The sentence:
“Force a refresh in the site if the previous page is in cache.”
generates a false positive in “a refresh”
I believe it should be “on the site”, but neither that nor comma separating the conditional solve the false positive.
“Force a refresh on the site, if the previous page is in cache.”
Actually, I would thing ‘of’ would be more correct. But we had better consult a native speaker.
@marcoagpinto, in standard English, ‘refresh’ is a verb, not a noun (refer to item 3 in the message). Oxford (Oxford Languages | The Home of Language Data) shows the word as a noun, but only in the context of computing.
Probably, the best solution is to add ‘refresh’ as a noun AND make a rule to say, ‘not a standard verb; use only in the context of computing’. But, I don’t have time to do that.
As for the questions about the preposition: ‘a refresh of/on/in the site’ all seem OK to me. ‘Of’ implies all of the site, ‘in’ implies a part of the site, and ‘on’ is used for all things webby (on Facebook; on the web).
As an alternative until we resolve the issue about refresh
being a noun, we can use reload as an alternative to refresh
“Force reload the site if the previous page is in cache” should be okay I think, but it is giving me another suggestion for “reload”:
The singular proper name ‘Force’ must be used with a third-person or a past tense verb: “reloads”, “reloaded”.
Not sure if “force” is a “singular proper name” in this instance…
P.S @marcoagpinto spotted you in the wild again
“Force-reload the site, if the previous page is in cache.”
“Force-refresh the site, if the previous page is in cache.”
A single hyphen seems to be all that’s needed to get LT to play nice.
It isn’t. But the message that I see in LT 4.4 and 4.5 snapshot is this:
Consider using third-person verb forms for singular and mass nouns: reloads.
I think I am using LT 4.4 (local server), I saw that message in the addon for Firefox.
Could you please make a bug report on Issues · languagetool-org/languagetool · GitHub for this problem? Then, someone who knows about the Firefox add-on can investigate. Thanks.
I have forgotten the context of the text that I was writing that in, without that the bug report would probably be useless. So I am afraid someone else has to re-discover this issue on their own.