17 < 10, Does Not Compute

oq4v3ht0u76kf2

Got this error whilst trying to search today, surely the "10" isn't hard coded into the $errorSearchFreq string? :P

Jonathan

Got a similar error many times before..

Sully

Been reported a few times.. no real fix I believe.

CuLT

Yep, no idea what it is, but I'm open to suggestions

I've resynchronized the time on the web servers and db, might have an effect.

seamus

I've seen that reported a few times around, usually on www.thedailywtf.com

Perhaps there's some form of timestamp kept in the cookie, which relates to the time on the client machine, and it's calculating on that.

/goes off to grasp some more straw

javaboy

CuLT wrote: »

Yep, no idea what it is, but I'm open to suggestions

I've resynchronized the time on the web servers and db, might have an effect.

Honestly! How did you make it this far in IT without the following phrase in your vocabulary: "Oh that... that's not a bug. That's a feature."

Clearly the extended wait time is a deliberate anti-DOS tactic.

IRLConor

I've an idea how this could happen.

The code does something like this:

[PHP]
if (($time_passed = TIMENOW - $last_search_time) < $flood_protection_time) {
abort(
"This forum requires that you wait " .
$flood_protection_time .
" seconds between searches. Please try again in " .
($flood_protection_time - $time_passed) .
" seconds."
);
}
[/PHP]

To get a message like the OP did would require $time_passed to be equal to -7. In other words, TIMENOW needs to be 7 seconds before $last_search_time.

TIMENOW is defined very early on in the execution of the page and $last_search_time gets pulled from the search query cache in the database.

So you look at how $last_search_time gets put in the database. In most cases the value entered is TIMENOW (the time value for that earlier search) but in one case they use the value of the PHP function time() directly. That seems odd, and could be the source of the bug but I haven't investigated it properly. Either way, I'm mostly sure that this is not caused by a client <-> server or web server <-> db server time sync issue. It's probably a bug somewhere in vBulletin.