How was it conflicting with him? Old browser? His settings? What?
Good question. His old IP addresses used to start with 12.214.xx.xxx and now they are 173.16.xxx.xx.
Now, when anyone comes to this forum, the first thing SMF does (or used to do) is take your IP address and use the whois function of the server to get the hostname of each IP. For example, my IP address resolves to my host bellsouth.net.
Why bother? For banning purposes. You could ban an IP address and/or hostname.
If you'll look on your profile it has a section for IP address and under that it has (now) a blank area for hostname.
The hostname lookup takes resources. When you get a "MySQL has gone away" error that means a function of the SMF forum is either taking too long to respond or it is taking too many resources on the server. For some reason, Tom's new IP address was taking too long to resolve or else it was not resolving at all. The forum saw this as either an error or a security risk (probably a security risk).
My guess is the new IP address Tom has is within a new range of IPs that perhaps hasn't been fully registered across the web. Or his host doesn't have something configured correctly.
Either way, the forum should initially load faster now for EVERYONE as you won't have to wait for a hostname lookup to be done on your IP address.
