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Discussion, mostly technical, about running Phoenyx groups goes here. Hypotheticals and wishlists go in stakeholders.
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KarenCravens
Karen Cravens

Wed

Jan 26
2000

17:07Z

Banner Exchange - a possible bug?

On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, timjh@csi.com wrote:

t>One significant factor: My ISP (BTInternet) uses a proxy server which
t>caches web pages - might this be causing the problems?

That's what's doing it... it specifically contains a no-cache pragma, but
if the ISP refuses to honor it, the script is going to get confused.

--
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net
The Dog Ate My Sketchbook:  http://silver.phoenyx.net/


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TimHall
Tim Hall

Wed

Jan 26
2000

17:28Z

Banner Exchange - a possible bug?

On Wed, 26 Jan 2000 11:07:56 cst, you wrote:

>That's what's doing it... it specifically contains a no-cache pragma, but
>if the ISP refuses to honor it, the script is going to get confused.

Is it worth me contacting the ISP about this?

--
Tim Hall, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/timjh

"The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future.  Have 
 you seen it?  It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly 
 bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department"
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KarenCravens
Karen Cravens

Thu

Jan 27
2000

00:11Z

Banner Exchange - a possible bug?

On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, timjh@csi.com wrote:

t>Is it worth me contacting the ISP about this?

I dunno; having done further reading, I'm not sure the no-cache will be
honored if it comes with the Location: and not the Content-Type:, but
further yet, it seems like that shouldn't be a problem, on account of if
it pulls the picture from the cache, it won't have pinged the script, so
the script won't have assigned a new random link and will continue to use
the one that matches the picture last served.  Seems like the worst that
would happen is you wouldn't get credit for the hits (which is, to me, a
strong argument against caching).

Are you sure you don't have any duplicated sequence numbers assigned, and
that the sequence numbers match within each set?  If that's not the
problem then yeah, I'd at least ask 'em about the caching thing.  I may
have to poke further into the web logs; as I recall, some places justify
caching by making headers-only request (to check for changes), and that
may be enough to trick the script into believing the new image was served.  
If *that's* the case, I just have to figure out how to detect the request
type and tell the script to either (1) ignore it and not assign a new
random link or (2) return an indication that the destination *has*
changed, thereby overriding the cache.

When it sends you the wrong place, is it going to other games, or is it
going to the Phoenyx home page always?  The latter is the fall-through if
the script is genuinely, hopelessly confused about what the banner request
matches up to.

-- 
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net
The Dog Ate My Sketchbook:  http://silver.phoenyx.net/



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TimHall
Tim Hall

Thu

Jan 27
2000

09:46Z

Banner Exchange - a possible bug?

On Wed, 26 Jan 2000 18:11:00 cst, you wrote:

>Are you sure you don't have any duplicated sequence numbers assigned, and
>that the sequence numbers match within each set? 

I will double-check that - Also some problems might have shown up
while I was testing: loading the page from my local C: drive while
connected to the net just to check the links work before I upload the
page.

Saying that, I have seen the same problem on other people's pages, not
just mine, which makes me think caching is the problem.

>When it sends you the wrong place, is it going to other games, or is it
>going to the Phoenyx home page always?  The latter is the fall-through if
>the script is genuinely, hopelessly confused about what the banner request
>matches up to.

Sometimes (quite often) it's the Phoenyx home page, but sometimes it's
a random other page.

--
Tim Hall, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/timjh

"The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future.  Have 
 you seen it?  It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly 
 bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department"
-- --------------------------------------------------------------
Listowner tools are found at http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners
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KarenCravens
Karen Cravens

Thu

Jan 27
2000

16:30Z

Banner Exchange - a possible bug?

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, timjh@csi.com wrote:

t>I will double-check that - Also some problems might have shown up
t>while I was testing: loading the page from my local C: drive while
t>connected to the net just to check the links work before I upload the
t>page.

That may do it.

t>Saying that, I have seen the same problem on other people's pages, not
t>just mine, which makes me think caching is the problem.

What have you got your browser set to, cache-wise?

t>Sometimes (quite often) it's the Phoenyx home page, but sometimes it's
t>a random other page.

Huh.  I can see where, right now, the links off your page might hit the
Phoenyx often, since that's where it goes if no one else has any credits
to spend, although I'm pretty sure Fudge does.  But in that case, it still
ought to show the Phoenyx banner.

I'm probably going to fiddle around with the script anyway, being that as
it stands right now, it doesn't do any sort of weighting... so if Joe Blow
has 5 credits and Kalyr has 5,000, they have an equal chance of
displaying, until Joe runs out of credits completely.  The old banner
script (never fully implemented) weighted things, which I think is more
fair (although I might cap it if there are gross imbalances like that).

I'd really like to pull in the awsd.com banner script (I use their web
logging, and it's pretty spiffy) but I haven't been able to reach their
server.

Speaking of web logging, I've got raw Apache logs for everyone's lists
being happily stored... if anybody wants them, I can either send them the
logs regularly or else set them up with the AWSD web logger.  It's pretty
thorough... shows keywords people used to find the site (if your primary
is here, anyway), that kind of thing... even if you haven't got a primary
here, the navbar hits will give you an idea of what your hits look like
somewhere else, if *your* host doesn't give you logs.

-- 
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net
The Dog Ate My Sketchbook:  http://silver.phoenyx.net/



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TimHall
Tim Hall

Thu

Jan 27
2000

19:43Z

Banner Exchange - a possible bug?

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000 10:30:45 cst, you wrote:

>What have you got your browser set to, cache-wise?

If this is Internet Explore's  Internet Settings->Temporary Internet
Files->Check for newer versions of stored pages, then it's set to
"Automatic".

--
Tim Hall, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/timjh

"The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future.  Have 
 you seen it?  It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly 
 bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department"
-- --------------------------------------------------------------
Listowner tools are found at http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners
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