Forum Log Out Bug - Back with a vengeance

The forums are not managed or supported by either the Paragon Studios devs or community management directly. They are managed by NCSoft datacenter people. Its unclear to me if they even *read* our forums. I've been regularly communicating with Zwill as to what I'm doing, what I'm testing, what I'm seeing, and asking him to pass that information along. I suspect that Zwill is doing the community thing and censoring out the parts where I question the datacenter IT staff's parentage, genetic make up, and mating habits. But I'm assuming they know there is an actual problem.

In the meantime, I would recommend people catch up with Chip.

I miss the +rep button.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

When it's happening nearly every other post or even preview of a post it might as well be like not being able to post at all, until the log-out issue settles down and gives you a few hours peace.

There's more than one way to skin a cat. There has to be a solution to the log-out issue that doesn't involve losing the ability to post.

I have literally no idea what you're trying to say. I think you're trying to say the forum ops worked really hard just to make the forums work at all, but vBB prevents them from randomly expiring sessions. I think.

If you have actual first hand knowledge of the problem, by all means enlighten me. It will obviate the need to perform a failure mode analysis on the vBB code, which I plan to do this weekend. I will have a better idea of what might be going on, and I will also probably be cranky that I'm spending my weekend doing someone else's job.

So. Your idea to get some attention to the problem is to intentionally and repeatedly break the forum rules?

I don't think that's the kind of attention you really want.

AH!!! MY EYES!!!

It burns!!!!

What I think is silly is that anyone took that seriously.

Well if you can't understand it that's your issue. If you're cranky for doing somebody else's job, then don't do it and stop being cranky.

The logout bug is related to the game login. Because it's NCSoft policy that only subscribed players can participate on the forum which I understand is not something that vBB copes with well. There were a number of attempted fixes, but whilst they worked for some, they completely prevented others from posting at all. Thus there was a tacit admission that this particular bug had beaten the powers that be and so it was effectively rolled back.

Whether this new increase in logouts is related to Freedom I don't know but it could well be.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

In other words, you don't actually know what you're talking about. The current problem is unlikely to have anything to do with anything you're saying, because the problem seems to have three separate components (at least) that have nothing to do with that.

First, evidence is mounting that there is a synchronization issue between the two servers that are being used to load balance the servers. Locking a browser to just one of them has reduced logout glitches in my tests by more than 50% (approaching 80%, actually) and while it hasn't fixed the problem, and hasn't even been shown to help everyone by any amount, anecdotal evidence suggests it is having an impact on at least some of the people that are testing it.

Second, even if vBB was having issues with the integration piece of their session validation code, that would not explain why our copy of vBB was sending cookie deletes for the Remember Me information - namely userid and password. That is separate from session management: bbsessions expire all the time and do not normally affect that information. Furthermore, testing shows that you can corrupt bbsession information and the forum does correctly recover from that by assuming the current session id is invalid and regenerating a new session id and restoring session information.

Third, only an idiot would add session validation code that checked with the authentication servers in real time, because subscriptions themselves are not altered in real time short of being banned. And being banned can be done on the forums themselves without having to validate game account banning. So if the forum ops did that, the error is theirs from the start. So whatever the problem is, at least one component of it has a temporal aspect of it which is illogical for the requirements of the system.


Over and above all of that relating these problems to Freedom is bizarre, because its been occurring for over a year fairly consistently. Which implies you don't even know what specific problem we're even discussing, much less its details.


So when I say "I have literally no idea what you're trying to say" its because I assumed no one would say "the forum logout issue got fixed" when they had absolutely no idea what any of the specifics were about what they were talking about, and also absolutely no clue about the subject matter itself of what they were talking about.

It does make me wonder however, with those two qualifications, if you're one of the forum ops. Either way, if you want to offer the entertaining distraction of parading your wit and ignorance around as target practice, you'll find I'm really not kidding around when I say this particular bug is really pissing me off.

Queen's English Translation:

As bad as this sounds, I really hope he/she has a retort for you, Arcana.

That is a sig line waiting to happen.

I'm going to guess no, they don't.

Very probably, but if it's not something that affects them directly, it won't seem like much of a problem. ("Oh, there goes Zwillinger again about his forum's log-out stuff.")

At this point, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be more effective to use the NC Soft Support web page's "Ask a Question" feature, under the "Account Support-General" category.

Technically, they should be at least nominally responsive to our community people. This would be comparable to the NCSoft server ops saying "oh, there goes those Paragon people again, always whining when we turn off their game servers."

Indeed, but one should not be under any illusions about where CoX stands in the NCSoft hierarchy. If there are any website problems for its big earners of any kind, they're going to get attention first. And then there are office politics to consider. Whatever the case, it's evident that there's more than just a technical barrier for NCSoft to take care of the problem.