• Baxter
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  • Registered: 2007-03-20
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Topic: New posts is posessed

OK, I understand that the markers for new posts are designed to simply show which posts are new, not whether they're read or not (and as a side note, that's become a BIG problem for me), but even under that understanding, they're completely unpredictable. They simply turn off at what appear to be random intervals and suddenly a whole bunch of posts that ARE new to me are no longer marked.

Board in question is at http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/board/

I've cranked Visit timeout to 1800 seconds in an effort to bring this under control, but it's no help.

Any suggestions?

God, I need 1.3

  • Smartys
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Re: New posts is posessed

1.3 wouldn't help you in the "stuff randomly turning off" department, all it does is make the icons turn off once read.
The visit timeout reflects how long your "session" can be active for before you're marked as having visited the forums. 1800 seconds is 30 minutes. That means if you visit the forum and go inactive for a half hour, all the posts are marked as old. If that's not what's happening, my best guess is a problem with the server or a bad modification

  • Baxter
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Re: New posts is posessed

Any suggestions on what to look at server-wise?

Only mods are PMs and RSS (unless that's not a mod.. can't remember).

  • Smartys
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Re: New posts is posessed

extern.php isn't a mod, although you could certainly have added mods to it.
If you have shell access, running the date command a few times might turn up something.

  • Baxter
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Re: New posts is posessed

What if there was a mismatch between server hostname and the domain?

  • Smartys
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Re: New posts is posessed

That should have no effect on the time reported by the server.

  • Baxter
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Re: New posts is posessed

I don't think it's a time thing, necessarily. I'm 99% sure it's somehow related to the domain/hostname.

Here's what I know... the site in question has several domains all pointing to the same site. They would prefer to have everything go to grassrootsmotorsports.com. In the punbb admin, that's the domain that's set. Somewhere in the dark mists of time, the server hostname was set to www.grmotorsports.com.

I set up an .htaccess file to route all traffic to the preferred domain. Anyone who comes to grmotorsports.com, or any www subdomain, gets routed to grassrootsmotorsports.com. With the htaccess rewrite rule turned off, if you go to the grmotorsports.com domain all kinds of things (mostly admin, editing, and login status) go funky.  But, if I turn it off, show new posts works.

When I turn the rewrite rule on, everything is stable except "show new posts". I'm thinking it's that mismatch between the hostname and domain name, although it could be my htaccess file. Unfortuntately, I don't currently have access to the htaccess to paste it in here.

8 Reply by Baxter (edited by Baxter 2007-04-12 18:14)

  • Baxter
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  • Posts: 6

Re: New posts is posessed

This remains a problem. I did find a mismatch between my "server time" setting and the actual server time, so I changed that to sync up and it helped some.

But it still just randomly marks all posts as old. Some times when you go to PMs and go back (PMs are the only mod), some times just when you click on a forum. No sense to it at all.


Edit... sorry, didn't mean to say marking them as read... it's marking them as old. Or, to be more precise, NOT marking them as new.

  • Smartys
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Re: New posts is posessed

The last visit time is only updated when you logout or when more than o_timeout_visit seconds have happened since your last visit. I'm afraid the only issue I can see there is if the server time were having issues jumping around (I've seen that happen on some servers, although only on the order of a few seconds).