Recent Outages

[Anthony]

I thought I might take some time to explain the recent issues with the website for anyone who wants to find out what was happening.

The recent outages over the last few months (the ones saying Forbidden) have been caused by our hosting company pulling the website due to excessive consumption of server resources. I suppose it is a good thing that the website has increased traffic, but of course you can see the downside to it too.

Normally in a situation like this you would use a mechanism called caching, which the website's software supports. But I had a problem. In addition to the website we have a forum here too, and the membership for both have been merged together to form a singular login. The software used to do this can be extremely buggy.

You may have noticed Invalid Token errors, problems registering, problems with forgotten passwords, other strange and frankly unacceptable bugs. Most problematic though was the fact that with caching enabled, users could not sign in, and so caching remained off.

This posed a very big problem a couple of months ago when the site was first pulled for excessive CPU usage. I immediately knew why and could do little about it. At first I tried disabling the shout box, then installing additional caching mechanisms, upgrading website extenions and so on. Each time I thought that these actions would make a difference, but unfortunately it would only be until a month later when the site got pulled again that I would find out it hadnt.

So this weekend rolls around and the site goes down again. Desperate for an answer that didnt involve migrating to an entirely new forum solution I was cautiously optimistic when I saw a patch for the website-forum merging software. I have applied this, plus a couple of other upgrades and it appears that caching can now be switched on without messing up user logins! Hurray.

Here's hoping that those issues are now behind us. At the very least with caching enabled the site should be loading faster than it used to.

P.S. Sorry to those who were looking forward to getting those Battlefield BC 2 demo codes and playing the game this weekend. Very sorry.

[Matto]

Not sure whether you got my PM yesterday about logging in problems.

The site is really screwy at the moment.  I tried logging in with MattO on the main page next to the cbargain chat box and it failed a number of times. 

I gave up in the end and headed to the forums and while i was in the forums - seemingly logged out - i appeared as Congi, Chris and chibandy - each time this happened i had full access to their PMs.

I captured screen shots of the first couple of times this happened.

I can confirm that this happens in the latest IE and FireFox.

[Matto]

...I tried testing in safari on mac but by that time all i got was teh forbidden website message you mention here.

I can confirm that it now seems to be working.

[Anthony]

Thanks for taking time PM me and for being nice enough to try and help. Things were REALLY messed up last night and still now there are some very strange quirks (dual site and forum log in has been disabled because it makes the site freeze) and what I have now takes several goes to log in as well.

Ive spent considerable time on the site recently and need a break, so now that things are semi-working Im going to take a break. Rest assured Im unhappy with some of the problems so I promise they will be fixed some day.

[Matto]

No worries - whatever you did seems to have worked.  Have a well deserved rest