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Its happening again (Host Error)


huami

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15 hours ago, Rob-M said:

I hope Dan is able to find someone else willing to give up so much of their time to support the site for nothing.  I know what it is like to manage IT systems and  the amount of time it can consume.

Thanks for your efforts in keeping the site running and trying hard to improve performance whilst reducing costs.

 

Thirded, Fourthed or whatever. Thanks Dan for putting in the effort in the past.

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On 22/02/2020 at 19:57, mrsmelly said:

I am not suprised you are standing down after the recent spatt of moaning from some quarters who fail to understand you do this role for nowt and its a thankless task. Anyway thanks for all you have done in the role. I feel I must add that it was not this particular thread you received the Flack on but members on a different thread. 

 

I completely agree with the above.

 

I have always made a point of thanking Rob-M and his predecessors when that have sorted out the relatively few IT issues I have had.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 21/02/2020 at 14:56, cuthound said:

Anyone else keep getting these errors?

I have not had one on this site, although interestingly I recently had it on another forum I use once, quick refresh and not seen it since.

 

Obviously if the issue persists it is something we will need to look into, however as  there have been no recent reports we shal sit it out for now.

 

On 22/02/2020 at 18:13, RichM said:

The monitoring systems have not picked up on this but this could be because it seems to be sporadic and not affecting all users. The logs on the server do not provide any explanation either though I'm aware our hosting provider has had some issues in the past week which may have affected our firewall but presents no security risk. 

 

Please let me know if anyone encounters this issue again after 18:00 today and I will investigate further though due to commitments outside of Canal World it may take me longer to get to it. Due to this, I will be standing down from my voluntary role here shortly but will be around until someone else is recruited.

Rich, thanks as always for looking into this, as well as al the time you have given to date.

 

As per our PMs I will work on finding a replacement, and thank you for the notice and handover period.

 

 

Daniel

 

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On 21/02/2020 at 22:50, Mike the Boilerman said:

I don't really buy this. Ok Rich does it for free but the some of the users here pay to support the site. Are you saying the site would not suffer outages if Rich charged for his services?

 

The thing is, out of all the forums I visit this is the only one that has a continuous dribble of outages due to 'technical issues'. Why would that be? Or more accurately, why do the others not? This seems to illustrate it can be done. 

Mike, if you never see outage on any other forum you use, I would suggest either you have either been lucky, or don't use them as much as you do cwdf and simply don't notice the outages as like ours they are few and far between. Either than or they are run on a different funding/staffing model; ie, they have adverts on the site, are part of a club with paid membership, or are a forum where tech knowledge is widely available, etc.

 

We are advert free, free to use for all, with no tiered membership options. We are fully reliant on voluntary donations, which does affect the choices we take in terms of hosting, particularly as we also offer services such as near unlimited image hosting free of charge, and modern professional spec pay-to-use forum software, which many free to use sites do not.

 

On 21/02/2020 at 22:50, Alan de Enfield said:

There are far better providers of forum software which is (apparently) more stable and much easier to use (user friendly) but they do cost more.

 

VBulletin, Xenforo...

These are basically the only two other comparable forum software providers out there. We have looked into both as alternatives on a number of occasions, to ensure we are using good quality software which returns on the investment, both for users and administrators, and it is our considered opinion that moving would not offer a net improvement to the current software. Invision is not perfect, but neither are other providers, even without the complications of migration, if I was to set up a new site now I would use Invision again every time.

 

Daniel

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42 minutes ago, DHutch said:

Mike, if you never see outage on any other forum you use, I would suggest either you have either been lucky, or don't use them as much as you do cwdf and simply don't notice the outages as like ours they are few and far between. Either than or they are run on a different funding/staffing model; ie, they have adverts on the site, are part of a club with paid membership, or are a forum where tech knowledge is widely available, etc.

 

We are advert free, free to use for all, with no tiered membership options. We are fully reliant on voluntary donations, which does affect the choices we take in terms of hosting, particularly as we also offer services such as near unlimited image hosting free of charge, and modern professional spec pay-to-use forum software, which many free to use sites do not.

