Apparently the forum requires a subject line on all private messages. This isn't such a bad thing, but when you click Back upon seeing you forgot to enter a subject line, the original text of your private message is gone! (I lost a lengthy private message because my subject-line error was handled this way.) The root of the problem seems to be a no-cache directive in the returned page. My web browser felt that the "compose new message" screen needed to be checked for updates, because of this aggressive no-cache directive, and so it lost my text. Proposed solution: edit the forum's code so it removes no-cache directives from post-forum-message or post-private-message pages. If it's hard to do then don't worry about it, but it'll take me a few messages (spread out over several weeks), getting bitten by this bug repeatedly, before I finally remember to always fill in a subject line before sending a PM. I imagine other users will probably also experience this learning curve, losing a few messages here and there, unless we change something. Sorry to bother you with this. The forum is great, and I really appreciate all the help you've given this community. I just see a small opportunity for improvement. --Michael Spencer
Michael, if you can tell me how to change that "directive", I will. I'm not a php programmer per se, so my abilities are somewhat limited.
No problem. I need to get specifics -- now that I think about it, there are some things that could cause this behavior other than what I said. I'm at work (in a bank) now, so my ability to sniff network traffic is limited by my desire to keep my job. When I get home I'll sic tcpdump on it, get some raw traffic dumps, figure out what is causing the problem, and then hit Google looking for a fix. I'm thinking this will come down to adding some obscure options to a function call on specific pages only. For what it's worth, I just got my shiny new diploma in the mail today (BS in CS), but I'm pretty clueless about PHP. I'm sure we can figure it out, though. --Michael Spencer
This is just info -- I'll interpret it later. A GIF file header looks like: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 17:45:02 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.51 (Fedora) Last-Modified: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 14:30:23 GMT ETag: "a02a704-109-897a7dc0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 265 Connection: close Content-Type: image/gif <binary data> While a "post private message" page header looks like: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 17:44:53 GMT Server: Apache/2.0.51 (Fedora) X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.10 Set-Cookie: priuschat_****_f_all=0; path=/forums; domain=.priuschat.com Set-Cookie: priuschat_****_f=*%***%**%**%**; path=/forums; domain=.priuschat.com Set-Cookie: priuschat_****_t=*%***%**%**%**; path=/forums; domain=.priuschat.com Cache-Control: no-cache, pre-check=0, post-check=0 Expires: 0 Pragma: no-cache Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html ****f <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html dir="ltr"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" /> <meta name="Keywords" content="toyota prius hsd shop store discussion forum forums group hybrid electric vehicles hev gas gasoli ne hybrids vehicle automobile automobiles insight civic rx400 highlander volta accord honda green environment pollution emission s /> <meta name="Description" content="The Toyota Prius & Hybrid Automotive Discussion Site." /> <meta name="robots" content="portal,follow"> <link rel="top" href="./index.php" title="PriusChat.com Forum Index" /> <link rel="search" href="./search.php" title="Search" /> <link rel="help" href="./faq.php" title="FAQ" /> <link rel="author" href="./memberlist.php" title="Memberlist" /> <title>PriusChat.com :: Toyota Prius Discussion :: Private Messaging :: Inbox</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="templates/fisubice/fisubice.css" type="text/css" /> <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="templates/toggle_display.js"></script> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="./favicon.ico">
