Posted by Scott Ellis (206.168.33.195) on December 13, 2002 at 16:28:29:
Thanks to everyone for the information about the intermittent strange behavior on my discussion board. For what it's worth, I have never seen what you all are describing.
All I can think of is that maybe the problem occurs when there is a concurrency issue. That is, maybe you are trying to get the discussion index page at the same time that someone else is trying to post a message. So the perl script is trying to update the page at the same time that the webserver is trying to serve it up. The fact that the problem is intermittent supports such a theory.
The discussion board is built on a rather old version of a freeware perl program from Matt's Script Archive called WWWBoard. One thing I might try one day is upgrading to the latest version. According to Matt, the new version contains a lot of improvements and bug fixes. The problem, however, is that the new version is not backwards compatible, so we would have to archive this whole board and start a new one. So far I have not had the time and/or inclination to undertake that effort.
Anyway, thanks again for everyone's feedback, and thanks for bearing with the discussion board's quirks until I can do the upgrade. Hopefully even with all it's flaws, the discussion board still serves a good purpose.
Regards,
Scott