Gentlemen - if you start having problems with finding things on this website (or any other) that are supposed to be there, or "disappear", the solution is almost always to *clear your browser history or cache*, and *delete any cookies associated with the site*. How to do this varies with your browser, but what that does is to do a complete reset.
Browser history/caches save things from the website, and checks if it has changed, and if it hasn't, it doesn't download it, it uses the stored file that it downloaded previously. This saves time downloading unnecessary files. However, it is at least possible for the cached file to become corrupted, or the fact that it changed is not detected, so it gets old or screwed up and stays that way. Clearing history/cache removes it all from your machine completely, meaning it has to download everything again from the server.
Cookies are tags that generally store your configuration of a website, like what pages you visited, what options (like the color) you selected, etc. They are generally time-tagged and "time out" after a certain amount of time. The one that allows you to "log in forever" is like that, it records that you are logged in and has a very long time-out period. If you delete it, it forgets that you had logged in and asks you again. But, if you inadvertently configure something (like you collapsed the 4-stroke forum), this is dutifully stored until the cookie times out, which for many things is "forever". Sparkys server does not deal with your peronal configuration, it is stored in cookies on your machine, tagged to the website.
Several things can go wrong with this, the solution is to navigate to a different site, find all the cookies stored that are associated with "stunthanger" or "stunthangar", and delete them. For all intents and purposes, this loses all your custom features (whether intentional or inadvertent), so you start over from scratch.
Doing both of these things cause your machine to "forget" all about Stunthanger, aside from your bookmark to it, when you go back, it is loke starting over again. You 4-stroke forum will reappear, or any other things that may have happened to it will also start from scratch.
It is highly advisable that you do all this before you start to call Sparky about it, because what happens on your machine is not something he can fix.
Very occasionally, things happen on the server or your ISP side (say, the ISP can change the IP address associated with stunthanger.com, and your ISP may take a few days to pick up the change) that will mess you up, he cannot do anything about it, and neither can you, the issue is the domain name server you use (which takes "stunthanger.com" and says "Oh, I will look up the address for stunthanger.com, it is IP Address 162.214.197.52") If the people running Sparkys host change it to 162.124.197.53, it takes some time (hours or days) for your domain name server to pick that up and know to look there, instead of the original address. Sparky can't fix that, either, that is you ISP, and if you call them, they will not fix it instantly, but wait for their hourly/daily/weekly update.
Normally you don't need to know any of this, but if you have problems, these are some of the problems you can have. I would also note that the last message to the 4-stroke forum was on November 23, so you aren't missing any hot new information.
Brett
Topic: Browser history and cookies (Read 850 times)