Frequently Asked Questions

If your question is not answered here, or you believe you have found an issue in one of our scripts, feel free to contact us.

1. I am receiving an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error when attempting to browse to the folder where the script is installed.

This error may mean that your server does not allow .htaccess overrides. Try renaming the .htaccess files that are included with this script to something else.

If that does not resolve the issue, check the Apache error log; it may contain a more specific error message that will help identify the issue.

2. When attempting to vote on a poll, I receive an error such as "Unable to open file for writing" or "Unable to open lock file."

This usually means that the "data" folder does not have write permissions enabled. On a UNIX server, the permissions can be changed with the "chmod" command.

3. I am attempting to use non-ASCII (i.e. non-English) characters in the configuration or template files, but they do not show up correctly in the web browser.

In order to use non-ASCII characters, you must configure your text editor to save the file using UTF-8 encoding. It is also recommended that you save it without a BOM (byte-order mark), since some configurations of PHP do not handle the BOM properly. Notepad++ is an example of a text editor that has this capability.

4. Some of the vote counts appear to be incorrect.

It is possible that the summary file was overwritten or corrupted. If you are running DRBPoll 1.8 or later, you can easily regenerate the summary file based on the data in the history file. To do so, simply delete the file named "summary_POLLID.dat" that is located in the "data" folder, replacing POLLID with the ID of the poll. Then, browse to the results page for that poll. Doing so will create a new summary file with the correct vote counts, assuming that the history file itself is correct and intact.