From earlier in the thread:
I still don’t know what it means, but you [hajario] or someone else with vB experience might.
I really don’t appreciate your snottiness here. None of us have read this thread is the reason plus maybe the advice is rarely taken well. Do you really think that we’ve all been reading Sam’s daily zapped again posts and ignoring them for some reason?
Anyway, Roo’s note above is a start but I’d do better with an fuller explanation and I will alert Giraffe to this thread too. Is this the thing where it looks like all of the threads have been read when really they haven’t after you click on “new posts”?
Probably because the vB experts are usually only telling you how to accomplish simple configuration tasks, not debug subtle server issues. (And you might note that you never actually take their advice on even the simple configuration stuff, so…)
Anyway, I don’t know how to fix this problem. From some Googling, it’s not a common one. I don’t see it on my board or here. My guess is that it’s either due to something in your slave server setup (for instance, check that all servers have exactly the same date and time, and install ntpd to keep them in sync if you haven’t already) or some specific configuration related to the users who see this, maybe something that is corrupting their cookies? Me, I’d have people who see this regularly try registering a new account and see if anything changes. New user id, new spot in the database, new login cookie: if it still happens just as often, maybe it’s on their end? If it goes away, that gives you two data points to work with.
Thanks, Giraffe, so as I initially suspected, it doesn’t look like a vb problem at all. Gee Tuba, yet another reason why they might not have gotten help from our pesky vb experts.
I am not an expert at all on the server side but I am an engineer. Applying some basic engineer problem solving to this, I love Giraffe’s suggestion to have the oft zapped Sam be allowed a sock account just this once to narrow things down. It will tell us a great deal if the problem is related to just the main account or the posting locations of both accounts.
It’s a problem that’s been affecting several of us for a year or two now at least. And it just happened again, the second time today! It can happen to me on multiple computers at different locations, so I don’t think the problem is on this end. But basically there’s a hiccup upon logging in, and suddenly it says now was the last log-in time instead of, say, 12 hours ago like it did at first. All Unread threads are rendered Read, and there are no New Posts to look at.
Very frustrating, and again it’s just happened for the second time today. But you can go a week or two before getting zapped. There seems to be no set pattern.
So the upshot is that it screws you up when you want to see which threads have unread posts, right? It’s almost like you’re getting two very quick back to back log-ins in a row.
Since it seems like it is only affecting a small number of users, I speculate that it’s your actual account rather than the location from where you post. This is why I really like Giraffe’s suggestion as the first step in the troubleshooting. If your sock account doesn’t have the problem, we have narrowed the possibilities significantly.
Will the Mods please allow Sam to make a test sock account for the purposes of troubleshooting?
That’s it exactly.
I’m willing to try it, but I can go days or weeks without getting zapped, so I’m not sure how long to go before anything is proved. But maybe the sock could be something like Siam Sam 2.
I suspect it’s not a common problem because the whole setup of automatically marking things as read after an idle period is one I do not commonly see on other boards. Most other places seem to require users to click the “mark everything as read” button before resetting everything.
We can’t see how it’s anything related to the user’s end–I know for me it’s happened on several different machines, running XP, Vista, Win 7 and Win 8, and determination of what is read or not is based on “Last Visited” time, which is server-side.
Without knowing the actual setup here, my suggestion is that if there are multiple front-end servers users connect to, someone makes their first query to server A, then the next time they click on a thread or whatever, the load balancers send them to server B, and do so before they sync up.
Then you have server A saying that the user logged in at, say, 7:03 am, but then server B says they logged in at 7:05 am, so maybe this results in the board software deciding that he logged in at 7:03, then logged out, marking everything as read, then logged in again at 7:05.
I would have thought that, given usernames and timestamps, someone could look at the logs and figure out exactly what’s going on. But I am certainly not a vB expert, so I don’t know how difficult that is. (just about everything I know about vB I’ve learned from trying to research this problem)
We have demonstrated on previous threads that it happens to a whole lot of us, it’s just that most of us don’t bother to report it anymore since it’s been going on so long with so little result.
I’d go with PigeonEggs. 
It’s a subtle problem so it could take some time. That’s how these things go. Hopefully it’s repeatable enough that it will replicate if you login with the new account immediately after getting zapped with the old one.
