Qhimm, Fix your forums!

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halkun

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I don't mean to sound infamatory, but for the last few months I haven't been showing up here because I thought the forums were broken. Turns out the won't render in Mozilla. IIS is refusing to run the board script, so all I get is <html><body></body></html> from forums.qhimm.com. This as *NOT* a render problem, but a server-side issue. This is being posted on a friends laptop. Can you *please* make it a little more platform-friendly? It appears that phpBB 2 (possably subsilver) is barfing on browser detection as it seems to be asking what browser I have for CSS setup. (posting.php executes fine, and it has a code snippit in it. index.php, search.php, login.php etc... don't have me anything but the blank tags)

In other news, how are you guys?

-halkun
 
Actually, this is a browser incompatibility with Netscape/Mozilla. Certain combinations of servers/phpBB versions produce code (gzip-compressed HTML) that the browser can't understand, thus a default empty page is displayed. Gzip-compressed http transfers are something of a standard and is supported by all modern browsers, furthermore it's only used if the browser sends the "Accept-encoding: gzip" line with the http headers.

So basically, Netscape/Mozilla tells the server that it can handle the compressed data, but in reality it can't. Whether this is the server producing faulty code or the browser having incomplete support I don't know. The fact that IE can parse the code fine seems to support the second conclusion. (then again, IE does quite a lot of things that isn't part of any standard)

The only solution I know to this problem would be to completely deactivate gzip-compression for the entire forums. Unfortunately, the extra bandwidth that would be generated from such a switch is ...well, more than I can handle at the moment. Apart from that, all I can do is keep upgrading phpBB, or if it's possible to allow users to disable gzip manually for their individual account.
 
That's odd, I coulda sworn Moz could read gzipped data. I can read megatokyo's forums great (Chek it out,it's gzipped too, look at the bottom, it tells you it's on) Lemme poke at it.

 -halkun
 
Yes. As I said, the problem only occurs with certain combinations of server software and phpBB versions. Either faulty code is generated, or Mozilla is too picky about which sort of gzip data it accepts.
 
It seems the problem has been solved by installed the latest phpBB patch. If it persists, please reply here.

Oh, and it seems user levels sort of disappeared when upgrading, I'll fix this soon.
 
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