PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

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Peter
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Peter »

Minor (< 30 min) maintenance will happen within 15 minutes. Sorry for the short heads up, but it will be over before you even realize.
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Peter
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

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There was a recent minor downtime due to the provider. It was nothing I could prevent or fix sooner.
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

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Had a wave of spam in queue, cleared that. Luckily they didn't mass PM everyone. If they do, I'll wipe that out as well.
- Each spammer used proper gmail addresses.
- Each had a valid IP.
- Each passed every check.
Ie.: Almost 100% human actions were taken to spam a forum that's 100% not interested in their junk product lol.
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Peter
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Peter »

Post queue/double posts:

I realize that our post queue can be mildly annoying. But please, be patient.
I try to approve the posts as soon as I can - but there is only so much I can do.

If you can help it, avoid double posting. It just fills up the forum with useless junk and it just looks terribly broken in the end.
Thank you.
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Peter
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Peter »

You might have encountered a "failed login" screen, it was the anti-spam being too aggressive.
This should not pop up anymore and everyone should be able to log in / stay logged in easily.
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

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- We've been getting a new wave of attacks from Tor, so we had to block Tor traffic. I mean... honestly, I don't think any legit traffic ever came from there.
- The rest of the high-attack-rate countries will retain their CAPTCHA prompt.

Thank you for your understanding.
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Peter
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Peter »

We had a downtime due to host issues. We will do everything in our power to make this never happen again.

- There was a minor rollback in forum posts / database.
- We'll build out a redundant system to guard against such cases.
- We'll ramp up our backup schedule and intensity to have more fresh snapshots.
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Peter
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

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Recent instability / downtimes:
- We had a few minor downtimes due to the provider. It seems to be an underlying hardware issue.
- The issue will be investigated, but this means the forum will be offline for a few hours - the main site will be operating and online from a different node.

I am terribly sorry for the outage, trust me, I tried my best to avoid such downtimes but you just can't have 100% uptime I guess. :(
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Peter
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

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Maintenance / repair is done, hopefully we should be stable once again. I will post an update if there will be more known downtimes.
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Peter »

We'll have a tiny bit of downtime, sorry about it. I will try to make the downtime as quick as possible, but it's a must.
Forum will be disabled, and site might have to be taken down offline until I am done. Should last only ~10 minutes.

I'll set up a second host stack as backup for maintenance like this so we never have to go totally offline.
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

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Forum theme has been updated since the 3.3 phpBB broke the "breadcrumbs" on the top of the site (those little navigation thingies you use to go back with.)

- The header image will be swapped out.
- We will do some minor .css changes (font wise for example).
- If you saw or know any good looking phpBB 3.3 compatible themes, feel free to post them here or message me via the site PM system or email.
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Drugwash »

There are three issues I wanted to mention while I'm here:
1. Staying logged in is a challenge as the timeout seems to be at a minute or so. One can't even put together and post a short reply - especially when English is not their native language - before getting kicked out, at which point everything they've written is lost unless they were careful enough to copy the text to clipboard before attempting to post. This may get frustrating.
2. When does moderation end for new users? I'm trying to help or at least reply the best I can to people but it all gets fragmented in time, and some may need urgent reply or deem us as impolite when not replying promptly.
3. The new flat theme is horrible. I mean the flat style itself is horrible, especially for older guys (like me) used to clearly delimited and well emphasized clickable objects. Please find an old style theme compatible with this phpBB version soon, and allow us to personalize our board environment.

Thank you.
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Peter »

Thanks for the feedback, VERY much appreciated!

1) is very weird. I stay logged in for weeks, months, etc. super weird.... does this happen on all browsers?

2) that's a phpbb issue. I'll look into it now AGAIN. basically they had two options. either have this moderation enabled, or disabled it. which is silly.
- why not disable it? we have no anti spam at all. phpbb had a great module, but the latest update broke it and it hasn't been updated still. we could only move to another forum like vbulletin that has native anti-spam. but yea, that's a lot of money, and some may oppose us using closed source software.
- why not set a limit? see just above, you can't just set a limit.

3) alright, I will also look into this. honestly I preferred the default theme but they broke it too... lol. I'll find another theme. btw if you have any themes in mind that's compatible with this version (latest phpbb), please link it and it may just become our new default theme... :p
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Drugwash
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Drugwash »

1. Haven't tried other browsers, I've been using Pale Moon for a few years now and it's set up as I need. Linux doesn't have much of a choice of browsers anyway, at least nothing as configurable. It didn't use to do that before, I only noticed it now after the version/theme change. Cookie settings have always been as in the screenshot below.
Screenshot from 2020-04-29 12-34-25.png
Screenshot from 2020-04-29 12-34-25.png (55.79 KiB) Viewed 8056 times
2. Ah, I understand. It's really a bad situation where you can't please all. vBulletin is too heavy for older machines and yeah, some may not be happy with that choice - or any other commercial one, for that matter.
3. Sorry to say I don't know anything on the subject but maybe you could try chatting with the guys over at AutoHotkey. No idea what phpBB version they use but they may be of some help, including for some anti-spam or other protection. Try contacting JoeDF and/or tank.

Missing feature:
4. There is no inline code option in the toolbar; may come in handy at times.

Thank you for your prompt reply.
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Drugwash
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Re: PSA: Maintenance notices / website updates

Post by Drugwash »

New issues:
4. Image attachment above appears to have been lost although at edit time it still says status OK. It's a 55.79kB PNG.
5. Trying to edit a post and submit yields the message Information The requested post does not exist.
Weird. Could this be a major incompatibility with the browser? I don't want to switch.

EDIT: screenshot is visible now with the other theme. Preview works correctly. If it now appears as edited twice then it's OK.
Thank you for looking into it.
Last edited by Drugwash on Wed Apr 29, 2020 11:21 am, edited 2 times in total.
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