I've certainly never seen anything like that before.
the reply from the guy who set it up is tis Brion:
I'm not sure if I can post to that list. I did the whole thing from scratch to prove I wasn't going nuts, and I wasn't. The new installation is at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/alpd/mediawiki-1.4.0 ; I've saved a copy of the installation log at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/alpd/mediawiki-1.4.0/MediaWiki- installation.html ; the working version 1.3.1 is still at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/alpd/wiki - the two versions are using different copies of the database.
We're using PHP 4.3.8 on an AIX box and MySQL 4.0.16 on a Sun Solaris box. The time() function is fine. The rc_timestamp and rc_cur_time columns in the recentchanges table look fine with sensible-looking
2004
and 2005 dates. The only difference I can see (using phpMyAdmin) between the working and non-working versions of that table is that the working version shows 'NONE" as the "cardinaility" of the index columns, but the non-working version shows actual numbers. I'm not really sure what this means, but I don't think it matters.
If you can't get an answer from the mailing list, I'll have to start comparing the PHP code of the two versions to see if I can spot something. That should be fun.
make any sense?