Kudos0

FAQ - "Post Forum Thread" button.

Posted: 22-Dec-2019 | 12:06PM · Edited: 22-Dec-2019 | 12:14PM · 2 Replies ·

From the FAQ:

How do I post a new message?
Once you've registered for the community, you will be able to post a new message. You can do this by navigating to the board you wish to post your new message, and click the "Post Forum Thread" button.

There is no such button:  "Post Forum Thread".  There is a "Post new item" button and a "Create v" dropdown.

This is not helpful to newbies.  Also, once you "Save" your post, it shows up in the forum when you're logged in, but not when you're logged out.  If there is a time delay (presumably for moderators to review the message), where is this explained, i.e., how long?  Is there any way to query the state of your post, to find out if/when it will appear in the forum or if it was rejected and for what reason?  What is the point of having 2 different views (logged in vs. logged out) of a board's contents.  I find the former to just be misleading.

Replies

Kudos0

Re: FAQ - "Post Forum Thread" button.

Posted: 24-Dec-2019 | 3:36PM · Edited: 24-Dec-2019 | 3:37PM · Permalink

schpliz:
...Also, once you "Save" your post, it shows up in the forum when you're logged in, but not when you're logged out.  If there is a time delay (presumably for moderators to review the message), where is this explained, i.e., how long?  Is there any way to query the state of your post, to find out if/when it will appear in the forum or if it was rejected and for what reason?  What is the point of having 2 different views (logged in vs. logged out) of a board's contents.  I find the former to just be misleading.

Hi schpliz:

The last time I checked there was a five or six hour lag (or even longer) before the latest replies / edits were viewable when I was logged out (i.e., not authenticated) and connected to a caching server (usually the server on Norton's distributed network that's nearest to your geographic location).  I've complained about this delayed refresh of the caching servers a few times (see my Oct 2017 thread Persistence of Spam / Refresh Rates for Cache Servers), and here's what Norton employee Kevin told us in his May 2015 post in State of the Forums:

"When you're authenticated, you pull data directly from our origin servers.

When you're not authenticated, you pull data from the caching server that can respond fastest to your request (usually the server that is closest to you geographically).

We do this for two reasons:

   1.  To reduce the load on the origins so authenticated users can post and interact without delay.
    2.  To serve pages as fast as possible to users wherever they are in the world.

​The tradeoff to using caching technology is sometimes the cached pages are not as "fresh" as pages that are served from the origin servers. We do automatically purge the cached pages to keep them as fresh as possible -- without degrading performance..."

Only refreshing the caching servers every six hours or so seems excessive to me, and I've always assumed the main reason is that Norton doesn't want to pay for the extra bandwidth they would require to keep the caching servers updated in near real-time.

Kudos0

Re: FAQ - "Post Forum Thread" button.

Posted: 25-Dec-2019 | 3:59PM · Permalink

lmacri:
Only refreshing the caching servers every six hours or so seems excessive to me, and I've always assumed the main reason is that Norton doesn't want to pay for the extra bandwidth they would require to keep the caching servers updated in near real-time.

And this is the only forum I frequent that behaves like that.

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