New Message: problem with inaccessible home page returns

[webmaster at userland.com]

A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$1834

By: Dan Mitchell (dan at mitchell.fhda.edu)

Earlier this year our server at De Anza College encountered a problem where some sites' home pages became inaccessible with an error message that looked more or less like this:

Sorry! There was an error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “149416960” hasn’t been defined.

Now I'm encountering the problem with a site on a different Frontier/Manila server that I operate.

The value in parentheses changes when one tries to hit the URL again.

Other pages (included the Editors Only site mangement links, the About page, etc.) are available by manually entering their URLs.

The site was set up using the "flip home page" method, but switching to news items seems to have to effect.

The onset of the problem does not seem to have beeen associated with anything in particular that we did.

There was ultimately a resolution to the problem with the De Anza server - unfortunately, I do not remember what it was, except that great pains were taken over a long period of time to find the problem (largely by Tom Clifton, if I recall correctly). These included moving the site to a different Frontier server where it worked perfectly - but even moving the same functional site back to the original server created the same problem

I vaguely recall that the solution was something simply but not obvious - but I don't recall the specificics: something about passwords, or user accounts, or something?

Help...

Thanks,

Dan

This is a Manila site... http://manila.userland.com/.