šŸ’¤ Unscheduled downtime

Yeah, it does, kinda - Iā€™ve seen that a couple of times myself.

Thing is with this caper is that you want to be sure that underlying stuff is cool before making any changes.

The bit itā€™s failing on there is getting the default language, something that the site has probably managed to do thousands of times without a problem.

Worst day ever.

All sorts of weird stuff going on. Really sorry about the mucking about.

Update on this. Weā€™ve been up and down like a tarts knickers today. Hereā€™s what Iā€™ve noticed.

  1. Iā€™m not really fixing anything to get us back online. We just come back.

  2. Other things, which have got bugger all to do with the site, are also down when we are down. This is stuff like FTP, which allows you to transfer files. That entire service was down when I was trying to use it.

  3. I am hoping that it is merely another app on the hosting box which is going mental. While that doesnā€™t help us in the short term, it does mean that as soon as they identify what is going on, we should be fixed too.

Bloody frustrating.

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Meh - no worries, Pap. Thanks for all your work on this site (and others too).

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Ahh, the old intermittent It gremlin. Good luck pinning that down.

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Itā€™s a fucking disgrace. I donā€™t pay good money to use this site, and I expect a better level of service for absolutely fuckall than Iā€™m getting right now. Shocking.

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Originally posted by @CB-Saint

Ahh, the old intermittent It gremlin. Good luck pinning that down.

It owns my fucking life right now, CB!

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Youā€™re lucky you have some background Techie knowledge. I built an information website as a ā€œgreenhornā€ in 1999 using MS FrontPage as it was freeā€¦and itā€™s still running. Iā€™m still using FrontPage 2002 which generally works (with a few glitches) with Windows 7 but Iā€™m scared everything is going to go tits-up with Windows 10.

BTW the website has about 120 pages. :scream:

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Half the problem is the fact that itā€™s a black box. I only have so much access to that server by design to prevent me from doing things that would affect other users.

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Had a teeny bit more of this. Hangover from yesterday. During al the trouble, the service provider got up to the ā€œsecond Rā€ of Microsoft support and rebooted the server.

Evidently, theyā€™ve got this on a schedule, and because the machine was rebooted this time yesterday, it thought ā€œah shit, Iā€™ve been running 24 hours. I need to reboot again!ā€.

Three Rs of Microsoft Support
1) Retry
2) Reboot
3) Re-install

Tried to sneak something in quickly today. Site took a lot longer to come back up, so we were effectively down for 12 minutes. Cool now, though.

Had some issues last night. Wasnā€™t able to resolve, stuck a ticket in. Donā€™t think that ticket has been seen, but the server reboots at 2am each morning, so I reckon that has cleared whatever was blocking us.

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Seems alright first thing, so try and jump on then, but by late afternoon/ evening, it seems to grind to a halt for me. Keeps logging me out when I change page.

Gotta say,since the speed improvements went in, I havenā€™t had any problems when the site is actually up. Just that when it went down last night, it really went down.

The only time I log myself out is when using a phone or a tablet and hit the logout button by mistake with fat fingers. I havenā€™t seen or heard of the behaviour you describe there.

Perhaps it is my iPad? Strange. It has happened a couple of times this morning.

Perhaps it is my iPad? Strange. It has happened a couple of times this morning.

Perhaps it is my iPad? Strange. It has happened a couple of times this morning.

Perhaps it is my iPad? Strange. It has happened a couple of times this morning.

Right, ok. Some more downtime today, which is not good, but an answer, which is.

The Hot Topics sidebar was just as inefficient as the main page at pulling in articles. The Automatic News Thread got very popular, became a Hot Topic, and then promptly killed performance when the code tried to load the enormity of it. Iā€™ve removed Hot Topics from the sidebar, and I believe we are now ok.

Itā€™s just logged me out too, when I hit on the Latest link and Iā€™m on a PCā€¦