Bug Cache causes weird charracter set for unregistered guests ONLY ...

[Badger]

I understand that a tech support rep vBulletin has been in touch with Fillip about this bug and it's being worked on.

However, I did want to open a ticket here and get an update, because since we've had to disable the PRO (life license) version of this mod on our site for guests, it's caused a reduction in performance for the last few weeks.

I'll restate the problem here for everyone's benefit.

Attached are screen shots as it looks in both FireFox and Safari. In IE8 under Windows XP, it appears as hollow squares instead of question marks.

It ONLY appears as a problem for unregistered guests not logged in. Everything is fine when someone is logged in.

When I first log out as a registered user to test it, then go to vbCMS home screen as in pics, everything looks fine, because I'm seeing a screen from my local cache that was stored there as a registered member before. If I do a reload or refresh, then the weird characters appear. If I log back in, they go away? What could be the difference between a registered logged in user and a user not logged in, that would cause a character set change?

With the patch provided by you guys and inserted to turn OFF vbOtimize for guests not logged in, it has been working properly, but of course performance has suffered since that's been implemented (see pic), which is why we purchased the mod in the first place.

Regards,
Doug

 

[Fillip H.]

Text is not cached in your browser, only images and .js files

It's a browser issue, as newer browsers appear to not be able to detect the encoding properly anymore.


There's two ways to work around this problem:
1. Replace the characters that cause the issue with ISO encoded characters. For instance, Mac chooses to use a weird bended version of " instead of the normal " chars, which could cause this.
2. Disable guest caching (set timeout to 0, I believe)

At least until browsers can properly autodetect encoding

 

[Badger]

Just for clarity, so I make sure I understand the problem and where to go next......

There's nothing wrong with vbOptimize, but there's design flaws in all the IE browsers, Safari, Firefox and Chrome, that disappear when I turn vbOpimize off?

Should I open trouble tickets with those companies so they can address their similar bug and if so, can I refer them here for help diagnosing their problem?

Thanks for the feedback .....

Regards
Doug

 

[Fillip H.]

Yeah, those products do not detect the encoding being sent properly (which is why, when the question marks appear, if you change the encoding to auto detect again, it will detect the proper encoding and the issue will disappear)

I don't think there's anything I'm able to do to fix it.

 

[Cosmic]

Just for clarity, so I make sure I understand the problem and where to go next......

There's nothing wrong with vbOptimize, but there's design flaws in all the IE browsers, Safari, Firefox and Chrome, that disappear when I turn vbOpimize off?

Should I open trouble tickets with those companies so they can address their similar bug and if so, can I refer them here for help diagnosing their problem?

Thanks for the feedback .....

Regards
Doug

I know it seems counter intuitive but it's essentially a situation where it appears the current generation of browsers have dropped a "feature" from the previous generation (or at least a procedure vBO makes use of) - this will either be re-added in time, or it will become necessary to find another way to push that information to the browsers. Until we know which is which though we can't really change it (since it would probably break functionality in the older browser versions).

Theres still a chance that the cause is something else, but if it is we've not been able to find it so far. Hopefully as we get more feedback and data we come up with a simple solution.

 

[Badger]

Well, it seems I'm out of luck and I'm only going to get value out of this add-on for anyone logged in, not the thousands of guests accessing our site every 24 hours ...

Nobody seems to want to help from the browser companies and I can't get a response from FireFox, Google, Apple or Microsoft as to why their browsers have this bug in them ..

Regards,
Doug