tags may work for some proxy caches, it won't work for others. The only standard way to specify no-cache is in the HTTP headers. A proxy is not required by any standard to search the text of a document to see if any httpd-equiv tags have been inserted in it. It's expensive on resources, so ISP proxies (such as mine) don't do it.

If Flyertalk's web server issued the no-cache directive in the HTTP headers, everything should be fine. Inserting the httpd-equiv tags in the documents is a hit and miss solution. (... so to speak.)