Get your miinds out of the gutter, Dopers! My company runs on-line stores for some of our clients. I’ve learned that, after we update images on those websites, some of our customers aren’t seeing the most recent images. We can see the new images just fine here, but one of them just sent us a screen capture and she’s definitely looking at an old picture, even though I updated the image on June 12th (over 6 weeks ago). She’s refreshed and rebooted. The on-line stores were set up for us by a vendor and the data, including images, lives on the vendor’s server. I update the images by FTPing them to our vendor, and, after I do, I go out to the appropriate website and make sure the correct image appears.
Does anyone out there have any idea how or why this could be happening? Obviously our clients don’t want to see out-dated information; on the other hand, I didn’t know they were seeing out-dated information until they contacted us. The rest of our IT department doesn’t know what’s causing this, either. On behalf of my employer and our clients, as well as myself, thank you. The fight against ignorance begins at home, after all.
She refreshed and rebooted but did she clear her cache?
In IE it’s Tools - Internet Options - General (tab) - Delete Files
In Firefox it’s Tools - Privacy - Cache - Clear
You can also add some meta tags to the site to help prevent caching.
Also, check with the vendor to see that the site isn’t changing IP addresses. There’s a possibility that the site used to be at a different IP address and the client’s ISP is caching the old IP address and viewing the old site.
We secretly (sort of secretly) have 2 servers set up for the website. I only have access to the drives on one of the servers. So I can update an image or style sheet, go to the web, and depending on whether I’m on the 1st server (the one whose drives I access) or the 2nd, I either get the right or wrong updates.
These 2 servers are synched occassionally, so usually if I wait it out, the site will be right on both servers. 6 weeks seems like a long time, though. Caching seems like a likely suspect, or a the nameserver hasn’t propogated properly on some servers. It’s a mystery.
I am a DNS admin, among other things. I assure you that it would be highly unusual for a nameserver to hold a DNS entry cached that long. Besides, that wouldn’t be a problem unless you changed the ip of your site.
My vote is for the browser cache.
If you are taking weird, out there suggestions, some ISPs have cacheflow servers. It holds a local copy of often requested sites, and serves them up when requested, instead of actually getting the latest copy from the original website. This can save them a lot on bandwidth costs. I know that Roadrunner used them, but I did not work with them, and wouldn’t be able to tell you how big a site you would have to be before you were added to the cacheflow. I also don’t know how badly it would have to be broken before it served up a 6 week old copy of a site. But that is a weird problem. You are sure she is not going to an old page somehow?
Six weeks is an awfully long time for her browser cache to retain the image. Still, it’s worth having her clear it out and see if that fixes the problem.
Thanks for the advice so far. For what it’s worth, they are using Internet Explorer to view the site, as do I. I’ll pass your suggestions on to the powers that be tomorrow.
My company runs on-line stores for some of our clients. I’ve learned that, after we update images on those websites, some of our customers aren’t seeing the most recent images. We can see the new images just fine here, but one of them just sent us a screen capture and she’s definitely looking at an old picture, even though I updated the image on June 12th (over 6 weeks ago). She’s refreshed and rebooted. The on-line stores were set up for us by a vendor and the data, including images, lives on the vendor’s server. I update the images by FTPing them to our vendor, and, after I do, I go out to the appropriate website and make sure the correct image appears.