If the problem is on my end, then why would this be the one and only website that it happens to me on? I don’t have the time to participate on a lot of boards, but I am on two or three others, and this never happens with any of these others. Never.
The problem seems to be some sort of hiccup upon log-in. Even last night I could see my last log-in was five days ago, but as soon as I clicked on anything, my last log-in was registered as that moment and everything was suddenly listed as Read. It seems to be a Board issue, and I would hope someone is trying to fix it.
Siam Sam, do you participate in any other vBulletin-based boards? My guess is this glitch is more vBull’s problem than SDMB’s, which, unfortunately, means it will be harder to get fixed. Would it be worth your while to register at another vBull board, like giraffeboards.com, to see if the same problem occurs? At least we could narrow it down and point the finger in the right direction.
I know the term “vBulletin,” but not being a tech-head I’ve never been quite sure what that meant. Some sort of software, I assume. But I’m not on any board that has the look of this one or which has used the term vBulletin that I’m aware of.
EDIT: Wait a minute. The old pigeon board that I used to be on did look like this one. Similar controls such as URL-link placement. That one is not up anymore, but that might have been vBulletin. And no, no problem there at all.
vBulletin is the responsible party for designing the board software that SDMB, and many other boards, use. SDMB does little more than configure it by modifying many options that the designer allowed to be changed (check this, uncheck that, boost the “1” to “2”, etc.). If there is a fault with the code, there’s little SDMB can do about it without a huge software coding expense, and the vulnerability of having the fix totally wiped out by the next upgrade. So they simply aren’t going to tackle it at all.
That’s why finding out the culprit is so important. Is the problem in the SDMB implementation (which includes the server and ISP) or the vB coding? One crew is not going to fix the other’s bugs.
I suggested giraffeboards.com as an alternate test because it runs on vB, and the administrator is friendly with SDMB, indeed, an active poster here. Others might not be as friendly if you accuse them of something baaaad, and it’s unlikely that vB will even talk to you unless you are a first-level user of their product.
vBulletin is the brand name. But even if Sam signed on at another vBulletin site, it wouldn’t prove much, because the software likely wouldn’t have the same version number, and from what I’ve gathered, each site modifies its software from hardly at all to extensively.
Sam, maybe you could borrow or rent a computer using a different operating system — Mac or Linux — for a month or so, using it only for the Dope, to see what happens, though that might be a bit much.
Somewhere back in this thread you discussed using a different browser, I suppose.
I don’t know which version. But it was still operating a couple of years ago.
The problem has occurred on different computers at different locations using different browsers. Another reason I don’t think the problem is on my end.
Why should **Siam Sam **have to do anything? He’s not the only one this is happening to. It should be clear that this is in fact a SDMB problem since it happens intermittently to many of us and only at SDMB.
It’s not clear at this time that it is a SDMB problem; it might be a vB bug. And Siam Sam doesn’t have to do anything, ever, but if anyone wants to help clear it up, more input to the admins would be valuable. SDMB doesn’t have the resources to tend to this problem full-time; why don’t we all pitch in to help where we can?
We’ve been around this a few times on this thread and others regarding the problem.
Here is what I believe I know is true based on my previous research.
What is marked as read is based on the “Last Visited” date. Anything earlier is read, anything else is unread.
This value is maintained server-side. It’s not a cookie, it’s not system dependent at all.
There are three ways to change this value–click the “mark everything read,” explicitly log out, or click on nothing on the board for long enough that it times out the session (default is 30 minutes, I forget if they’ve made it longer or not, but they’ve said it’s not less).
So there is little explicitly on the user’s end that can cause the reported behavior.
What I do not know is the hardware setup of the message board. One working guess I made is that the boards.straightdope.com address is just a VIP on a load balancer, sending traffic to two or more actual servers that have the web content, with the user database either synced between the two, or possibly to a third server.
If that is anywhere close to correct, my guess was that the load balancer, which is generally supposed to maintain a flow so that a given user session would always go to the same server, sometimes messes up and sends you to the other server before the databases are synched.
For example, you open the board, and get sent to Server A at 8pm, so the server marks you as logging in at 8pm. At 8:01pm, the load balancer decides to send you to server B, which doesn’t yet know that you logged into server A, so it marks you as logging in at 8:01. Then they sync, and Server B gets the report that you had logged in a 8:00, so it assumes you logged out a 8 and logged back in at 8:01.
If any of that is even close to correct, it would require examining server logs and possibly load balancer logs or traces.
I also note that this is the only board I’ve ever seen that utilizes this “automatic mark as read” feature, most others require you to click a “mark all read” type link to clear everything.
Not just Siam Sam. I - and others - have mentioned this several times. There’s never been any comment from tptb, so I assume they’re not all that interested in fixing it.
Sorry, I know I keep replying to comments aimed at Siam Sam but I’m currently using a MacBook Pro. My last computer was a Windows one and I’ve had the same problem on both.
Got it tonight. Haven’t had it happen in a couple weeks. It’s gotten better, but not entirely gone. I’ve never had the same problem on any other vbulletin sites, fwiw.
I’m sure that helps the tech team. It’s looking more, to me, to be a SDMB board and/or server problem. Possibly an obscure configuration error or quirk. Unless we can narrow it down still further, it will probably be hard to find and fix. And, as often happens, the next vB version upgrade may make the problem moot.
We’re on version 3.8.7, which looks like it was released Feb 28, 2011, current versions are 5.something.
I suppose the optimist can say that, after 3 years, we must be about due. The pessimist would point out that going three years and two major versions without an upgrade suggests that the Powers That Be don’t have the interest and/or resources to upgrade–and that’s only going to get harder and harder to do the older and more out-of-date it gets.
I might mention that a little after 2pm Bangkok time today (Sunday) or 2am CST in the US, the Board and the main Straight Dope website went down for about 20 minutes. Didn’t affect my Unread posts though.