Wiki sidebar inconsistency

[D2JK]

For what it's worth, the sidebar on the wiki seems to change depending on which page you're on, and may be missing some links that are present on the sidebar of other pages.

Examples:

Actor classes: ZScript sidebar category is missing entirely.
Action functions: ZScript sidebar category is present, but is missing the "Reference" link.

I don't know much about website designing, but shouldn't it be possible to create single, shared sidebar to be referenced from all the pages?

[wildweasel]

I wonder if the problem is not in the sidebar, but in the wiki's own page cache?

[Xaser]

Could be -- though it could also be the browser cache.

@D2JK: If you reload the Action Functions page with Ctrl+F5 or Shift+F5, does the link appear? If not, perhaps there's some server-side caching shenanigans going on.

I see the full ZScript category, including the "Reference" link, on both pages, for the record.

[D2JK]

I tried reloading the pages on both Firefox and Chrome before reporting, but doing so had no effect on any of the sidebars.

Is there a difference between Ctrl+F5 / Shift+F5 and the regular F5 / page reload, by the way?

[Xaser]

The Ctrl/Shift modifiers instruct the browsers to skip loading anything from the local cache. It's always a good thing to rule out, if nothing else.

At this point, Rachael and/or Gez are the best ones to weigh in on this, since I'm not sure what the server-side cache setup might be. Hooray for strange black boxes.

[Gez]

Works for me.

Static versions of the pages are cached, when there are sweeping updates that modify every page (and a change in sidebar counts) then they can take a while to appear everywhere because the software tries to spread out the recomputing of cached pages over time to prevent overloading the server. (Otherwise, something like updating the sidebar on Wikipedia would be basically a denial-of-service attack.)

You can manually force the purge of a given page if you want this page in particular updated right now. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how.