 

These are basically the only two other comparable forum software providers out there. We have looked into both as alternatives on a number of occasions, to ensure we are using good quality software which returns on the investment, both for users and administrators, and it is our considered opinion that moving would not offer a net improvement to the current software. Invision is not perfect, but neither are other providers, even without the complications of migration, if I was to set up a new site now I would use Invision again every time.

 

Daniel

I run a site using VBulletin and can confirm that (so far as I can see from my role as a user of CWF) it's no better. It meets 99.9% of the time but for over a thousand users that still means that at least one user is unhappy. For 10,000 users that's 10 users at any given time...

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4 hours ago, 1st ade said:

I run a site using VBulletin and can confirm that (so far as I can see from my role as a user of CWF) it's no better. It meets 99.9% of the time but for over a thousand users that still means that at least one user is unhappy. For 10,000 users that's 10 users at any given time...

Fair! I use other sites on IPB, vB and  XF and certainly neither are perfect! Ditto sites running PHPfree or custom code.

2 hours ago, cuthound said:

Since the 21stbof February, when i got about 5 Cloudflare errors in quick succession, I haven't had one since.

 

I assumed that Rich M had found something and corrected it.

Or just a one-off unexplainable thing!

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  • 1 month later...
44 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

And again - 11.35

 

 

Screenshot (142).png

I've had that occasionally over the last few days - it's not within my remit or skill set to solve it though!

 

There may be a subtle marketing lesson here - the old 404 error or whatever it was never gate me a target for my wrath, but every time that pops up I tend to think ill of Cloudflare...

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No problems so far but this is getting to be a familiar error. I am very sympathetic and grateful for the hard work and expertise of those who are able and willing to fix these issues, but despite protestations from some they do seem to happen more frequently than before. For what it's worth I use a few other forums where this does not happen and I have suggested before that maybe it is time to look at some different software, although personally I do not have the expertise to put forward any useful suggestions.

 

Howard

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3 hours ago, Alan de Enfield said:

And again - 11.35

Alan,

 

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to  report this, again. Could I ask a few questions to try and understand the cause, and hence solution to this, as well as the prevalence.

 

1) Is the error persistent for some time, or does it go away if you hit refresh/f5 or otherwise retry the link straightaway?

2) Does this happen just on your 'new posts' stream, or across the whole site? Any patterns in when or when?

3) Assuming the site is mainly working, what sort of percentage of the time do you get an error vs normal page load?

 

 

Thanks

 

Daniel

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1 minute ago, DHutch said:

Alan,

 

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to  report this, again. Could I ask a few questions to try and understand the cause, and hence solution to this, as well as the prevalence.

 

1) Is the error persistent for some time, or does it go away if you hit refresh/f5 or otherwise retry the link straightaway?

I would say that over the last couple of days there it has happened maybe been 6 times, it would be about 50/50 that it clears on the 1st click of 'refresh' and the other times refresh, no, refresh no, refresh it, works OK

 

2) Does this happen just on your 'new posts' stream, or across the whole site? Any patterns in when or when?

I only use VNC, seems mostly in the morning (twice this morning at about 10:30 and 11:30)

 

3) Assuming the site is mainly working, what sort of percentage of the time do you get an error vs normal page load?

Happens 2 or 3 times in the day compared to (probably) 100 normal page loads. 

 

 

Thanks

 

Daniel

 

As much as I know.

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4 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

I would say that over the last couple of days there it has happened maybe been 6 times, it would be about 50/50 that it clears on the 1st click of 'refresh' and the other times refresh, no, refresh no, refresh it, works OK

 

I only use VNC, seems mostly in the morning (twice this morning at about 10:30 and 11:30)

 

Happens 2 or 3 times in the day compared to (probably) 100 normal page loads. 

 

As much as I know.

Great, thanks.

 

And is it only on the VNC* page you get it, or randomly across the site.

 

*you appear to have a custom vnc; https://www.canalworld.net/forums/index.php?/discover/254/

 

Thanks

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