Modern Vespa

I've been tracking a problem for quite a while now where things break when a user is surfing with cookies turned off, especially a logged-in user. There was quite a bit of pre-existing code involved in making this particular case work properly, but it was broken, for a variety of reasons. It's been broken for some time, actually.

So I sat down this morning with a pot of coffee and delved deeper into the guts of the forum software than I think I've been before, and I think I've worked out all the problems and provided appropriate solutions. It was broken in a lot of ways, all over the forum, so this change is fairly invasive. The chances that I broke something else in the process are high. If you see a broken link, or something that doesn't seem to work right, please respond here in this thread.

The upshot to all of this should be that surfing with cookies turned off, while logged in, should now work.

I see one issue: you've got four balls

Thanks for all the hard work

That's pretty impressive!
Thanks

Yep..four balls IS pretty impressive!

Now if you add some strings, you can clack them left and right, perpetually, just like that physics toy. "L" can tell us how that works, being into physics and all.

Oooo!
That's an easy one--conservation of target/ball momentum

Oops! Forgot the end balls

That's conservation of momentum (see above)
combined with conservation of mechanical energy (below)

I have also noticed that if you hit the back button after posting a comment on a thread that it no longer makes a copy of your previous post.!!
This is a very good thing..

Thanks Jess

That was a separate improvement, made a few days ago. Let me guess -- IE user?

yes its a good thing, it was driving me nuts

Whew! That was a close one.

Yeah Jess!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Does that mean that I can log in once and remain logged in forever provided I don't delete the cookies?

<Added> It seems that the "posts read" indicators may not be working. Anyone else?

I'm not sure about IE since I havnt used it for so long but with Firefox you can choose which sites to accept cookies.So for example if I came here this site would automatically allow cookies but when I surfed to another site,no cookies would be allowed.I like this option vs all cookies on or all cookies off.

Never mind, I just answered my own question when I closed my browser, opened it again and came back. I was automatically logged off. Oh well.

It does seem though that something is awry with the "posts read" indicator both with and without cookies turned on. Strange!

Nah they don't work properly. Jess is aware of this I think...

There are actually two separate problems here.

Under phpBB2, the posts read are tracked via a cookie on the client side. Thus, if you have cookies off, that functionality won't work properly. You can log in and surf without cookies, but you'll be missing that piece.

Second, under phpBB2, the posts read being tracked by cookies doesn't work very well, and occasionally (or even often) will take you to a point in a thread where you have previously jumped in.

The remedy to both of these problems is to replace the phpBB2 post-tracking code with something closer to the phpBB3 model, where the server keeps track of which posts have been read by which user.

Seems to have solved the issue I was seeing with pages timing out as well. This happened mostly when I tried to open several pages at a time in new tabs.