So, what happened? UPDATE: FIX AVAILABLE + EXPLANATION

[TheLQ offline]

Erm, what happened? Seemed like the encoding was screwed up, but I have no idea.

SCROLL DOWN FOR FIX AND EXPLANATION

[xiaozanghou offline]

It's a problem with gzip/deflate compression. For some reason, phpbb is serving content encoded in such a way that many browsers won't recognize it, hence the text garbage.

[Gadget offline]

I assume this problem still hasn’t been fixed, because the only way I have been able to post is to go threw a proxy. Which in itself isn’t a problem, it’s just annoying.

Is there any user side solution to this, Or will it have to be a server side fix?

[xiaozanghou offline]

If you're using Firefox, follow these steps:

1. Type "about:config" in the URL bar, hit enter, and click accept or whatever the resulting screen says.
2. In the filter, type network.http.accept-encoding
3. Double-click on it, erase "gzip,deflate" in the box, click OK.
4. Restart Firefox.

You should be able to read the forums normally again.

[TheAppleFreak]

This is <s>odd</s> strange ; I've been here in italy for a week now and haven't encountered any such errors on this blackberry. Even now, as I type this message on this infuriatingly slow device, the forum is operating normally.

[TheLQ offline]

I KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS NOW

See, whats happening is that the webserver is for some reason not correctly using Gzip for web compression. Its probably got a corrupted addon or something (ARG 1and1 hosting). To show you the difference, lets send a request for the homepage

GET /forum/ HTTP/1.1
Host: lyokofreak.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2. Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0C)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate <--- Browser is saying, "Yes, you can use compression"
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: *snip*

Now lets look at the response header

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:19:23 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.13
Set-Cookie: *snip*
Set-Cookie: *snip*
Cache-Control: no-cache, pre-check=0, post-check=0
Expires: 0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Encoding: gzip <--- Server is saying "Yes, I am using compression"
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 5504
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

And the result

��������]{w�6��[��rnm��zP[~�7q�$�q�������É

[Gadget offline]

Thanks xiaozanghou, That fixed it easily.

EDIT:
I thought since there was a fire fox fix posted, I would post an Internet Explorer fix, Since I now know what the issue is.
Now I used this method on IE8 to fix it. It should work on IE7, but I am not sure

From the browser
1. Go to “toolsâ€

[xiaozanghou offline]

Now that the problem is fixed on the server, everyone should revert their in-browser fixes if they haven't done so already. It's better for bandwidth.