Arcadia Discussion Zone

Esteemed gentlemen: what happened last night (9/30)? The forum (for me, anyway) turned into a blank page.

Secondly, whatever happened, as others have noted, seems to have wiped out a day's worth of posts - or more.

That's kind of the 2nd time that's happened - this is a bit annoying. I'm going to have to be careful to stop adding so much content in a single day if from time to time I know a day's worth of stuff is going to vanish ....

Thanx.

Oh dearie me what a loss to mankind, it doesn't bear thinking about. I will have to go and lie down in a darkened room and just when I was compiling a collection of Seeker's wit and wisdom; a slender volume admittedly but hey never mind the size just feel the quality.

I'm back

What happened

poor lil website
was it attacked


I know there is a conspiracy somewhere

Presumably Andy had to restore it from a backup or cached copy. (He's the IT specialist; I wouldn't have a clue how.)

So... cock-up or conspiracy?

Whichever, an annoying loss.

Ummm, the bottom line is, while we can enjoy throwing insults, every time this happens people loses a day's worth of posts and PMs -- and I will say this much, I've certainly seen forums with downtime and crashes and problems, but this is the first one that occasionally seems to disappear content when that happens. I've never seen that before.

It is kinda annoying. And not just for me, as I see.

Also, the forum usually sends me an email when a topic I've been on has a new post. It's not been doing that tonight. I've just checked my profile, and that is still the default, and it's still ticked below.
Something is screwed up somewhere.

And no emails about PMs received, either.

After an hour or two I get logged off automatically, anyone else?

Mmmm...ask Sheila about that one.

I find i have to log in every time i go away for more than an hour or so or minimise the page...so logging in sometimes over 8 times per day...it's getting a bit tiresome..can't figure it out at all,

And me, its since they got rid of the automatic login. Annoying anyway
Regards
Nic

I don't know the exact time interval, but yes, it's definitely logging everybody off after a certain interval.

There have been a couple times where it logged me off in the middle of composing a reply. Rather annoying.

On the other hand, that was supposed to "solve" another problem of people not being able to log in at all. Dunno.

Most other boards I'm on remember your login and preserve it and I've never seen one where that feature caused anybody any problems ... ?

In any case - that issue existed long before the recent crash.

Only since the new look interim forum came into being ...... a couple of months back...not before.

Hi All

Sorry to anyone who lost posts and material the other day.

The short answer is that the Forum seems to have been the victim of a malicious attack and we have been looking into it since the moment it happened. The Tech guys are still examining how and why etc. I am sure you can appreciate that all that can be done is being done. We value all content and we hate losing posts as much as you do. So, apologies, it should be a very rare occurrence. Things do seem a lot more stable since the attack.

As for the issue of having to log in again and again, I am going to try an experiment right now to see if we can resolve this. It may be that we cannot run this in the long term, but we are going to try switching persistent logging-in back on for now and give it week. If it creates problems with people getting locked out again, then we will have to abandon this plan. However, we feel that this issue is a big enough problem that we need to look at it again. So, cross your fingers and with some luck we can keep this switched on and you won't have to log in all the time.

Finally, the other issues such as PMs not working and the Search facility not finding older posts is being worked on. Hopefully we can get all these ironed out very soon.

Mark

Mille grazie

....I love it when the techie lads pop their head in.

Thanx for sorting out the auto-login. I'm interested to know who would want to hack this forum?? Get their IP's
Regards
Nic

....and dust for fingerprints.

And then launch a blast of electromagnetic radiation at the computer and its owner through a skylight (note to self - I really must stop reading cheap suspense novels).

I tried to open the Forum, about half an hour or so ago, and it was down again; not even an error message this time, just a white page. Now it seems to be working again. Was that just me, or was it anyone else?

Yes. Except this time the page was not totally blank; it said "cannot write to cache".

BTW, look at the bottom of your screen. You may notice a "cache not writeable" message in tiny print at the bottom.

Techs, just bringing this to your attention. Computers I know. Forum maintenance, not so much. But I know what a cache is, and I think you better take a look at this forum's.

Umm... am I losing my mind (it's very possible) or did posts suddenly lose their "edit" button?

I wanted to go back and edit that to say what I see at tiny print at the bottom of my screen, exactly .... it says in tiny font "./cache/ is not writeable".

This is very likely related to the fact that when the forum was down, at the top of the screen it said "cache error" (forget the exact error).

No. I just noticed that too.

That happened once before. Late last year, I noticed nobody has written on the forum for a couple of days, thought it was a bit quiet, and it turned out that there was an old version of the forum (without edit function) running alongside the actual one, where everyone else was posting as normal. I eventually located Roscoe in there, and we were stuck there for a fe days while it got sorted out, and we got back in, though me a few days before him, as I recall - less a Martian timeslip, more a parallel universe. But that seemed to be regional - some parts of the globe affected and not others.

Very strange. I know little to nothing about computers, I'm afraid, so I'll be of little use on this thread.

I didn't touch a thing...honest.

So, it turns out the Tech guys crashed the Forum while switching Persistent Login back on. I know... what can you say.

I am seeing an Edit button again - is it working for everyone else as well now?

Mark

No, not at this end.

I personally don't mind about logging in each time I visit. Takes a few seconds; don't see what the problem is. Especially if reverting back to the old system causes problems (wasn't that the reason it was removed in the first place?)