Weird things happening with the forum | Page 14 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

mmm – ctrl+F5 will clear your browser cache. It sounds like the stats are being cached on your machine, which is why you’re seeing old data. It’s not being cached by my server. Short of going round to everyone’s house and clearing their cache for them, I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it.

Sorry about the “cannot modify headers” error. A few people have reported it now. I did try to find out the cause but drew a blank. I’ll dig deeper as soon as I have a chance.

IJSAFo – Please contact your ISP and ask them to unblock the IP address 72.44.89.46. Try disabling your firewall, antivirus, anything else that might be preventing access. The server is mostly fine (there were 30 minutes of downtime earlier today but my hosts are on it) and your IP is not being blocked by security as far as we can tell, so I really need you to look into it yourself.

IveJustSeenAFaceo said

It’s weird, because I don’t feel like that’s the problem anymore, unless it’s only blocking me every so often. And it’s only the main page that’s doing it, it works fine if I go straight to the forum most of the time. It might be though, I’ll look into it. Thanks again, I feel really bad about all the complaining because I really do love the site. 

One question. ISP?

ISP: internet service provider. You said before that the site is fine on a cell network, so I suspect it’s to do with your router, antivirus, ISP or something else. The server, AFAIK, is working fine – I’m getting record levels of traffic at the moment and nobody else is reporting the same issue as you.

That said, if it’s fine for some pages not others it suggests it might be my problem after all. I’m considering switching hosts yet again because Future Hosting’s customer service is pretty terrible – I have to hassle them with two or three support tickets to make them take action on quite simple things. I just need to find someone else that’s not going to hit me with a whole load of new issues. Sigh.

It’s really hard to troubleshoot this stuff. To give a bit of background, WordPress is the content management system which powers this site. It allows me to write articles, upload photos etc, and generally works well.

There are also many third-party WordPress plugins which offer increased functionality. These let me add maps to posts, run this forum, block spam comments, get visitor stats, cache pages for speedier loading and so on.

The trouble is that some plugins are coded better than others, and unless you’re a programming ninja it can be difficult to troubleshoot them successfully. Some add JavaScript or other code to the pages, and occasionally this conflicts with scripts added by other plugins.

On a smaller, less high-profile site I’d just switch to a default WordPress design, turn the plugins off, and re-enable them one by one until I can work out what’s causing the errors. Sometimes I do that anyway, normally when the USA is asleep so most people don’t notice. But it’s impractical and often doesn’t fully isolate the issue.

Also, errors like “Cannot modify header information” only really occur when people are using the fully-functioning site, appear sporadically, and cannot be reproduced in a test environment. I rarely see them, and if I do a browser refresh normally fixes things. Some people’s net connections aren’t so good and they struggle to load pages, but TBH I can’t be responsible for that. So there are many variables which can lead to errors, not all of them my problem. Although I try to look at each issue that comes up, I’m not a programmer so can only go so far.

Before using my current hosts I had an unmanaged (blank slate) server, and paid someone to set it up, tweak it for performance etc. He got into a bit of a mess with an overcomplicated setup, found he wasn’t always available or able to troubleshoot it, and recommended I went with a managed hosting provider instead. So I did, and although the server is mostly more robust and faster (though I have been getting some downtime which I’m not happy with) I don’t get the very precise attention I might have had with a single support person. My web hosts are responsible for server performance but when it comes to software issues they tend not to get too involved (this is fair enough – they can’t be expected to deal with everything I make and break here). There’s no real ideal solution as far as I can tell, although I am looking for a better managed host.

It’s a good thing you’re not all paying customers, isn’t it?