PM Error Message

[Blase]

All of a sudden the board isn't letting me send PM's - I'm getting an error message specifying that users can only send one message every 15 seconds.

The thing is, I waited much longer than that. And I've been chatting via PM without a problem for the past two hours or so (and my mailbox is NOT full, in case anyone wants to ask).

 

[dark_phantom]

Same thing with me, I then got a message about flooding.

 

[Cathleen]

Perhaps the change to Daylight Savings was a bugger for the system. Seems to be all set now.

 

[Weird Harold]

Perhaps the change to Daylight Savings was a bugger for the system. Seems to be all set now.

Good guess, but the forum software/servers switched to standard time last Sunday and I don' think the software knows or cares what time the users' computers have set.


The problem of inapprorpiate flooding message is usally caused by the server clocks getting out of synch so that the time/date stamp on new messages is older on one server than it is on the server where the message is checked for flooding.

 

[mjl2010]

Good guess, but the forum software/servers switched to standard time last Sunday and I don' think the software knows or cares what time the users' computers have set.


The problem of inapprorpiate flooding message is usally caused by the server clocks getting out of synch so that the time/date stamp on new messages is older on one server than it is on the server where the message is checked for flooding.

That is almost certainly the case. I've seen this happen on mail servers.

MJL

 

[Weird Harold]

That is almost certainly the case. I've seen this happen on mail servers.

MJL

A year or two ago, the problem got so bad here at Lit that Manu had to install a utility that polls a site with an "atomic clock" (US Bureau of Standards or US Naval Observatory, but I forget which) to synchronise the servers every hour or so. Bu every so often the uility crashes or doesn't run for some reason and the server clocks get out of synch.

The timing of the problem coincident with the official fall-back time in the Eastern Time Zone makes it look daylight-savings related but unless the utility picked up something that caused it to shift again I don't think it is.