I have had the same thing happen to me on occasion, I think. Also, I only access the boards on a couple of different devices so I very rarely log-on. I just stay permanently logged-on on those computers. I suspect that most of the users do the same.
If it takes looking at vB logs, our work is done here. There is no way in hell that any of us are going to get access to that and I personally wouldn’t even know what to do with them anyway without some research.
Siam Sam, since you’re the user who appears to be the most reliably affected by this problem, do you mind giving some more details about your SDMB browsing habits? You say you access the board from different computers, are these computers you use regularly? Are you logging on and off every time you use said computer or leaving yourself logged in? What browser(s) are you using? Any special security settings, e.g. cookies disabled, privacy settings? Are you clearing your history?
Apologies if you’re already spelled this out in past threads, I haven’t been following. And there’s a very good chance this is all completely irrelevant, but maybe it will help us identify a signature we can use to trigger the problem more reliably? That’s always the first step to debugging anything.
Yeah, from the user end, what is seen is that the “Last Visited” time in the upper right corner changes during a session to the current time. The board automatically marks everything older than “Last Visited” as read, so this is what causes the zap.
What causes that update? That’s what we still don’t understand. It’s stored server-side, not on cookies or anything (you can move computers/locations and it will stay updated). From what I’ve read there is a second parameter called “Last Activity” that is kept but not displayed to users, it’s storing the last time you actually did something on the board (clicked on a link to a thread or whatever).
There are supposed to be three situations where “Last Visited” gets updated to the current time.
First, if you explicitly log out.
Second, if you click the “Mark Everything as Read” link.
Third, if “Last Activity” reaches 30 minutes or whatever an admin sets it to (an idle timeout), then “Last Visited” will update to match “Last Activity.”
So one of those three things is happening when it shouldn’t, I’m not sure how to figure out too much more without looking at logs to determine what it is.
I have also noted in the past that most of the time that I get “zapped” it’s very early in the session–within the first couple minutes. This is one of the reasons I’ve tended to think it could be some sort of sync thing, if I’m somehow hitting two different databases before one has the chance to update the other.
Thanks, dzeiger, you have done your homework. It’s looking more to me that this is indeed a hardware problem and not a vBulletin problem which makes TubaDiva’s comment kind of perplexing.
We can set up a bunch of testing and I will try logging of and logging back on a couple times a day to see if I get zapped but I doubt it will do any good.
Tuba, I know that you can’t give us access to the logs even if you wanted to do so. Will you at least grant Sam permission to make a sock for testing purposes? It’s a long shot but it might help.
I don’t know what Siam Sam’s experience is but the zapping thing happens a lot to me as well. No particular time, although at one stage it did seem to happen more frequently ~9:00am Sydney time. I use the same computer all the time but it also happened on my previous computer. My current one is a MacBook Pro, using Safari. My previous computer was a Toshiba, using Internet Explorer.
And I never log out.
That’s an interesting data point. I wonder why some people seem to be hit more than others. I’m sure, as someone speculated, it’s happening to others who aren’t reporting it.
HELLO? Are you there?
You got some advice over the last day and a half. Any interest in acting on some of it or at least acknowledging the fact that it exists?
In discussion now. Cool your jets.
You’re welcome.
Okay, SiamSam, you are given permission to start a new screen name for testing purposes.
Please call it something like “SiamSam2” or “SonOfSiamSam” so it’s obvious you are not socking but testing.
Of course we’ll close that second name down when testing is over.
And let’s see what happens with this. I hope understanding and a fix for your problem is just around the corner.
Thanks, TubaDiva, this might give us some useful information.
We do know a few things.
Location of the user doesn’t seem to be the issue. We have had reports of problems in Thailand, Australia and Texas.
It doesn’t appear to correlate to time of day but we don’t have enough data to say that conclusively.
This happens for users who log on and off frequently and for those who never log off.
Does it only affect certain accounts? The SonOfSiamSam experiment could shed some light here.
TubaDiva, you mentioned earlier that you thought that this was related to vBulletin. I know that I must have missed a lot of information in the previous thread. What exactly was it that made you think that it’s related to vB rather than, say, hardware?