Why are the forums so often offline?

Why are the forums so often offline?

This is now every day several times a day.

It is horrible when you are writing something and everything is lost because the forum goes offline.

Makes me really anxious as I follow some people and I like to read the updates from them.

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  • 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.

  • 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?

  • Can I respond to the low-tech first?

    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,

    Nice idea, but the servers are probably in a big warehousey place, maybe in Liverpool, which should have some efficient air conditioning. I hope you find equally efficient cooling, or suitable downtime. :)

    High-tech:

    I set a crontab to log the results from name resolution once every 60 seconds

    Ha. I have a crontab to log a wget to see when it gives a 503 (the script on the forum checks more often, every 20 seconds, and gives an orange box if it doesn't give the expected result).  It looks like the problem with the DNS was resolved 5 months ago, and as WebPM says, this current problem is unrelated and software-related, involving the IIS application pool crashing.

    So far as I'm aware from that log it was OK from about 4pm on Tuesday (3 July 2018) until a brief downtime today Thursday 1444-1445. I suspect that (a) my posting to a Copybot thread may have precipitated that crash (sorry if so, but it didn't happen doing very similar things); (b) the hosts have set something to restart the server every 5 minutes to reduce the downtime and work around the problem; (c) the software problem is the bug I link to as 'techie link' above, briefly referred to on the Telligent Community community [sic], unlimited recursion (speculating even further, from supplying wrong arguments to a hash function).

    So it's better than it was, but probably still awaiting a software fix from the supplier. Thanks, WebPM.

  • Who knows? Neither of us have access to logs or source (did you look at the backtrace in the report?), although some vague coincidences (my (a) above) suggested an ordinary user like me could trigger it when posting to a thread, abusive or not.

    I'm not sure why CanUserReviewAppeals() calls GetThreadById()... or vice versa. Maybe the fix is in CanManageAbuse() - just want to know if user has a general privilege, not for the page being viewed.

    Of course it's not in a spambot or crawler's interest to bring a site down.

  • Not unless there's some URL redirect mechanism that also involves the abuse system, and the crawler gets stuck on a redirect to a redirect to a redirect.

    How about a bot attempting to appeal against a moderation?

Reply Children
  • Who knows? Neither of us have access to logs or source (did you look at the backtrace in the report?), although some vague coincidences (my (a) above) suggested an ordinary user like me could trigger it when posting to a thread, abusive or not.

    I'm not sure why CanUserReviewAppeals() calls GetThreadById()... or vice versa. Maybe the fix is in CanManageAbuse() - just want to know if user has a general privilege, not for the page being viewed.

    Of course it's not in a spambot or crawler's interest to bring a site down.