Why are the forums so often offline?

We're really aware of this, and have been working with our suppliers on the technical issues affecting the forum. We don't have a full solution yet, but we have put a measure in place that should improve things. There is also discussion in this thread.

I am sorry for the inconvenience and concern that this is causing.

We're really aware of this, and have been working with our suppliers on the technical issues affecting the forum. We don't have a full solution yet, but we have put a measure in place that should improve things. There is also discussion in this thread.

I am sorry for the inconvenience and concern that this is causing.

Greetings anyone, from myself, after many days away, and likely many more to come...!

Perhaps someone can dismiss my own wondering, which is Low-Tech, amidst all of this High-Tech Talk...? (Manual/Hardware, rather than Digital/Software.)

I was wondering if NAS (their servers/machines) are simply offline so much of late for similar reasons I am...? We are stuck in London, and it gets too hot, and at over 80-85°Fahrenheit, we can do very little at all: we want to, but we cannot...?

(There is a slight cool spell just now, and so I can write (my usual waffle)... yet until September, I do not know when I can again --- and cannot even follow all of what is going on here, sorry.)

The alternate thread you reference refers to DNS issues. What sort of issues?

I had wondered if you might have been hinting at a sinkhole, possibly affecting several of your supplier's clients, perhaps because of sub-optimal behaviour by some of them. 

To that end I set a crontab to log the results from name resolution once every 60 seconds. I have seen no changes to the resolved address regardless of the evident state of the forum. 

Given your assertion of DNS issues, and the consistent 185.68.1.27, does this imply that it's reverse lookups at your end that are failing?

It was down today until about 10am BST, then down again between 12:00 and 12:36pm, and between 1324 and 1411, and then briefly from 1439 to 1440. Maybe you have access to logs showing those times? It gives 503 when trying to load or reload any page on community.autism.org.uk, and if you still have a forum page open in the browser get the orange pop-up box 'You've gone offline', which disappears about a minute after the server starts up again.

When it's down, it's down for everyone. I had a weird idea though that it went down whenever I tried to comment on this thread. Probably that's just me being paranoid because I've seen the orange box there a few times for other reasons, but I wonder if posting on particular threads may cause the IIS application pool to crash (edit: I can neither reproduce the crash reliably or rule out the idea that 503 errors for a few minutes are related to posting to such a thread; also down 1604-1605). Also it showed a reply I posted to that thread, but it then disappeared.

(techie link - to a forum that hopefully doesn't crash :). Could be database corruption or even disk failure, but if that 'CanManageAbuse' shows up in the stack trace repeatedly as in that bug report, it's presumably a bug in the software, maybe triggered on particular moderation settings.  Maybe as a workaround, the host could also write some script to restart automatically on a 503 error.)

Anyway, hope they get it sorted soonish.