AOL Caching and board here.

[Brett_Tabke]

I have been reading in depth on aol's site about caching and browsers. There seems to be a problem with people from AOL being able to see updated posts here throughout the day. AOL is only revalidating and caching a page only once every 24 hours. Can anyone dispute this?

I could turn on 'Pragma: no cache', but that would force a reload on every page AOL'ers request (not good).

The problem is our usage of dynamically generated .htm files. AOL is fully caching them. Does anyone know of a way I can get AOL to do a check for 'last modified' times? I want them to be able to cache a file, I just want them to check if it has been modified on every request.

Thank you.

[rcjordan]

>The problem is our usage of dynamically generated .htm
How about sticking a random number after the .htm extension when the thread is modified? A spin on the way we break banner cache.

[PeteU]

Brett, I think you could do this by setting HTTP Headers correctly, set EXPIRES header to low value, and then make sure the LAST-MODIFIED is set correctly whenever new message is added to the thread.
Typical Proxy behaviour is to look at EXPIRES header of cached page, if it is pass expiration it will send header request to the server to check LAST-MODIFIED, it then compares cached LAST-MODIFIED to newly retrieved LAST-MODIFIED if they are the same cached page is served, if not a full html reqest is send and new page is retrieved, served and put in cache.

[Brett_Tabke]

That is the route I guess Pete. I was hoping for another solution. I am not fond of the expires header. I wonder what kind of time frame I should think about? 10mins? Will it even do any good. I bet they ignore anything under an hour and just repull the page every time. I don't want to do that for the whole board and will target aol.