I have been getting this occasionally myself, but I think that it sometimes goes away without my having to log in again. I am not sure of this, so I will start keeping track now.

Hmm, this is a new one:

I haven't seen the error yet. If anyone can reproduce at will, can do the following (to try to track down the problem):

1) Detail system configuration (XP,IE 6.0/firefox etc)
2) Once you get the error, can you ensure that your cache is completely clear and try again. This *could* be an issue to do with cookies/sessionids which is causing the problem.

Argh, the error again. And I've been seeing other people having the error too when I get bored and stare the "who's online" for some time.

XP Home SP2
Firefox 1.0
Cache disabled, cookies set to expire and delete after browser closes.

The error actually seems *random*. Some semblance of a pattern of post-error trails, but the occurance seems random.

There is also another discribency I observed: The entire session does not update when you stay active on the forum for long periods of time. I've had friend visit the forums, and sitll couldn't find him anywhere on the "who's online" while he could see it on his side. The time since last activity and all that are actually still updating as this happens, as are the activities of the other users that show up. Some users simply become inactive for quite awhile on the list, which happens when they close the browser. My friend, however, reports when we compared our lists that said users were not there, there were other users on, or the timings were different. EVen when I see a new post by a member in the "recent threads" page while viewing this, the poster is reflected both on the post as well as the lists as not online. To get an updated list, I had to restart my browser and login again.

This is actually a continuous fluke, not a random error. Whenever I see a post made by a user say afew minutes ago, and that user is not reflected in "who's online", I know that something in the database has shot and lagged, so I restart my browser.

One hypothesis for this is that the forum threads and posts, plus the recent threads list, are on one database that updated whenever there's a post, while the online users, timings, and such are on another database that updates with every user page access. But this doesn't explain the difference in lists between people, especially since the timings and some users' activities are still updated on the lagging list. Unless there are a number of servers that link to the two databases, and the server-databse information can lag, and different people connect to different servers at random and the server updates fully only at said connect, or something like that.