troubleshooting

How to reload/refresh an SOC web page

When you visit www.the-soc.org.uk or other website, your browser will probably store temporary copies of the website pages on your computer. This store of pages is known as a 'cache'. The cache can speed up your browsing by reducing the number of times pages have to be downloaded from the internet. (Exactly how the cache is used will depend on your browser - eg Internet Explorer or Firefox - and its settings. Try your browser's Help pages for more information.)

Sometimes your browser might display an out-of-date page from the cache instead of fetching the latest version from the internet. If you suspect this is happening, all you need to do is click on the Reload or Refresh button (usually one or two arrows curved into a circle). This instructs your browser to download a fresh, up-to-date, copy of the page from the internet.

Unfortunately if your internet provider is AOL this might not be so easy! This is because the AOL browser uses two different caches: one on your own computer, and another on an AOL computer known as a 'proxy server'. When you click the Reload button on your AOL browser, a fresh copy of the page will be fetched from the AOL proxy server, not from the website itself. If the copy on the proxy server is out of date, then unfortunately this is what your browser will display. AOL have published some questions and answers on their caching strategy, but there doesn't appear to be an easy solution to the problem described here - other than changing to a different browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.