[Kevin]

Other than the usual time-outs, pages not loading, etc, I got this gem today

[Maflynn]

You know for such a big and popular site, the outages, and issues are really intolerable and embarrassing. I don't understand why the admins cannot figure out how to run a forum. Perhaps they need to training or hire people who have more knowledge of the hardware/software.

I've never seen this level of instability in any other forum, whether larger or smaller.

Mike

[subego]

I've always felt it's made the place feel homey.

[Rolling Bones]

Don't you people know this is a feature!!??

It's MacNN's way of annoying frequent posters so they'll fekk off and die.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Maflynn

You know for such a big and popular site, the outages, and issues are really intolerable and embarrassing. I don't understand why the admins cannot figure out how to run a forum. Perhaps they need to training or hire people who have more knowledge of the hardware/software.

I've never seen this level of instability in any other forum, whether larger or smaller.

Mike

Well, just to clarify: the forum admins like me have no access to the servers that the forums run on. The server admins are different people, though I am not entirely sure they actually exist!

I've been complaining to MacNN's owner for a long, long, long time (years) about the embarrassing state of things, but the results speak for themselves...

tooki

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Kevin

Other than the usual time-outs, pages not loading, etc, I got this gem today

Wow! That's a new one! Thanks for having the state of mind to grab a screenshot for evidence.

tooki

[Maflynn]

Originally Posted by tooki

Well, just to clarify: the forum admins like me have no access to the servers that the forums run on. The server admins are different people, though I am not entirely sure they actually exist!

I wasn't overly clear in what I was saying. Yes, its the folks that maintain (and I use the word maintain in the loosest sense) the servers.

Mike

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by tooki

Wow! That's a new one! Thanks for having the state of mind to grab a screenshot for evidence.

tooki

I think da hampstor keeps track of the TLPNC (total lifetime posts - nicks consolidated).
Kevin just hit 50,000 !

-t

[Kevin]

I did?

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by Kevin

I did?

I dunno. Ask da hampstor.

-t

[ajprice]

I have had this happen to me several times now -

I post in a thread using the Quick Reply box at the bottom of the page, and submit the post My cursor changes to the watch, with the hands not moving, nothing happens, apart from the 'posting' message in the grey box around QR. I go back to the forum listing and the thread I have posted in has the red dot to say I have posted but my name is not listed as the latest poster for the thread and does not move up to the top of the list, but stays at the time of the previous listing with the previous posters name.

This has happened several times on different Macs, so I'm guessing its a server thing. Has it happened to anyone else, and is there any chance of it being fixed?

PS. Somebody kill the 2 threads called Quick Reply and 2 called Quick Reply posting problem. I tried to make a new thread about this but it didn't work. I got the Safari error page for page failing to load . Oh the irony!!

[tooki]

Yep, I know exactly what you're describing.

As best I can figure out (this is my guess of how it works, I have not been told anything about how it functions), this is the fundamental functioning of posting a message

1) User writes the message and presses "submit"
2) Browser communicates with server and sends message to server
3) Forum server receives message and processes it
4) Forum server saves message to database server
5) Forum server updates things like post count, last person in a thread, etc
6) Forum server grabs updated thread from database
7) Forum server processes the thread into a page and sends it back to the browser (and in the case of quick reply, the browser just receives your post and merges it back into the thread you are viewing).

What seems to be happening is that everything up to step 4 happens immediately, without incident. Then step 5, for some reason, sometimes takes a LONG time to happen. Until it has completed step 5, the system cannot move on and provide any feedback to the user, and in fact, the HTTP connection can time out. I've seen step 5 take up to 10 minutes to complete. During this time, viewing the forums still seems to work fine -- you can even go back and "confirm" that your post didn't "stick". Then, 5 minutes later when step 5 has finished, all the posts appear.

It's really weird, and annoying because all feedback (and even manual confirmation) will indicate that the post failed, when in fact it's just tied up and will appear eventually.

tooki

[turtle777]

Yeah, it's annoying. I try to check everytime when timed out if the post was processed or not. But sometime, yeah, out of luck. Result: hampstor posts.

-t