Error When Attempt to Publish Pages

Question

Hello -- I'm re posting this as the problem continues to
exist for this customer of mine, and still have not been able to
determine a solution. Hopefully someone out there will be able to
shed some light this time?
Thank you.
Original Post:
Hello -- I've just built a new site for a customer who wants
to maintain their own content, and we're set up to use Contribute 3
for that.
I've sent the customer their key for editing, and, during
early training, they're able to connect to the site and edit pages.
However, when they attempt to publish an edited page, after
Contribute displays the "Publishing your draft to the server..."
message window, they report a fairly lengthy delay (i.e. at least a
couple of minutes), then Contribute indicates that the "operation
was cancelled" and displays the error message: "Contribute could
not connect because the server is down or not accepting
connections. Please contact your administrator."
I am able to successfully edit and publish pages to the site
while on the phone with the customer at the same time they're
working, using Contribute 3.11 (they're running at least 3
something - waiting to get exact version info. from them), the same
connection key and roughly the same general environment as the
customer (as far as I know). The main difference I know of is that
I'm on a fast cable broadband connection and they're on what I
believe is a slower DSL (exact speeds unknown). They're on Windows
XP (probably the Home version). I don't know yet what their setup
is re. things like firewalls, etc., although its a home office, and
they're not a high tech user. They report no other problems
accessing the Web.
The server is up and as far as I can tell accepting
connections, at least from my vantage point, during this time (as
indicated, I can do a Publish of pages I edit while troubleshooting
on the phone with the customer, and can access the server in other
ways as well during this time).
I've emailed a new key to them (which I tested locally before
sending), to see if perchance something might've been amiss with
their copy of the first key, but without success. I'm fairly sure
it' s not related to permissions on the FreeBSD/Apache server, as
ones I've tested seem to generate different error conditions, and
haven't yet been able to configure any of my firewalls to cause
this error, searched and haven't found anything quite related in
the forums or online support so far.
I've also tried changing various settings in XP related to
internet security and so on but haven't been able to reproduce the
problem here that way either.
Anyone have any ideas what might be causing these symptoms,
and/or what else I should be looking for, how to resolve?
Thanks in advance.
JD_Cat

Answer 1

CS3 has a fix for the timeout problem. You can set the length
before Contribute times out and says it can't connect to the
server. But they didn't fix the underlying problem--that it takes
so long in the first place.