Weird thing that's been happening to me recently

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Keegan
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Weird thing that's been happening to me recently

Post by Keegan »

Sometimes when I enter something into the search engine, go to one of the resulting episodes, then hit the back button on my browser to return to the results, I get a "This page can not be displayed" screen. Then, if I refresh, I get an error saying that "The specified search method is not supported." Why has this been happening? I've only been getting it recently.
JH
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Post by JH »

Oo-er. I haven't seen this behaviour. Which browser are you using? Not that I can offer any help myself, but I suspect that Sir Toby will need that information to help in his investigation.
JH
Keegan (Guest)

Post by Keegan (Guest) »

I've only observed it happening when I'm using Internet Explorer. I'll check sometime today if it happens when using Firefox.
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Post by JH »

Which version of IE? I haven't seen this using IE6. Which types of search were you doing? (99% of mine are for episodes created within the last 24 hours, which may explain why I haven't seen it.)
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Keegan
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Post by Keegan »

I've been using IE6 as well, and most of my searches were for episodes created in the past day as well. Firefox seems to be immune to this weirdness.
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Post by JH »

As you've only been getting the error recently, have you changed any IE settings recently? I'm wondering if there's some security-related setting which could do this.
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Keegan
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Post by Keegan »

I can't think of any security changes that I made.
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Sir Toby
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Post by Sir Toby »

Has there been any updates with this issue? I'd be happy to help investigate if this is still a problem.
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Keegan
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Post by Keegan »

I haven't been to this website for a while, but it still seems to be happening. I think it might have something to do with my security settings on IE, like I mentioned earlier, Firefox seems immune to the problem, and I haven't encountered this issue using other computers.
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Sir Toby
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Post by Sir Toby »

From your description of the problem, it sounds like IE is clearing it's cache of the search results page. When you go back to the search results page, I imagine it's complaining about not having anything to display. Refreshing the search results page should re-run your search, but in this case it sounds like IE is requesting the search results without re-sending the form data that tells Extend-A-Story what type of search you want to perform, and what your search terms are. Hence, you get the error regarding the specified search method not being supported, as no search method was specified.

If you can email me a screenshot of the initial error you get from IE when you try to go back to the search results, that may help me to determine what is going on. If needed, I can also go into the beta test story and update the search results page to include more information when it encounters the problem so that I can get a better idea as to what is going on there.
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Keegan
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Post by Keegan »

Hi-

I've just sent an email with the screenshots.
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Sir Toby
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Post by Sir Toby »

Keegan wrote:I've just sent an email with the screenshots.
Got it. I suspect the error message about the search method not being supported is due to your browser refreshing the search results without sending the form data for the search request. As for the "this page cannot be displayed" error, I'm not sure what would cause that. It wasn't really what I was expecting to see. Of course, that error may just be IE's generic error page for when anything goes wrong. I'll have to investigate to see if there is a way I can convince IE to be more specific about what is going wrong.

I see in your first post regarding this issue that you indicate this problem only occurs "sometimes". Is that accurate, or do you have steps you can follow to reproduce this problem 100% of the time? If you can't reproduce it 100% of the time, have you noticed any paterns regarding when it occurs, or does it seem to be fairly random?
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Keegan
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Post by Keegan »

Well, now it seems to happen 100% of the time, as long as I am using Internet Explorer, no matter what type of search I perform. I no longer recall why I put down "sometimes". When I am using Firefox, everything is normal.
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