Help:Bypass your cache

In order to increase page load speed and save bandwidth when you visit Wikia, your web browser is instructed to save the current view of the page. This is called your "cache". Normally, revisiting the cached page, or clicking "Refresh" or "Reload", will cause the browser to ask the website if there is a newer version available. Sometimes though, the cache does not update, and you will view the older version of the page you have cached. This can be confusing if a change has recently been made to the page.

In order to ensure you're getting the latest version of the page you can bypass your cache. Bypassing your cache helps you to get the most recent version of a page, which will often clarify errors you may see. Examples of commonly cached items are CSS and other files called on when you load a page.

Disabling the cache is another option, but not recommended as a long term desirable solution because it downloads everything from a website every time, even if you've just looked at them and they haven't changed. However, disabling the cache is a useful experiment to determine if caching contributes to a problem.

Below is a list of browsers and instructions on how to clear or bypass your cache:

Internet Explorer

 * To reload a page and bypass the cache:
 * either: Hold the Control key, and press F5.
 * or: Hold the Control key, and click the Refresh button on the Start bar.
 * To completely clear the cache (see note above):
 * Click on 'Tools' and then 'Internet Options' and choose the 'General' tab. Then click on "Delete..." under "Browsing history". In the 'Temporary Internet files' section, click 'Delete Files...'. You will then get a dialogue box asking if you want to delete just the temporary files, or all offline content. Choose the latter and click 'OK'.
 * To change cache settings (only do this if you are reasonably confident of what you are doing):
 * Selecting 'Tools' → 'Internet Options' → 'Temporary Internet files' → 'Settings...' allows you to make advanced configuration changes to the cache.
 * There is an option labeled "Check for a new version of stored pages:" This does not bypass the cache, it merely determines how often the browser asks if there is a newer version available.

Mozilla family
This includes Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator (versions 6.x and 7.x) and SeaMonkey.


 * To reload a page and bypass the cache:
 * either: Hold both Shift and Ctrl and press R. (Alternatively, hold down the Control key, and press F5.) On an Apple Mac, use the Command key instead of Control.
 * or: Hold down the Shift key, and click the Reload button on the navigation toolbar.
 * To completely clear the cache (see note above):
 * From the 'Edit' or 'Tools' menu, choose 'Preferences' or 'Options'. Expand the 'Advanced' options and choose 'Cache' or 'Privacy'. Click the button called 'Clear Cache'.
 * In newer versions of Mozilla Firefox, you can easily clear the cache, history and cookies: Hold down the Control and Shift keys, and press Delete (or Del), then choose what you want to remove. Or from the 'Tools' menu, select 'Clear Private Data'.
 * For older versions of Mozilla Firefox, go to 'Tools' → 'Options' and click on 'Privacy' (picture of a key) in the sidebar of the window that pops up. Click the 'Clear' button that is next to the word 'Cache'.
 * To disable the cache permanently (only do this if you are reasonably confident of what you are doing):
 * Click on the word 'Cache' and tell the computer to allocate 0 KB to store the cache in.

Opera

 * Reloading a page:
 * Opera does not appear to have an option to forcibly bypass the cache, so if a normal refresh does not seem to work, you may want to try one of the following:
 * Empty the cache completely (see below).
 * Click edit this page, and save the page without making any modifications (this doesn't affect the page history).
 * To completely clear the cache :
 * From the 'Tools' menu, choose 'Preferences'. Expand the 'Advanced' options and choose 'History'. Click the button called 'Empty now'.
 * Alternatively, you can easily clear the cache, history and cookies: From the 'Tools' menu, choose 'Delete private data'. Click 'Details', make sure that 'Delete entire cache' is selected, and then choose any other data you want to remove.
 * To disable the cache permanently (only do this if you are reasonably confident of what you are doing):
 * From the 'Tools' menu, choose 'Preferences'. Expand the 'Advanced' options and choose 'History'. Click on the dropdown for 'Disk Cache' and select Off.

Safari

 * To reload a page and bypass the cache:
 * for version 3 or newer:
 * either: Hold down the Command key, and press R.
 * or: Click the Reload toolbar button.
 * (In Safari 3, "regular" reloads will always bypass the cache. )
 * for version 2 or older:
 * either: Hold down the Command and Shift keys, and press R.
 * or: Hold down the Shift key and click the Reload toolbar button. (This may not work in all versions of Safari)
 * To completely clear the cache (see note above):
 * From the 'Safari' menu, choose 'Empty Cache...' or hold down the Option and Command keys and press E.
 * To disable the cache permanently (this method only works on old versions of Safari 2 on OS X 10.4 and previous versions and is not endorsed by Apple as it may potentially cause system instability):
 * Quit Safari by choosing 'Quit' from the 'Safari' menu, or by holding down the Command key and pressing Q.
 * Open a Terminal window by double-clicking 'Terminal' within the 'Utilities' folder, which is within the 'Applications' folder.
 * Type the following commands, which are case-sensitive, each followed by the Enter key:
 * rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/Safari
 * touch ~/Library/Caches/Safari
 * Quit Terminal by choosing 'Quit' from the 'Terminal' menu, or by holding down the Command key and pressing Q.
 * Relaunch Safari.

Google Chrome

 * To clear the cache:
 * Go to the Tools menu (the wrench on the upper right of the browser) and click on Clear browsing data...
 * Select the types of data you want to clear
 * On the Clear data from this period: drop-down list, select one of the following:
 * Everything to clear all the data you selected;
 * Last day to clear the data only from the last day;
 * Last week to clear the data only from the last week; or
 * Last 4 weeks to clear the data only from the last 4 weeks.

Other Browsers

 * Please see browser's website for further instructions.

Server cache
The Wikia servers cache a version of articles for visitors who are not logged in. For these users, preferences do not affect the layout so each webpage is always the same. They are recreated (converted from wikitext to HTML) only when the page is saved.

This causes a few undesirable side effects due to bugs (or design) of the software:
 * References to variables which give the current date and time (27 August,  UTC) ( 27 August, ) are not updated if not logged in.
 * The cache for redirected pages contains the rendered HTML-page of the target; this is not "invalidated" (recreated from the article text) when the target page is updated. That is, if Article A is a redirect to Article B, subsequent references to Article A displays the cached copy of Article B even if Article A or Article B is updated.

Forcing the server to re-render
Bypassing your own cache might not be enough if the updated content that is not being properly displayed or is contained in a template or other transcluded page. You may need to purge the server cache of old versions of the page in order for the new material to be visible.

The server can be instructed to refresh its cache of a page's contents with the  URL parameter. Add this to the end of the URL, or in place of the  or.

For example, to purge this page — which forces the latest version of wikimarkup to be rendered to HTML — use:



For technical pages you think may need to be purged often, you can create a "purge" template so that you don't have to edit the URL by hand.

Disabling page caching
As a last resort, you can adjust your user preferences to disable page caching entirely, using


 * Preferences→Misc settings→Disable page caching.

See Help:Preferences for more information about this option. Be forewarned: you will be using more bandwidth, make the servers work harder and get worse performance with this option set. Use it as a last resort.