This morning I’ve been having problems getting and staying logged in; i.e:
The system initially would not accept my login; i.e. I logged in as normal, received the “Thank you for logging in” message, but then got dumped back to the non-logged in state.
I reset my password in an effort to resolve the problem, but now whenever I jump from one forum to another (such as from this one to the BBQ Pit), I show as logged out and have to manually log in again.
Any idea what might be going on?
I not having a problem staying logged in, but the system is not updating the threads to show the last poster like it usually does. Well, sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. Very erratic.
This happens to me quite frequently. I have no idea why.
I’ve experienced something similar to El K here. I’ve tried clearing cookies, etc. I have no idea what it was, but rebooting fixed it. Gets a little strange when it starts warning you that you’ve already used X of Y attempts.
Oh, and the clock is screwed again, not that that’s anything big deal.
Yeah, there’s a problem. "New “Posts” usually shows me a few hundred threads, now it gives me “No New Posts”.
The board seems to be acting wonky in a few different ways this morning. I’ve notified our admins.
Who forgot to feed the hamsters??
It happened to me twice as soon as I tried to reply to this thread. Either it happens some times (it last did to me about 6 months back) or ------------- its those damn Russian Hackers again. I blame Trump and his supporters.
I have to refresh the page over and over again to get it to admit that something has been posted on this board since approximately 3:45 am Pacific time.
Moderator Note
I have modified the title of this thread to indicate that there are more issues than just login problems, so that we don’t end up with a dozen different threads about essentially the same issue.
At a bare minimum, here are the issues that we are presently experiencing:
Some folks are getting logged out.
Forums may or may not display threads correctly and if refreshed may alternate between an old stale thread list and the current list.
Threads are not being properly marked as read or unread.
Posts do not always show up when replying to them. If you refresh enough times the post will probably eventually show up.
The New Posts feature is not working correctly.
Other erratic issues may be possible.
The admins are aware of the problem and are looking into it.
Thanks ECG! Glad ya’ll are on it.
Sorry about the one I started (that was understandably closed), but as I said I couldn’t see it in the first place! :smack:
Who was smoking weed in the hamster room and then spilled booze in their cages?
No log in problems, but a couple times I got a message that the following posts hadn’t been updated since my last visit. They had been though.
I would categorize the suspects based upon the exact booze involved. As for the weed, this is the Straight Dope after all. 
This one, in particular, has been a chronically recurring problem for as long as I’ve been around here. It seems to come in spells. At least sometimes when it happens, we get complaints from multiple people (once they manage to log in), so we know it’s not just one person’s computer that’s screwed up.
And yet, the first knee-jerk response to such complaints is always “clear your cache and cookies”. Under the circumstances, that’s right up there with “check that your printer is plugged in”.
It got bad enough during one spell, a few years back, that the staff took the whole board down for several hours and (I think) re-indexed the whole database. That seemed to fix things for quite a while.
Maybe time to start thinking about that again.
In those two other threads that engineer_comp_geek closed, he remarked that all these symptoms are part of that same problem.
Is that actually known? Is it known what that one universal cause-of-all-symptoms problem is?
ETA: I worked for a small company once that had a database-based product. When customers called in with complaints, our first knee-jerk solution was always “Re-index”. In fact, that really did fix a substantial number of the complaints.
Is this all possibly related to the error page I keep getting that says that “The Straight Dope is not Secure,” and denies me access? It happens when I try to load “new messages,” or a specific topic, about 1 time in 10. I use the back button, and try again, and then it loads just fine.
The not secure message is a relatively new “feature” that I think was started by Chrome and has since been copied by Firefox. The browsers are basically just bitching about the fact that we have a login box on the page but we’re not using https for extra security.
You can disable the warnings in the browsers if it causes issues for you.
This may not be your intent, but the use of “bitching” and “extra” make it sound like https is some kind of unnecessary add-on. As I’m sure you know, it is actually pretty unusual not to have it on any website that reveals sensitive information from your browsing behavior, allows user input, or has passwords.
Since it is basically free to implement it, it’s certainly an odd choice not to do so. I assume it’s because we use a super-old version of vbulletin or something (itself a security problem)?