given that php always recreates the page, even when using the back button

Minor nitpick, -- not for everyone. We had a discussion about this a while ago when the point was about the post-box-content disappearing.

It's an issue to do with a combination of browser, ISP and cache(s), and I don't think we ever quite got to the bottom of it.

I googled it a bit, and it seems that php is supposed to work that way, and it's only in Opera that it doesn't. This is considered a 'feature' of Opera, by which I mean that it's a bug, but most people would prefer it to work that way.

edit: On the caches, php wants a server side cache.

DX, can you give me some links on that behaviour?

A feature I've tucked away in my brain to implement sometime is to be able to skip to a particular time/date in a thread.

it seems that php is supposed to work that way, and it's only in Opera that it doesn't.

Standing right here!

MacOS and IE.

Nearly all Australian ISP cache the hell out of content though, because it's so likely to be US content it makes sense.

Also the browser has settings for how often it checks documents, right? Once a session/Every time/Never, in my browser.

to be able to skip to a particular time/date in a thread.

Good one -- posts in the last n hours would be cool.

but the diet too because I want to be immortalised

It's fricking annoying because my work connection and IE caches the hell out of everything but here. So www.worldcrossing.com is refreshed once a day (terribly annoying), but I can't hit the back button here without a reload.

I like home connection and Opera much better.

Philosophically, I think a browser shouldn't cache things with a question mark in the URL, because they're by definition dynamic.

But I don't know what I think my browser should do with a page that I'm getting to via the Back Button (second most common navational device online, Jakob says) -- it it's just one step back in the history, what does the user want? Don't they want the thing they saw there last time they were there?

Loving the ability to go to 20 or 50 posts per click. Just what I wanted.

Aargh!

I just got this "quote":

Jimmy Olsen joke, sir. Pretty much gonna be lost on you, huh? Xander, 'The Zeppo'

No, no, no. It's definitely:

Jimmy Olsen jokes're pretty much gonna be lost on you, huh?

Xander never calls Giles "sir"! He called him "G-Man" once and Giles immediately said "never call me that again", but I digress.

Please fix it? Or can we build an interface so that admins can fix it?

You know what's hard? Trying to remember a google search string from two months back. I couldn't find the original stuff I looked at.

Looking around today, it looks like I only remembered part of the story. Browsers can cache php pages, but as John notes, if you're building pages dynamically, you usually want them to remain dynamic. So if you want to prevent (or force) caching in php, you can use the Cache-Control command in the header of the php page. The problem is that Opera seems to ignore this command, and caches the pages anyway. The other problem is that I can't find the original page where I read this, but here are a couple I found today.

[link]

[link]

Don't know how useful they'll be.