Forum bugs

[Aury]

When I view a topic, and read to the last post, and then go back to the main index, even after refreshing, the post is still marked as unread. I have to log out and log in for it to appear as read.

[Curudan]

When I view a topic, and read to the last post, and then go back to the main index, even after refreshing, the post is still marked as unread. I have to log out and log in for it to appear as read.

Yeah, I'll sometimes have the same problem, and I also have one other problem; I can only press the red "view latest post" button once per visit. When I press it a second time, it says "no unread posts for that topic", even if I haven't viewed that topic yet.

Oh, and sometimes the forum will display a "phantom" page on a multipage topic.

[Bobby]

Its been responding very slowly for me lately, it sometimes takes 30 seconds plus to load a page, though I suppose that could also be my fault for using firefox with tons of tabs and going days without re-booting it, though other websites work fine.

I got a white error page a while ago, but not since.

sometimes after a refresh the forums label everything as read even if I haven't read it all yet, it seems completely random and is generally rare.

For some reason I can't even see the view latest post link after the page is done loading.

I just got what Wolfy reported too, "mark all forums as read" fixed it.

[Periculi]

Forums are reaaaly slow for me here too. Takes over a minute just to load the index, and really makes it difficult to catch up on anything.

[Bobby]

The slowness is intermittent for me. It's ok right now, but there's a good chance it will be slow again shortly.

the forums not being marked as read seems to be correlated with responding slowly.

[alterecco]

I had to switch to a completely different browser to read the forums recently... Clicking a link on a thread would just give me nothing. Cleared cache and so forth (not all my cache, because some of it is precious to me, but for this site). No change. The same page in another browser, at the same time, no problem. Now it seems to be behaving ok. I am really stumped as to what the cause might be. I work in webdevelopment, and have seen weird behaviour on the web, but this one is quite high on the list of weird. My thoughts... update phpbb (i know, it sucks)

[Aury]

This is not the only forum I've had these bugs on; it seems to be something specific to phpbb2. As alterecco said, I suggest updating the database... if that doesn't help... I don't know.

[Periculi]

I don't imagine that the 4k++ user accounts is helping matters. Probably be a good idea to kill the 3750+ spam accounts and leave just the actual users so at least that little bit of the db is optimized again.

(I do believe that it's been mentioned various times that a phpBB update with at least a mod for CAPTCHA/ReCAPTCHA to prevent spam bots from getting inserted in user accounts is in order...)

edit -

hmm... I have been experiencing the worst loading times ever just now, and tried the neurohack.com/ domain. I got the same problem on the other parts of the domain that are not phpBB forums. Seems that the server or ISP you are on is having a tough time delivering at least to Maui, George. The worst part is that the problem is no longer intermittent and is getting worse. It took a full 2 minutes to load the index for the forum, and the same for the neurohack blog and transcendence site. No other sites are giving me this problem with load times that I visit, and my ISP did fine when I tested the connection and latency to USA west coast, east coast, London and other major areas. - so it's not my internet, it's your server or network in particular, and it's apparently not effecting some areas (testing neurohack.com from free website page load test services based in East Coast showed 0.2 seconds page load times )

The most comprehensive test on neurohack.com I found (internetsupervision.com)
Dortmund, Germany (5 Mbps) OK 7.32 0.41 144
Sydney, Australia (5 Mbps) OK 7.32 1.31 45
Gloucester, UK (5 Mbps) OK 7.32 0.33 178
Chicago, IL (45 Mbps) OK 7.32 0.19 312
Los Angeles, CA (1.5 Mbps) OK 7.32 23.44 2
Santiago, Chile (760 Kbps) OK 7.32 0.55 106

Notice the 23.44 to Los Angeles.

[Periculi]

Another odd thing about that internetsupervision.com test, George - they test 12 locations - the list only shows 6 because the other 6 were unavailable, only time I have ever seen that many locations missing! Detroit is one of the server locations they test from, and I have never seen it unavailable before (I test my own sites with these guys a couple times a month to see how things are working).

I fixed the results to show the seconds only:

Dortmund, Germany (5 Mbps) seconds = 0.41
Sydney, Australia (5 Mbps) seconds = 1.31
Gloucester, UK (5 Mbps) seconds = 0.33
Chicago, IL (45 Mbps) seconds = 0.19
Los Angeles, CA (1.5 Mbps) seconds = 23.44
Santiago, Chile (760 Kbps) seconds = 0.55

[Aury]

I'm practically next to LA and it loads really fast (<1 sec, now the wiki takes ~5 secs); the only problems I'm getting are the 'whitepage errors' and incorrect post-read marks.

[Periculi]

And now it's working as expected. Yay!
[rambling]
I wonder if Yahoo (that's your hosting provider?!!) implemented some bandwidth limitation on non-preferred networks like they were talking about a while back. I read a horror story a couple of years ago about how major ISPs were going to implement a metering system to provide major customers (i.e. Coca Cola, and such other major companies) with more bandwidth by stealing it from tiny businesses. The end result of their evil plan would be to deliver content of minor sites like this one at a drastically lowered speed something akin to what we all used to have on telephone line modems. Never found out if the government was going to support the decision or not, but I definitely voted against the politicians supporting this evil plan to favor big corporations bandwidth. Yes, I am aware this makes me look like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but it was a real proposal put forward by companies like Yahoo, and those big ISPs including America Online, Comcast, and Verizon.
[/rambling]

[schilcote]

And now it's working as expected. Yay!
[rambling]
I wonder if Yahoo (that's your hosting provider?!!) implemented some bandwidth limitation on non-preferred networks like they were talking about a while back. I read a horror story a couple of years ago about how major ISPs were going to implement a metering system to provide major customers (i.e. Coca Cola, and such other major companies) with more bandwidth by stealing it from tiny businesses. The end result of their evil plan would be to deliver content of minor sites like this one at a drastically lowered speed something akin to what we all used to have on telephone line modems. Never found out if the government was going to support the decision or not, but I definitely voted against the politicians supporting this evil plan to favor big corporations bandwidth. Yes, I am aware this makes me look like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but it was a real proposal put forward by companies like Yahoo, and those big ISPs including America Online, Comcast, and Verizon.
[/rambling]

Ted Stephens was right!

I'm getting here just fine on my server (all other machines are out of commision...). I'm just lucky

My theory is that the disturbances are caused by large spikes of network activity in George's (server's) area, the ISP's system can't handle the traffic it's getting so we see the effects of the weakest link at the end of the chain. I'd love to run a cap' on their servers, too bad it's illegal.not that that's TOO big a deal