An Error Has Occurred

[Dan]

SMF: Small Machines Forum, it's the name of the software that run this board (and Karla's)
Debian: A Linux distribution. A Linux operating system is made of many, many parts. When you put them all together, it's called a distribution. Debian is a popular one for servers.
Lexing: The act of taking tokens from source code and giving them meaning. For instance it would transform the 4 letters of "goto" in a single token that have a meaning
Parsing: The act of assembling the tokens previously lexed according to the rules of the language
Zend: The company now behind PHP
PHP: A popular quick and dirty programming language targeted toward the web, SMF is written in it.

[Karla]

By the way, I seem to have found what is required to get my forum running again. I unticked 'Use database driven sessions'. I will have to find out more about how to clear out obsolete session data from the database.

[Dan]

By the way, I seem to have found what is required to get my forum running again. I unticked 'Use database driven sessions'. I will have to find out more about how to clear out obsolete session data from the database.

This means you are back at PHP's regular session handling. Their strategy is to save every session to disk (which fails if you are using more than one server but I doubt your board is *that* popular). If there's no coding errors and funky issues with php.ini, you should be fine.

I can't figure out why the SMF guys replaced PHP's session handling with something less reliable...

[dmutah]

I think it is great that this group has people that care and have the understanding of this kind of stuff to keep this group going. Thank you.

[Wolfboy]

SMF: Small Machines Forum, it's the name of the software that run this board (and Karla's)
Debian: A Linux distribution. A Linux operating system is made of many, many parts. When you put them all together, it's called a distribution. Debian is a popular one for servers.
Lexing: The act of taking tokens from source code and giving them meaning. For instance it would transform the 4 letters of "goto" in a single token that have a meaning
Parsing: The act of assembling the tokens previously lexed according to the rules of the language
Zend: The company now behind PHP
PHP: A popular quick and dirty programming language targeted toward the web, SMF is written in it.

Thanks for the explanation Dan
It's a lot clearer now

[DiElle]

Often when i want to reply or quote to a post i get to see this message:

An Error Has Occurred!
Session verification failed. Please try logging out and back in again, and then try again.

Can it be that it is a problem with my computer or am i doïng something wrong?

I have the same problem... even  clearing the cache and cookie I can't find solution with Safari.
With other browser, everything works fine!!

[Wolfboy]

I have the same problem... even  clearing the cache and cookie I can't find solution with Safari.
With other browser, everything works fine!!

I also cleared up the cache and cookies but i still see "An Error Has Occurred" appear from time to time... Although not that often anymore

[Karla]

I never did find a way of getting the forum to use database driven sessions on the new server. I asked on the simple machines forum but no one answered. They aren't too helpful I find.

I tried emptying the relevant table in the database but that didn't help either.

It's useful to know how many people are suffering from this problem and how frequently before making any changes onthe server side. The last thing you want to do is to destroy the entire forum for a minor problem. I always make a full back-up of the database before changing any of the settings.

Is it a problem that's developed over time and is getting worse for example?

[Dan]

I never did find a way of getting the forum to use database driven sessions on the new server. I asked on the simple machines forum but no one answered. They aren't too helpful I find.

And their software isn't open source either which is good if you like check and balance. Being open source means that if you do a crappy job, it's possible to fork and go on. The SMF guys want forking to require their written permission.