Thanks to everyone who sent in emails through the web support form. When you send me a message via that link, it sends me a bunch of info about your forum settings, browser, etc. which makes troubleshooting a lot easier. It became clear very quickly that everyone experiencing the problem had their account set to a larger font size than our website default. Between that and the screenshot from Peter it became clear that it was a CSS problem.
I recently made a change to our site to have separate CSS style sheets for each font size setting (previously we’d created the CSS dynamically inline on every web page which was convenient for maintenance, but meant you're downloading the info every time you load a page). A script we use to keep our web servers in synch didn't like the file names of the new CSS and removed all the css sheets for the plus sized fonts.
So that was problem one, and problem two is none of my test browsers are set to use larger font sizes.
CSS files have been renamed, synch script has been verified, and I now have test browsers set to various font sizes.
Long story short, it's fixed and won't happen again.
Well, good people,
I have my text size set to large, if that has anything to do with it. When I return to the forum (it has been open but not looked at for a while) I have to press F5 - naturally - and then the refreshed page opens as a page 2. Last time it happened, the first post on the page was no. 11. That made me think that all the posts between 1 and 11 had been posted after my last refresh, but I am not sure about that. My number of posts per page is set to 50, so to break at 11 seems strange.
This happens after everyone has said everything is OK. Well, it isn't!
Tor
Tors - I forgot about this - it's been behaving that way here for weeks - after switching on in the morning and refreshing, the first post has often been No. 5, No.16, No.30 and various other random numbers.
Clicking "More Recent Posts" corrects it immediately, so I haven't worried about it, but it's a bit strange.
TorS and Peter, I'm guessing that when you're browsing the forums, you're clicking the "older topics" links, and then later clicking "more recent topics" until you're back at the front page.
If my guess is right, you'll notice '&ldint=[number]" in the address bar. It's basically telling the page to start at messages begining at a certain time stamp. This is good in some ways, because if you're going back and forth between pages, you wont miss any messages if something was posted in the interim. That said, I can see how it's kind of a strange experience to be back at the homepage, and then when you refresh get older messages.
If you click the "Vegas - Video" heading on the page, it'll take you back to the true Vegas Forum start page. From there, your refresh should always give you the most recent messages.
Use that for now, and I'll try and fix this up during the week.
I very rarely press the older topics link. And the behaviour does not bring me to a true older topics page, but one that has - like - topic 14 at the top. Also - this usually does not happen if I refresh after a short while, but typically next morning or so.
Tor
I always hit the "Back to Vegas - Video" link when I'm done reading a thread to get back to the main forum page in case any posts have been added. Occasionally, when I link back, the forum will exhibit the problem; it will list all the messages starting with the first "non-sticky" message. It doesn't happen all the time. I'll have to make note of exactly what I was doing when that behavior occurs.
The Vegas forum is not my home page (which may come as a surprise to some.)
When I was programming that, I thought it would be nice if you were a few pages in (say you were looking a messages 150-200) that the "Back to Vegas - Video" link would take you back to that same set of messages.
What's bad currently, is that I am also attaching a timestamp (current time + 12 hours) if you were originally coming off of page 1 (i.e. messages 1-50).
That explains the behaviour people are seeing if they have clicked "Back to Vegas - Video" and then left their browser open for a very long time.
I will remove the timestamp if you came off of page 1 for sure. Before I do though, I'd like to hear what you guys think about this - should the "Back to Vegas - Video" link always take you back to message #1, or is it useful to have it linking back to the message listing page you started on if you're in a little deeper.
Apologies if I'm not explaining this well. Either way I'll have a fix in tomorrow.
Yes, I suppose that if I'm in deep into the older messages, it should take me back to the message listing page from which I came. I like the idea of taking me back to message #1 if it's been more than an hour. Even 30 minutes would work, too.
While this forum is not my home page, I do tend to leave the Vegas forum up for hours and hours at a time on my laptop.
Can we have both functions? If we are deep into a search (access any page via search) can we have an option appear undearneath "Vegas-Video" that says "Return to Page of Origin" or something better named?
> "What URL is in your address bar when you see this problem?"
It hasn't happened since then, but if it does, I'll note the URL.
>"Is the Vegas Forum set as your browser's home page?"
I do have this site as one of my home pages - I have over 20 tabs open in Opera as default - Vegas Video is on the extreme left, so it is sort of my "first" home page.
- as I said, if it happens again I'll note my previous actions, and I'll try Ctrl/refresh.