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.

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.

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.