Forum Ups and Downs

[bradl]

I've gotten some email about forum error messages, so I'm reposting the announcement here to catch anyone who missed the announcement (or who skips boring technical messages - can't say I blame you). This one's important, however. So, just in case you missed the announcement:

Due to high server loads, our site has been moved to an evaluation server by our web host. In order to determine if the source of high server loads is simple traffic or an errant script or setting, there will be many adjustments made over the next week or two in an effort to identify and hopefully eliminate these high server loads. This will result in (hopefully short) periods where you will receive error messages or experience down time. This applies to both the forum and the gallery. I appreciate your patience as we sort through this.

We cannot afford the high cost of a dedicated server so it is imperative that the forum server load be managed successfully. If the first round of adjustments are not successful in controlling load, I may be forced to take the forum off-line for an extended period of time to research and deploy an alternative. I hope that will not be necessary.

I regret the inconvenience.

[Greg]

bradl....I am getting an error message also....I turned my firewall off and was able to get back in.

[bradl]

Thanks for that tip! I sent a note to a couple of folks who were similary affected. I hope to have this particular setting turned off Sunday morning (Pacific time) after they ship my today's statistics...

Update: It helped Shoe. Thanks again, Greg.

[Eliz222]

Yes, I am online!!! Thanks, Brad and Greg! DS helped my turn off my Norton Security and it worked. We are secured other ways, so I really don't need the Norton....at least that is what my son told me!

[bradl]

I deleted the setting that I believe was causing the problem - so fingers crossed everyone can access the forum as before. I'm still tinkering with forum features a bit but most of the changes I try from here out should not cause such scary messages.

From the looks of things, its about 50-50 between the forum and gallery as to what causes the load. I also excluded a lot of robots and set a delay on MSNbot - because this site is fairly active it gets indexed quite frequently by the search engines. In fact you may find sometimes that using google to search the site works as well or better than the forum search! To use google to search the site you'd use the site: argument. For example, to search the forum for 'housebreaking' you could enter the following into google:

housebreaking site:cairnterrier.org

The results: Google: housebreaking site:cairnterrier.org