I just came in to GQ, and found the first page full of messages with replys from ~4:30 AM last night (it’s ~11 pm now). Tried a search for newer stuff and was told I wasn’t logged in. Quit ie, and came back. Still not logged in, threads still outdated. So I logged in from the main message board page, and now the newer posts are back, and everything appears fine 
Did anyone else see this ?
What caused it ?
Is this related to Ceasar’s Ghost’s troubles ?
(http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=168238)
Isn’t it true that when you’re not logged in, the board defaults to GMT? Are you sure it wasn’t ~4:30 AM this night?
Very weird. I’ve been being logged out randomly, but no outdated threads stuff.
Well, something that does happen is it only shows the threads from the past day when normally I have it show every thread. that might be related; maybe not.
That’d be about right, but the threads looked wrong. Perhaps it was just a temporal hallucination on my part, but there are now three questions here about odd board behavior tonight: ( http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=168662 )
How much had you had to drink?
OK, seriously, we’ll have someone look into it.
I’d prefer a crushing hangover, or even flashbacks, to having the SDMB go off to cloud cuckoo land again, but sadly, I feel fine this morning.
Thanks.
Is it possible that you were seeing some sort of cached copy of the forum? Not likely, I suppose, if you weren’t online at 4:30 AM, but some ISPs keep caches of pages as well (I’ve heard that AOL is particularly bad at this).
“Is it possible that you were seeing some sort of cached copy of the forum?” That was the first thing I thought, and why I quit ie and cleared the cache. Still, explorer being what it is, I suppose it could have kept a secret copy somewhere for transmission to the forces of darkness, and a “undocumented feature” revealed it to me… Perhaps one of vbulletin’s caches picked up an erroneous timestamp, and it sent out the page long after it should’ve expired ?
You know, I’m doubting it was a cached copy, from your description. You’re in Central Time, right? If so, it’s very unlikely that GQ had a page full of threads with the last post made around 4:30 AM. At that point, the board has only been online about 20 minutes since the nightly backup, and it’s a very low-traffic time for the boards. For instance, in GQ, there’s a post on the forum list page now made at 03-11-2003 04:01 AM, and the next one immediately after that is 03-11-2003 06:35 AM. It’s quite possible that there were threads that were in that gap, but they were bumped out later. But more than a few? Not likely.
That makes sense, but depends on how vbulletin updates its pages. Having never played with the software, I’ve no idea how it actually handles the process.