Getting rid of cached pages on visitors system.

New site for client, non-savy customers.

[Frequent]

We recently put up a completely new site for a customer who previously had just a splash page that forwarded into a "hosted" site solution.

The customer is getting a lot of calls from people who are obviously still seeing the previous splash page which is apparently getting served out of a toolbar cache. The customer is trying to walk people through deleting their old bookmarks, clearing their cache and off-line content, etc. but it doesn't work in most cases.

We have narrowed it down to being a cache problem with various toolbars and the customer is getting frustrated.

As a work around we told them to have the customer go to the site via the IP address which works but isn't optimal for obvious reasons.

Is there something we can incorporate that will force these cached pages out of the visitors system?

Obviously, we can do something on-page now to prevent this problem from happening in the future for new visitors, but how do we deal with the old visitors who can't seem to loose the old splash page?

It's been 2 months and they are still getting calls. We had hoped that the toolbars would eventually drop the page out of cache on their own but it doesn't seem to be happening.

Freq---

[encyclo]

Usually a Shift+F5 should force the browser to get the latest page directly from the server - but this is a pretty intractible problem if the browser is serving the content directly from the browser cache without ever referencing the server: if this is the case then there is very little you can do other than wait it out.

Two months is a particularly long time, however. Was the splash page in place a long time? It sounds as if your server is set up to give very long expiry times to static content. Also, are you getting any requests to the server for the splash page graphics, and what response code is the server giving to those requests? 304 Not Modified?

[inveni0]

It sounds like they're using "internet speed boosting" software, which, as you said, is simply 2-3 gigs of cached files and an app that refuses to take the files from anywhere but locally.

Tell your client that he can't be held responsible for 3rd party software on someone else's computer. All you can do is tell the customer that in order to view the latest content on ANY website, they'll need to find another browsing solution.

[bull]

<Files splashpage\.htm>
Header add Expires "0"
Header add Pragma "no-cache"
Header unset Cache-Control:
Header append Cache-Control: "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"
</Files>

should work. Requires the Apache module mod_headers

[inveni0]

The above won't work because they aren't accessing the server. Updating the splash page won't change a thing because they can't get the update.