Published changes not appearing to all users

Rarely a new or modified page is activated, the changes are not visible to all users on the published website.

Reviewed June 3, 2022

The Issue

Normally page activations go through a process called replication, and are syndicated to all of our publisher servers. Depending on the load (overall demand for Web pages), each user is temporarily assigned to one of the publishers and, during that session, all pages they view are loaded from that server. Meanwhile other users may be assigned the same publisher, or a different one.

Rarely, a page activation does not make it to all of the publishers, so depending on which server an individual is viewing, they may not see the changes.

Which Publisher Am I On?

You can determine which publisher you are on by looking at the HTML source. Often this is available by right-clicking your page, then choosing 'View Page Source' (Firefox or Chrome), or 'View source' (IE).  A new tab will open, with the page's HTML code. The very first line of that code will include this text: '<!-- cmspub04 0608-142940 -->' (where the cmspub number will be a number, like 01 or 02).

For example, if you can correctly see your changes on cmspub04 but your colleague cannot see them on cmspub01, you now know that cmspub01 is not in synch. (This information helps us determine which publisher to look at.)

Workaround

The workaround is to re-publish the page so the replication process has another chance to work.

Please let us know if you believe it has happened to you.

It is useful to let us know first, especially if it is a recurring problem to help us troubleshoot. It is useful to let us know even after the fact as we can look to see if other things appear to be be out of sync or if it was an isolated incident.

And if possible, let us know that you observed different behavior by the publishers, and which publisher was wrong. 

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