Icons under member details

[#1]

Been off the forums for a few days, but noticed today a number of icons under member's details, including a big green 'rate / fav blog' icon on some member's details ... Which have since gone.  Is someone meddling with the form settings?

[#2]

That's not showing for me?

[#3]

Chris,
The icons are under your description on the left. The day before I wrote the above, some members had green "rate this blog" (or similar) button as well. Looks like someone had been tinkering.
Kevin

[#4]

Kevin, can you be a little more explicit as I don't ever recall seeing such an icon.
Reading your OP I wasn't certain where you meant, but now I assume you mean located below the forum member's username and any comment/description they add - in your case below 'Sopport and Ex-Puublican'  where there is the Profile and PM icons.
Can you give any examples of forum members that may have had this and what shape was the icon?

[#5]

Hi AO,
For a day or so before my OP, some users (you were one, but not me) had a green rectangular icon with something like 'rate fave blog' to the right of the current icons.  It actually linked to either the users profile or to a PM to them.  Do not clearly recall (I was busy that day) and wanted to investigate before posting - the day I posted the green icons had all gone.
The ones which remain I do not recall being there before.
Kevin

[#6]

The "fave this blog - technorati" icon at the bottom of this page? Perhaps it was just your web browser or computer temporarily mixing up some images.

[#7]

i don't recall ever seeing such an icon under users, but as ejs states there is on at the bottom of every page.

[#8]

So there is and we've seen "misplaced" graphics before on this forum.  The odd thing is it was there for some folk's details and not others.
That said, there are variations of the icons appearing under the user details.  In this thread, I'm the only one with 3 icons.  My 'extra' icon is an envelope which when clicked reports 'an error occurred, this user has blocked their email...' also my last icon (links to PM form) has a green "i" in it whilst everyone elses' is red.
As I said, I've not noticed these iscons being there before ... But I might be being forgetful, the appearance of the green rectangle simply attracting my attention!

[#9]

Everyone has 3 icons under their name on my screen at the moment (View profile, email and PM)
I believe the mark in the speech bubble is green when the user is online and red when they're offline.

[#10]

You are correct about the Green & Red marks on the PM icon Harry, but not everyone will have the Email icon visible to regular users as they may not want email. It may of course be visible to Plusnet staff. I believe their own is also visible to the user, but as Townman discovered gives an error when email is disabled.

Quote from: ejs

The "fave this blog - technorati" icon at the bottom of this page? Perhaps it was just your web browser or computer temporarily mixing up some images.

That was my thought when I made post #3, but didn't want to potentially  "colour" any response. Townman has had issues with that one before, IIRC he's had another user's avatar appear in it's place. Something to do with local caching I'd guess.

[#11]

AO,
You have an excellent memory.  It was not strictly a matter of local caching, it was a matter of the wrong image content being delivered by the server.
To explain a file X.jpg had the content of file Y.jpg in the local cache.  Looking at two machines side by side one would display the real content of X.jpg and the other something different.  I constructed a web page to display X.jpg on its own.  On the good machine I got the right image on the other I got the wrong image.  Looking for the file in the browser cache and displaying it confirmed the theory.  Clearing the cache fixed the problem.
My problem with the observation / analysis is how the hell does the web server manage to send the wrong content for the image file?  I've only seen this on the forums, if it were a generic issue with my browser / platform I'd expect to see more of it.

[#12]

I don't think it's at all likely that the web server sent the wrong content for the image file, nor do I see why you have concluded that that was what must have happened.

[#13]

I don't think it was a server problem either ejs otherwise more of us would have seen similar things at some point. I'd wager a small bet that McAfee had a bearing on this as IIRC Townman uses their AV etc. But I also don't think it is quite a straight forward as that. I suspect that the occasional issues that we see with the forum (recorded in the many posts on this board) are possibly what triggers the image problem in combination with the aforementioned.

[#14]

@ejs,
I reach that conclusion because that is what the evidence points to.  In my cache I had a file called Fred which has the image of Bill.  I have only seen this on these forums.  If as suggested by AO that this is a McAfee issue then I'd be seeing it everywhere, which I do not.  It only seems to involve the image which appears at the bottom of the forum screens, which to be honest I rarely scroll to.
In respect of this thread I'm content to accept that there has been no intentional change to introduce new functionality and what I saw was an aberration.

[#15]

You've discovered the problem is with the cache, there isn't really any evidence to say how the cache ended up in that state. Only seeing the problem on these forums could be due to how much time is spent on these forums vs. other websites. If it's just you who's experienced the issue, where does that suggest the problem is?
These forums might be a bit old fashioned and so more likely to trigger the issue, other sites might put lots of little icons into one big image which they then cut out areas of.