Is this a bug, or is it me?

[Smigma]

I have caching disabled on my forum.  But when someone posts the changes are not reflected till I do a Tempary File purge.  Is this a bug or is it something I'm doing wrong?

I do not have this problem with other forum/sites.  Just SMF at the moment?

[[Unknown]]

It's always been working for me.  How do you have your caching options set in Internet Options?

-[Unknown]

[Smigma]

It is set to automatically update. 

But since this problem, I changed the settings  to check everytime i visit the page, and reduced my Temp cache to 1 meg.

Very drastic but still not helping.

[[Unknown]]

I use 80 meg, automatic, with no problems whatsoever.  Are you using any firewall software or hardware?  Do you connect through any proxy?

I happen to know this is a BIG problem with proxies, I've experienced it - yet there's really no good way to solve it.

-[Unknown]

[Smigma]

No proxies here.  But i know what you mean.  Another observation that i noticed it only happens on the main page "index.php".  The boards all update after clicking the "new" posts.  If i go to the main page and purge the temp folder then F5 i get the most up-to-date page.  Really weird.  I'm going to try different computers around the house and see if it happens to them, or not.  To help rule out things...


****UPDATE****

After messing around with 3 other computers, they too are experiencing the same problem.  But when browsing another forum or website.  The information is updated each time.  Is there a way I can put a meta tag somewhere that tell IE to update the page?  I wonder if i stated that right?

[[Unknown]]

You must have some sorta of caching stuff upstream then, or installed.  The index.php caching issue is EXACTLY one of the problems with lax proxy caching.

SMF is already sending proper caching headers, the proxy just thinks it is too smart for them.

-[Unknown]

[CaptnIgnit]

I am having the exact same problem. the website keeps caching itself. i have to hit ctrl-f5 in order for the page to update. i have disabled output caching but it doesnt seem to have helped. i was having problems with sessions but those seem to be resolved now. anyone have any idea whats up? is there a setting i might be missing? i have run several forums on my server and none of them have had this problem.

sorry for the post resurrection, but its better than making new ones over and over

[[Unknown]]

In most cases, this is caused by your local or ISP's network caching things a little to frivilously....

-[Unknown]

[CaptnIgnit]

so in other words, im SOL

i can understand the isp and the server caching stuff, but why would it just be with SMF? everyone i know that has gone to my forum has had this problem. from multiple PC's and internet connections, which leads me to believe that its something going on with the server/forum.

if you care to take a look and see what i mean

http://www.lanpartynw.com/forumse [nofollow]

[[Unknown]]

http://dev.lewismedia.com/tools/httpheaders.php?url=http://www.lanpartynw.com/forumse/index.php
http://dev.lewismedia.com/tools/httpheaders.php?url=http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php

They are sending practically the same headers.  Looks to me as if your server is responding to If-Not-Modified, but that's just a guess.

-[Unknown]

[CaptnIgnit]

what exactly is If-Not-Modified, im not aware of it(so it likely could be the problem )

and thanks in advanced, i imagine you are a busy man with all this stuff!

[[Unknown]]

Sorry... If-Not-Modified might not be the actual header, let me check....

Oops, okay... it was If-Modified-Since.  Close... basically, this is a header the browser sends, like so:

If-Modified-Since: some date

And then, the server says, "oh.. yeah, it hasn't been modified yet!"  It then... doesn't send the new content.

But this is just a possibility.  Usually, the script has to do this manually.... I know I've even written scripts to do this, because it is GREAT for caching.  However, I don't know if your server is doing this... I just know that if I click to reload it doesn't reload.... but if I press Ctrl-F5, it works.  And, the anti-caching headers ARE being sent....

So.. I'm not really sure.  You should ask your host if they've configured anything special in Apache...

-[Unknown]

[CaptnIgnit]

well i own the server, and i've been messing around looking through httpd.conf and php.ini to find anything about caching and haven't come up with anything. ill keep looking to see what i can find out.

do you know if there is a place that If-Modified-Since could be registered globally?

[CaptnIgnit]

ok, think i have it figured out

i gave up on messing around with my server since everything i did, didn't seem to help. In the end what solved it was adding

session_cache_limiter('none');

to the top of index.php. it had to do with the session caching(obviously).

Thanks much for your help on the issue unknown!