Forum Error

[David Nicholson]

If I remember rightly we had similar problems 3/4 years ago and I think Fearless Fred was able to apply the oil can and resolved them?

[Maggi Young]

I think that was when we needed another bandwidth upgrade, David. Not sure that is the same thing now.

[TC]

I thought that it was just happening to me!  It took me 5 attempts to post my two pictures this afternoon.  I tried other web sites with no problem so I assumed that someone was working on the SRGC site

[Paul T]

It could be the volume of people on the forum

Mark,

I know that many of us are overweight, but that shouldn't really be affecting picture loading.  

Or do you mean that we're talking or typing too loud? 

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[Maggi Young]

It could be the volume of people on the forum

Mark,

I know that many of us are overweight, but that shouldn't really be affecting picture loading.  

Or do you mean that we're talking or typing too loud? 

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Oooops! I may be guilty on ALL counts 

[Lesley Cox]

Yes it happens here too, so an international problem. In our case probably because we have dismal Broadband and as a South African visitor said in today's paper, "what a beautiful country, marvellous people (thanks) stunning scenery, but what a pity your mobile phone networks are so primitive!

With nothing else to do, I lay in bed for a while this morning and read an old TIme article about Steve Jobs. Why didn't I go for Apple in the first place?

[David Nicholson]

Photographs taking an age to post this evening??

[Lesley Cox]

For me too David. Then when the post appears it is the text minus the pics so I have to modify and reload them. Par for the course though with my computer. It's probably something to do with having 10,000 pics in My Pictures, none in separate folders. Must do something about it but can't face it.

[TheOnionMan]

You may be right, David.
I have noticed that I  tend to have the problem at times when the USA/ North America is likely to be coming online and making everything "busy".
I suppose one would liken it to the drop in electricity experienced at  mealtimes in the UK, or times when  a popular TV programme takes a break! 

I have the problem on SRGC, and of late, myself and others get the same error when attempting to post on NARGS.  I do think the NARGS Forum is overdue for Forum Maintenance, but I have been hesitant to do so on NARGS, as I believe it is best done by temporarily locking the forum from members getting on. running the various routines (such as "Optimize all tables to improve performance", "Find and repair any errors", "Empty out unimportant logs.") then pray it all starts back up without problem

On NARGS, I do believe there is also a correlation between slowness and when there is a "spambot attack", times of the day when web-crawlers and web-bots latch onto our site in droves, attempting to harvest every page. I have blocked as many of the most egregious web-bots and spam-bots as I can, see:
http://www.srgc.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=8580.msg231862#msg231862
These spambots and web-bots, once they find a site, glom on and come back each and every hour, often in increasing numbers, and because they're printing and harvesting data, it utilizes lots of bandwidth and resources.  The biggest hit we got was from spambots out of Fujian China, with 60-80 "guests" showing up on the NARGS Forum front door hourly.  They still show up occasionally, but since I have the IP subnet range blocked, now only about a dozen of them show up attempting reading/harvesting our pages.

Tips on getting forum messages to post (both NARGS & SRGC), I find the problem always occurs if I take a while composing a message, then lastly select some photos to upload.  Seems better to start a message in the forum (if you want some context of the previous poster's comments), then copy that to a standard text editor, back out of the forum message started, and compose the message in a text editor elsewhere. When ready to post, start a fresh forum response, paste in your message text, quickly select photo uploads, and hope for the best.  I also de-select the "Return to this topic" option under the Additional Options..." area, for whatever reason, it seems to succeed more often with that option unchecked.  If one gets a time-out error, don't try again using the same open message, back out of it instead and start yet another fresh response, and quickly paste in your text and select photo uploads... for me it usually works on the 2nd try.

[Paul T]

Mark,

The other alternative is to just finish compsing your message, then go back into modify to add the pictures.  I haven't posted pics of late, so I don't know about this particular error.  But I know that in the past where there were problems with pictures, I found that posting the message first, then adding the photos afterwards seemed to work more smoothly.

[fermi de Sousa]

Hi Mark
I find Paul's suggestion the quickest way for posting pics but it varies as sometimes the pics upload easily and other times it's hopeless.
cheers
fermi
PS the image of you as a Jedi Knight fighting those all those spambots comes to mind! Perhaps time for a new avatar?

[TheOnionMan]

Hi Mark
I find Paul's suggestion the quickest way for posting pics but it varies as sometimes the pics upload easily and other times it's hopeless.
cheers
fermi
PS the image of you as a Jedi Knight fighting those all those spambots comes to mind! Perhaps time for a new avatar?

Yes. I use that approach too, post the message then edit to add photos.

New avatar eh?  I'l have to work on a new one sometime, its been a long time since mine changed, those were the good ol' days when I had time.

[Paul T]

Howdy Folks,

Just to let you know that the SQL error seems to be in effect at the moment.  I was unable to post a reply with pics attached, however I was able to easily post the reply, then attach the pics afterwards.  It just can't seem to handle the posting and the pics at the one time.

There has been some downtime for the forum a couple of hours ago, so maybe there is just a bit of instability causing the error at the moment.  I thought it was worthwhile posting here to warn people so that if they're going to post pics they'll be aware of it.  Then again, maybe it will work fine for others.  I'd prefer to warn, just in case.

[astragalus]

Glad I saw this thread because I had been having so much difficulty in posting pictures recently.  Now I know it's not because I had forgotten the appropriate steps.

[Lesley Cox]

Problems here yesterday too, about 4 hours with no Internet (how did I survive?) but the local council are yet again doing surgical things to the roads round about including by the nearest splash box so i assumed it was that. OK today.