h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Some days, you just know that life is going to be a trial.

Well, it appears that today is going to be one of those days. I guess I should explain myself, so it started like this: "A number of years ago, in a distant country, a young woman met a young man. They liked each other a lot, ". Ummm, maybe I don't need to include quite so much history in this article?

The pertinant details are much more recent, so lets just focus on those shall we? Yes, I think that that is a better option. When I started the web browser this morning, my wife said: "How come you get a different page when you load my H2G2 than when I do?".
This wasn;t the first time that she had said this, but this was the first time I took any notice. (Ahhh, domestic bliss.)

When I looked closer, I noticed that we were loading "www.h2g2.com/A2000" instead of our normal "www.h2g2.com". The second thing that I noticed was that H2G2 was reporting our e-mail address incorrectly. (It said I was someone else from our obscure ISP in our obscure sparesly populated corner of the globe.) So we logged in again, and lo and behold, up came the SAME PAGE!

So, things have gone from strange, to wierd (and I supposed that the sublime cannot be too far off now . Now I am adding a journal entry, HOPING that it will come up on my page, but half suspecting that it will come up on the other one....

Theres a few problems occuring at the moment, Some are to do with the site itself others are caused by some ISP's, you seem to have seen most of them.

A couple of them I have had happen to me and I will repeat the explanations I've received below.

1. h2g2 appears to log you in as someone else (can be in either skin)

This is caused by ISP's caching pages from the site, if another researcher logs on using the same ISP as you their cache server may store the page as returned to them, when you request the page the cache server sends you the copy it already has rather than fetching it from the h2g2 server, so it looks as if you have logged in as the wrong person.

ISP's cache popular pages to speed up connections and cut down on bandwidth use, this works well on static sites which return the same page image to all users, but is a pain in the butt when they do it to sites like this that build pages differently for each user.

In response to a previous occurrance of this Jim Lynn (U6) said that the add post routines carry out another check on your identity cookie so you can't post under the wrong user name, so its not a security issue.


2. h2g2 thinks you don't exist

The servers have been having problems recently with what appears to be database server going down or at least not talking to the servers which transmit the pages to us researchers.
All of us are affected at the same time.
I havent seen anything from the Powers at the Towers about the cause.
Hopefully they will get it fixed soon.

3. Broken Images

h2g2 have moved the images around due to the change of skins
it might help to check with Bruces Guide ML Clinic to see what current info is available.
http://www.h2g2.com/A187229

Thank you, Bald Bloke.

Maybe we can find a few more bugs?

Q'pop