Trouble With Chatbox Auto Refresh and Other Bugs

Technical Details

Forum version : phpBB3
Position : Administrator
Concerned browser(s) : Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari
Who the problem concerns : All members
When the problem appeared : This morning.
Forum link : http://roleplayhetalia.forumotion.com

Description of problem

The chatbox in our forum has been acting up since this morning and we've checked everything we can possibly find to fix it. The chat will not auto refresh, first of all. It'll only refresh for me if I post something, and it's the same for everyone else. Second of all, the chatbox may kick someone out as soon as they log in, saying they logged off, but there's only been a few cases of it so I have no screenshot evidence. Third of all, when someone disconnects from the chatbox (not including logging out), the chat repeats the message multiple times. At the beginning of the day, the messages were repeated twice. As of now, this number has climbed a total of 6 times. Here's a photo for reference.


Lastly, the chat takes an excruciatingly long time to go to the chat's archives. The chat shows up as white in the mean time.


Anyway, as I've said, we've tried everything to try and find out what the issue is. The founder tried deactivating and reactivating the chatbox, another admin tried switching off the avatars in the chatbox, I searched around this forum, and the last admin tried looking around the coding to find out the issue. So far, the only thing we could come up with was that the theme we used for this month (we change the site's theme every month) may be outdated, but it's been 10 days since we first changed the theme, so we decided that couldn't could be the issue.

Now I'm not the tech whiz out of the site's four Administrators, but the one who is, after she checked the coding, said that she believed she found the issue. She said, and I quote, "Well there you have it. It's using WYSIWIG. That's an outdated editor, and it doesn't read script nor CSS." Of course, it seems far-fetched to me because the chat had been using WYSIWIG for the longest time and it had been working until just now. Not to mention, no one else on forumotion had been having this exact same issue. It had to just be our site.

Although, on both Google Chrome and Firefox, I inspected the elements of the chatbox. Of course, not being a tech whiz, I may be giving useless information, but its showing things like this:


Notice at the top, next to a red button with a white x, that there is a number. 514. That's how many errors it's found. I took this screenshot at the start of writing this. The number climbs by five every two seconds. Right now, I checked and the error count is about 7000. Pretty much all of them have to do with whatever http://f14.dnspro.org is. I looked it up and was redirected to forumotion. This is what I got.


I also tried to view the page source on Google Chrome. Here's a picture.


If you want to see it for yourself, paste this in Google Chrome or Firefox (The format on Firefox doesn't look that great, so I suggest Google Chrome):
view-source:http://roleplayhetalia.forumotion.com/chatbox/index.forum?archives

If there's something wrong with that aspect of the chatbox, I guess that may help. Again, I'm not a tech whiz so forgive me if I look stupid for giving pointless information. I'm trying to give you a lot to work with, since I know your job is most likely tedious and annoying when you don't receive enough information.

I apologise if I posted in the wrong section. I don't mean to be lazy or troublesome; I posted here because this is more of a general issue and I didn't quite know where to put it. Also, I didn't see other threads exactly like our issue, so I just decided to post my own. I apologise if I'm doing this wrong. My lack of general technology skills is probably going to be the end of me one day. ^^'  

Thus, whoever is reading this, I thank you tremendously for working with me even though I am not very great with techology and for reading this long, obnoxious message about my issue. Of course, you may see it as pointless to respond to me when I don't know about technology like I should, but any reply I get, I'll make sure to research to understand as well as relay the reply to the administrator I work with that does know her way around technology.

Once again, thank you!

We at http://www.haloroleplay.com/ have been having this problem all day today, Friday the 10th of April. All of our members have been experiencing extreme chat lag as well. There's also an issue that every time you refresh the page with the chat-box, it logs the user out and they have to log back into the chat.

@Dracozara
Hello!

I will highlight a few important things:

1- For a complete analysis of the problem, you will have to disable all codes that perhaps are used for personalizing the chat;
2- For the refresh, the current version (chatbox8.js) uses three functions that are:
Chatbox.prototype.listen(), Chatbox.prototype.initListening() and Chatbox.prototype.get() that only calls the refresh function when there are changes in the return as follows: "if (response) { self.refresh(response) }"
3-Finally, the ideal is that you create a temporary account (with rights of member only) and tell us the name and password for that account in order to log on in your forum and verify "closely" the reported problems.

So long,

JS

Thanks. We tried disabling all our personalisations to the chat, but nothing happened. We've tried various other things but nothing has happened. What do you think may be the issue?

@Dracozara

So Then:

3-Finally, the ideal is that you create a temporary account (with rights of member only) and tell us the name and password for that account in order to log on in your forum and verify "closely" the reported problems.

So long,

JS

Okay. She posted another topic in another topic. --> https://help.forumotion.com/t140105-chatbox-coding-issues#952187

I'm going to throw in a random suggestion, have you tried disabling and re-enabling the chatbox?

[edit]

Nevermind, I tried and it didn't work.

I've tried everything. I've spend all day weaving through the forums for a solution. I've taken away codes from the CSS style sheet, I've messed around with HTML and JS, and I've researched everything I could. 

I made a new Forum specifically to try and troubleshoot, but it had the same issue. The chatbox would not refresh. It has to be a bug... 

I tried changing the theme version (phpBB 3 to phpBB 2 to Invision, etc.). Nothing. It's really starting to scare me that it won't be fixed because absolutely nothing is working.

When I inspected the elements of the chatbox on Google Chrome, it kept popping with a (403) Forbidden error, trying to connect to the http://f14.dnspro.org I mentioned earlier. Upon further inspection, I figured out that it is a non-existant place, and our chat was trying to connect to it even though it didn't exist. This may have caused the problem. Here's a screenshot of the inspection. 


Well, now that I (supposedly) narrowed it down, how do I fix it? I don't know how I could possibly change the chat's host. Or how to fix it.

<24hr bump>

So, for whatever reason, we at haloroleplay.com aren't having a problem with this failure to autorefresh. 

Doing a google-elements inspection reveals that the server is now connecting to this f49.DNSPRO.org

Which seems to be a server of some kind?



I have no idea. 

If you guys know, or figure it out, I'd like to know. 

Thanks.


[Edit]


when I posted this, it went through f33.dnspro.org
So I think dnspro is some kind of server element.

It must be. We're still having trouble. We're losing members... No one is on anymore...

Hi,

I've made a report to our proadmin to look into this problem.

Thanks for your patience.

Just a few minutes ago, it started working again, and I didn't do anything. I'm not sure about the other person, though, so I'm not going to mark this solved quite yet (unless you suggest I do).

Thanks!

Hello

Our technicians fixed a bug for the chatbox refresh. Let us know if it improves your chatbox!

Thanks