I've been looking round on a phpbb forum, and I noticed that the
"current time" as reported on the main page wasn't being updated.
I then found that I wasn't seeing new posts on the forum, because
wwwoffle is apparently aggressively caching these.
I checked the headers (as found in the wwwoffle spooldir), and they
include:
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 21:39:58 GMT
Cache-Control: private, pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
It doesn't matter if the Expires header is the same as the Date: header,
or 0; RFC2068 states:
HTTP/1.1 clients and caches MUST treat other invalid date formats,
especially including the value "0", as in the past (i.e., "already
expired")
However, every attempt to access this page (short of a forced reload)
shows:
Mar 24 22:44:23 wurtel wwwoffles[24779]: URL='http://forum.gps.nl/index.php'.
Mar 24 22:44:23 wurtel wwwoffles[24779]: Cache Access Status='Cached Page Used'.
This is pretty frustrating. I can of course put a line
http://forum.gps.nl/*
in the DontCache section, but as the site makes every effort to ensure
that the pages aren't cached, then (at least while still online)
wwwoffle should honour that.
Or is the site doing something wrong in its headers?
Paul Slootman
