Zapped for the first time in almost six months. Is this due to Cecil’s retirement?
Zapped again. Still occurring from time to time.
What is “zapped”?
Zapped as Siam Sam refers to it is a problem where the board marks all of the threads as read for a user. In addition to making it more difficult to tell which threads have already been completely read and which ones have new posts, it makes the New Posts feature completely worthless (since nothing will be marked as new). Sometimes the user will even get logged out completely.
This zapping seems to pick on some users more than others, and may be related to the user’s geographical location, or more likely, the network connections and packet retries and such associated with them in certain parts of the world. Some users, like Siam Sam, get picked on excessively, where other users, like me, almost never experience the issue.
When Jerry was our tech guy, he dug into it and found that it’s not something that we can fix on our present version of vBulletin. I never found out the details of what exactly Jerry found when he went digging. However, one thing we have learned over the years is that it seems to be related to server load and other slowdown events.
With the search timer decreased significantly and the addition of avatars, I would expect zapping to occur more frequently.
While we do not currently have a solution for Siam Sam and others who experience this issue, the zap reports are very useful for us. They help us to monitor the issue and give us a general indication of when server load is starting to become an issue. The zapping seems to occur more frequently before other symptoms of server loading (like page timeouts) start to appear.
That’s odd, because I moved from Bangkok to Honolulu two years ago. At one point, it was happening excessively over there. Here not so much, but it does seem to hit me more than others.
Jerry’s been gone for a while. The guy that is our tech person now is as busy as Jerry ever was – maybe more so, Jerry had people working for him and I don’t think John has that luxury – but I can ask him if he can tell us anything from what he sees on the server side.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Lemme ask you (because this seems to happen to you more than everyone else) how are you accessing the site? Device, OS, etc.
I’m just looking for clues here. (Again, intermittent problems are the worst.)
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
In Bangkok, I was using a desktop set-up. Here in Honolulu, it’s a laptop. I usually use Firefox, but it has happened with other OSs too.
What kind of operating system? What vintage?
Just trying to figure out something, anything, that can give us a hint here.
Jenny
Gah! I am old and don’t know all these technical terms. 
I suspect some others get zapped, just don’t report it as often.
Okay, I’m seeing Windows 8.1. Does that help? “Single Language with Bing.”
[I thought I answered this before, but I don’t see the post here now. If it shows up again, sorry for the duplication.]
There is a possibility your older operating system could be part of the problem. Windows 8.1 was released in October of 2013, and while this is not the oldest operating system around, it is long in the tooth where the internets are concerned these days.
It’s still supported by Microsoft – and supposedly will be until 2023 – but you can’t buy it at Microsoft. You can only upgrade to Windows 10. (Yeah, I know, I hate it too.)
Starting to hear occasional reports from the field re the site and old software. I recently had someone who wanted to sign up to the board and despite all our best efforts, registration just would not work on her machine. She went out and bought a new computer and all her problems went away. (Well, at least as far as connecting to the SDMB was concerned, anyway.) I expect to see more of this kind of thing and not less.
I know there’s a school of thought that says “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and so I have to ask you, have you been allowing Microsoft to put those patches and fixes and updates on your Windows 8.1? If the answer is no, perhaps looking at the available updates and judiciously applying some might assist. Of course this is a crapshoot – Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away – but if this is an option for you, you might consider it.
The fact that this is happening to you and not to multitudes of other people makes me wonder if there’s not something unique to you that is making this more of an issue for you. That being said, I am not blaming you. But I am searching for some kind of solution here.
I’ve asked the techs to look at this as well. It will take them time to get to me but the situation is being looked at.
Sorry for your inconvenience.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
I’ll give you my Windows7 when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.
Thanks for the explanation.
I do get Microsoft updates sporadically. Thanks for looking into it.
Just a note for the records. It’s happened again, getting zapped, first time in three months. Shows my last log-in as this one, with all threads marked Read.
Sorry it happened.
We’ve never been able to figure out what causes this or how to keep it from happening. Had some serious tech people spend time looking at it and never received any useful input or assistance on this issue.
The closest I ever got was a tech person telling me it was probably some sort of unfixed system bug in vBulletin itself, some kind of system conflict. No one has ever been able to chase it down.
Why it happens mostly to you and no one else is likewise a mystery.
Again, sorry for your inconvenience.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Seems to happen every few months or so, sometimes isolated, sometimes a bunch of times together. I think a couple of people have had it happen too. Oddest thing.
I am new posting here and was wondering if there is a notification that a person has quoted you in a response or do I have to backtrack through every thread I post in to find responses to my posts
I think there is such a setting under User CP, but I don’t know if you would want to be flooded to so many alerts.
The board’s software has no way of knowing that you’ve been quoted. The closest you can get is to set it to auto-subscribe to any thread you post to, and to get notifications of replies to all threads you’re subscribed to. But that’ll be anyone posting to those threads, not necessarily responding to you specifically.
And yeah, it’d probably be a lot of alerts to have to sift through.