Users of very early versions of Microsoft's Personal Web Server, and some more recent server versions with unusual setups, have occasionally reported to us that their boards are correctly installed, they can log into administration, set up their password, and create topics. However, upon the first attempted access to one of the topics, they immediately get a 404 (Not Found) error message.

If the above paragraph describes your situation, please try the following:

1. Right-click on the first topic from your board and choose to open the link in a new window. (The new window should display the 404 error.)

2. Edit the URL in the location bar, removing the question mark (?) and the string of 9 or 10 numbers that follows the question mark.

3. Hit ENTER.

If the above three steps allowed you to access your topic, then you need to do the following to fix the problem and prevent it from happening again:

1. Edit your discus.conf file (presumably, since you are likely experiencing this problem on the machine that is right in front of you, you can simply open the file in a text editor). Add the line noqm=1 to the end of the file, on its own line. Save the file.

2. Log back in to your administration program to regenerate your board.

   • In Discus 4.0+, go to Appearance Manager and click the "Regeneration" tab. Leave "All Topic" selected and click the "Regenerate Board" button. This will not cause data loss.

   • In Discus 3.10, go to Board Manager and click the "Regenerate Subtopic/Message Lists" button. When this completes, click the "Regenerate Topic List" button. This will not cause data loss.

   • In Discus 3.00 or 3.01, go to Board Manager and delete your topics. There is not a way to recover from this problem in version 3.00/3.01.

   Upon returning to your board, the topics should no longer come back as "not found."

Additional Information: Why does this happen?

Discus adds the question mark and the string of numbers after URLs in the user interface. When a new post is made or other activity takes place, the string of numbers after the URL is changed. This causes the link to be marked as unvisited in a browser, providing indication of new activity that is stored in the browser's history.

Rare web servers or server configurations can mishandle the question mark after the page. To these servers, the question mark indicates that the HTML file is a script, and since script execution is not permitted in the directory where your message files reside, you receive an error.