This page is (hopefully) the beginning of a page to help resolve various technical difficulties with accessing or editing Modern Wikia Pages.
Cache problems with Internet Explorer[]
A problem commonly reported by Microsoft Internet Explorer users relates to Modern Wikia content that seems to be out-of-date. The problem usually manifests as disappearing page edits or days-old current events. This problem is almost always caused by browser caching. Almost all Web browsers temporarily store a copy of viewed Web pages on the user's computer, and almost all browsers are configured by default to display the cached copy if the user revisits the same page and it can be determined that the page has not been updated since his last visit. Usually, this process works as expected; however, some versions of Internet Explorer fail to always correctly re-download a page when it has become outdated (which may be a software bug).
(The Internet Explorer problem is not unique to Modern Wikia; if you incorrectly see cached data here, you are likely seeing out-of-date pages on other sites too.)
There are three simple workarounds you should try if you encounter this problem.
- Click the Refresh button in the toolbar or activate the Refresh keyboard shortcut (on Microsoft Windows computers, either F5 or Ctrl-R).
- If that doesn't work, try Ctrl-F5 (i.e. hold down the Control key and then press F5); this shortcut is documented as always refreshing the page from the Internet, regardless of what is in the cache.
- If neither method of refreshing works, you can manually delete all files in your cache. To do this, select "Internet Options" from the Internet Explorer "Tools" menu and then click the "Delete Files..." button. (Note that this last process may take some time if the cache has not been recently cleared.)
Finally, you might simply consider trying a different Web browser. Firefox, Netscape Navigator, and Opera are three popular alternatives available for a variety of operating systems.
Internet Explorer has been singled out in this troubleshooting section because the majority of cache-related problems are reported by Internet Explorer users, but similar issues could be found in other browsers (Netscape 7.2 had this problem). For more information about Wikipedia page caching and caching in general, see Modern Wikia:Clear your cache.
Firewall / privacy issues[]
Symptoms: Images don't show up correctly, or the 'Modern Wikia' logo graphic appears instead of referenced images; log-in does not 'stick', and the user's ip keeps appearing at the top right of pages instead of the user name.
Apparently, Modern Wikia must make use of some more advanced cookie features. Make sure that any Firewall or Privacy settings (e.g., ZoneAlarm, IE privacy settings, etc.) let Wikipedia have more freedom to set cookies as it desires; in particular, for ZoneAlarm settings, you must allow cookies with private header information.
Too many connections problem[]
Symptoms: Some contributors occasionally see error messages like the following instead of the page they requested:
Warning: open(/tmp/sess_e3b9b5e8f5afa9cce2aa0066fca4a143, O_RDWR) failed: Too many open files in system (23) in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 7
Warning: Failed opening 'Setup.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 12
Fatal error: Undefined class name 'outputpage' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 14
Warning: open(/tmp/sess_e3b9b5e8f5afa9cce2aa0066fca4a143, O_RDWR) failed: Too many open files in system (23) in Unknown on line 0
Warning: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 0
This is caused by the existence of a limit on the number of files which can be open at once, and at times too many users have been connected at once (essentially, this is Wikipedia becoming a victim of its own success). The limit has recently been increased to avoid this error occurring so frequently. However, some people's systems may have cached versions of the error message and so be continually redisplaying it; see "Cache Problems with IE" above.