"There is nothing here" until I refresh

introspektron

I'm experiencing a strange problem with Flarum. Whenever I click on a tag in the left pane, the forum informs me that "there is nothing to show here". Only when I refresh the page (with browser refresh button) do the discussions, which actually are there, appear. Even then, if I use Flarum's own refresh button (the one next to "mark as read"), all the discussions disappear again and the forum seems to be empty.

I assume that this is some kind of JS issue, but I'd rather not dive into that, so I was hoping that perhaps somebody else has encountered this problem.

clarkwinkelmann

introspektron are you using any third-party extension ? Can you share the output of your php flarum info command ?

introspektron

Just the Polish Language Pack. However, the problem was already present prior to installing it. The installation itself is brand new, made yesterday actually. I'd like to port a small community that I'm a part of from phpBB to Flarum, so I set up an experimental forum to check things out and experiment before pulling the trigger. I'm loving it so far, but this issue is pretty concerning. I haven't found any information on problems like that, so I assume the fault lies with the server configuration or something and this can be worked out.

Some more information that will hopefully be helpful:

The forum is hosted on a shared hosting that, however, offers SSH access, which is how I was able to install Flarum via composer. They use nginx as their webserver, but they use a proprietary module to enable configuration by Apache-style .htaccess files. However, I assume this module might be imperfect. The Flarum docs say that there should be a .nginx.conf file included with Flarum, but I haven't been able to find it.

I did some additional testing and the problem seems to have to do with overly aggressive caching on the frontend. If I open the site in an incognito window, everything works fine initially. Also, when an another user logged on, they only started experiencing such issues after a longer period of activity on the site. It seems like the frontend uses an outdated forum state: aside from the disappearing discussions, if I visit a tag that previously had no set color, the newly set color will only be visible after a manual browser refresh and disappear again after switching to another tag.

I checked if the fault didn't lie with server-side caching, but it's entirely disabled for the site.

introspektron

To check if the fault didn't lay with nginx server configuration, I set up an Apache server, with nginx acting only as proxy. The problem resurfaced shortly.

Clearing browser cache resolved the issue temporarily.

I'd appreciate any help.