I received a message that I don't have permission to open topics in this forum. Is it a bug, or did I do something really wrong here? I see that everything has changed a lot, so I thought maybe that was the cause. TIA

Me too, can't get in to open forum

Yes, we have a precocious gremlin in the system. We expect it to be dealt with sometime this weekend.

In the meantime, try using a different web browser. Opera and this site mingle well for some reason.

I am getting the same problem the last few days. Was hoping it would just go away on its own but it hasn't. Please fix.

[You do not have the required permissions to read topics within this forum.]

I get this after clicking the 'Open Topic Discussion' forum, does this mean too as well...?

Yes, as noted elsewhere, the open forum has turned into a funhouse-you must find an alternative method for entry (try doing a forum search for a particular topic, or, click on the forum designation listed at the bottom of any Open Topic forum thread).
Other than that, we must wait until the mutating problem can be located and terminated.

Thanks for the tip FL. I'll try the "Jump To" link, or perhaps the "Last 24 hrs" link to access the open topic forum.

I am willing to sell you a small trap for gremlins for only 3 easy payments of $9.95.

That's not going to work. Some sort of link or mapping is fubar (i.e variable A in one page has to match variable X in the database or some hardcoding). There is obviously a lot of custom code written for this site, which can get away from you very easily. You need to be very thorough and good at debugging scripts (i.e. PHP) with a good knowledge of databases to fix this. I just hope this forum software they chose isn't too obfuscated with functions calling functions calling functions calling func.... etc. or else it will be painful.

That is why you have a mirror test environment and test all code changes there first. Never develop in production. Sounds easy but you have no idea how often I have to draw a line in the sand about that where I work, every day.

This is still broken. Any idea when the open forum will be fixed?

No, no idea.

Is anyone still having problems?

Posters still do not have access to Open Topic Discussion

Yes. I still have no permissions to see the forums.

In the PHP scripts, set your ID or permissions to me and you will see the problem. On the permissions include on every page, create a line like this. This is formatted for generic C#/JavaScript/Java/JSP syntax, but your syntax will be similar and you just have to figure out your script notation.

if (usr == 'admin')
{
usr = 'jotapay';
}

'usr' would be your type variable (a string, since this is a script and not managed code where strings are objects) for the user logged in, so you can view a page with my permissions. If you actually have a user class or object (where 'usr' is an object and 'name' is a property of object), then you need to do something like this, where the parameter for the constructor is the string of the user id.

User usr;
.....
if (usr.name == 'admin') // a Java/JSP variant is: if (usr.name.equalsIgnoreCase('admin'))
{
usr = new User ('jotapay');
}


Do a bunch of script dumps to the Apache (or IIS) log as the code executes in sequence, or email them to yourself, so you can see what it going on. Scripts are a pain, as you are experiencing. Managed code with a deugger (like ASP.NET) is so much more preferable in my experience.