[Sticky] The New Forum

I stay logged in on a Samsung A54 and an ancient iPad

Ive been logged out a couple of times with no apparent reason but not regularly

For me it's at least once a day on Edge/Android. Edge in Windows seems fine.

It's been with us a while now, and having got used to it, I feel I can comment.  Well I don't come here nearly as often now.  Navigating a thread is a headache - sometimes you jump in at the top of a page, others at the last post.  And my fan still gets the usual workout that you never get elsewhere. 

Not got any particular woe with being logged out - that used to happen and happens elsewhere too.  

Posted by: DrJ

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When you use the quote feature, sometimes it says "posted by username" and sometimes it says "posted by real name". Why is that?

hmm. changed my "nickname" but it still says posted by username. curiouser and curiouser.

......

Posted by: somafunk

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Posted by: Cougar

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The display name is changeable on your profile but no-one really noticed because a) few people actually changed it and b) it was (almost?) never used anyway.

So if I change my display name to something such as “insert novel name here” it will be displayed whenever I am quoted?, cool 😎

I'll try it...

EDIT : nope, I changed my display name on Saturday yet it still shows my user name when quoted.....

Posted by: somafunk

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Posted by: somafunk

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Posted by: Cougar

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The display name is changeable on your profile but no-one really noticed because a) few people actually changed it and b) it was (almost?) never used anyway.

So if I change my display name to something such as “insert novel name here” it will be displayed whenever I am quoted?, cool 😎

 

I'll try it...

 

EDIT : nope, I changed my display name on Saturday yet it still shows my user name when quoted.....

test ??????

Posted by: tjagain

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test ??????

Who said that?

Just updated my account/profile as I may have forgotten to input my password to save updates so we'll see if my new display name appears......

Posted by: somafunk

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Just updated my account/profile as I may have forgotten to input my password to save updates so we'll see if my new display name appears......

has it?....

edit....nope.......oh well.......I changed it to “just-another-nobody-posting-unintelligible-bollox”….thought it rather appropriate 

As far as I'm aware you've never been able to change your display/username* without a request to STW tech directly - and even then you need a very good reason. 

(*you could in the early days of STW and much hilarity ensued when you pretended to be another forum member and posted a load of crap under their name - hence why changing user name is now locked! 🤣).

Just a point of note:

www.singletracworld.com/forum now takes you to the list of forums, rather than teh "latests posts" view.  Not sure if thats deliberate or not but for 20+ years that link ha taken you to a list of threads, most recently uset at the top.    Now it doesnt so i have to figure out (drop down of forum>latest) how to get to the "traditional" allin one view, and figure out how to get there straight away.  

I'd think that  alively page with loads of threads/activity would be a more atractive landing page that a dull-lookgin list of sub-forums?  

Posted by: the-muffin-man

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As far as I'm aware you've never been able to change your display/username* without a request to STW tech directly - and even then you need a very good reason. 

You've never been able to change your account name, as you say.  But (as I understand it) there is a second cosmetic name which is usually but not always the same.  Perhaps as part of the migration it's copied existing 'soft' names but is no longer honouring subsequent changes?  IDK, that's probably a question for Mark / Tech.

Posted by: Cougar

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there is a second cosmetic name

Just to be sure we're talking about the same thing, the only name-like field I see when I edit my profile is "Nickname". I can change it, but it doesn't show up anywhere and isn't quoted in posts. Amusingly, the only compulsory field in the profile is "pronouns".

Has this been covered? Every time I come to the forum,  I now have to log in (I always tick the 'stay logged in box' - does nowt) and then click forum/latest to see the posts since my last visit. Before, I used tge same link and was taken straight to latest posts and log in was persistent.

Why? 

Posted by: boblo

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Has this been covered? Every time I come to the forum,  I now have to log in

Some folk are experiencing this. Others (like me) are persistently logged in. It could be a factor of browser settings, security, plug-ins etc. 

Understood. But it's typical IT witchcraft; nothing changed my end (afaik), but it suddenly starts misbehaving... It started a few days after tge new theme was applied - within the past week.

I used to get logged out a lot but it has been fine recently. Plenty of other glitches, but not that one 🙂

It does seem to forget which threads I have read so sometimes jumps to the last page, sometimes just opens the first. No real pattern, but I am logged in.

Posted by: boblo

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Understood. But it's typical IT witchcraft; nothing changed my end (afaik), but it suddenly starts misbehaving... It started a few days after tge new theme was applied - within the past week.

Still happening to me I've changed nothing. Very annoying to say the least. 

Still happening to me I've changed nothing. Very annoying to say the least. 

Yep. Every single visit to the site on my phone for the last 4 days or so. It's fine on PC and Chromebook. I've changed nothing and tried clearing cookies, cache etc. I use my phone to browse a lot. I understand it's a hard one to nail down, but it's frustrating enough to curtail my time on here significantly if there isn't a fix. On a train now and glad I brought a book! A book! With paper and ink and everything - who'd have thought! 😊

Woo, the dark theme modal boxes have been fixed!

... shame the embed plugin still thinks every Amazon link is a broken Kindle title though.  It's just taken me four attempts to post an actual link (I embedded it in CODE tags in the end)

[url= https://i.ibb.co/FbGQHnpF/Screenshot-2025-07-01-164743.jp g" target="_blank">https://i.ibb.co/FbGQHnpF/Screenshot-2025-07-01-164743.jp g"/> [/img][/url]

He, something ironic about images not displaying properly when trying to show that adverts and other menus are overlapping all the links you need to access the forum. 

(Win10, Chrome btw)

That ^^   is what I see if I open the Overview page . https://singletrackworld.com/forum/overview/.

I’m new here, well I say new but I was on here years ago when new forum and hats being eaten was the order of the day.

From my limited time on here the forum is dreadful, looks awful on an iPad and typing is very laggy, on my work laptop it’s pretty much unusable, usually doesn’t load properly and is very slow. I’m on a 900mb full fibre connection at home so it’s not my Wi-Fi.  

I can’t complain about the ads as I’m not paying but there are some ladies in dresses that are not appropriate for work

in all honesty it’s just too much effort to use and it’s not a pleasant user experience 

Posted by: bruneep

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Still happening to me I've changed nothing. Very annoying to say the least

Same. iOS and MacOS. 

Posted by: Viktor Balzac

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I’m on a 900mb full fibre connection at home so it’s not my Wi-Fi.  

You're on a 900mb full fibre connection at home so it’s not your Internet connection but could very easily be your Wi-Fi.  

@Mark - would it be possible (technically and financially) to have a "no Ads" day?

I'm thinking that it might show some of the Free Members what the forum actually looks like and might also give some folks an opportunity to see if their response time/lagging/display issues are solely related to Ads being shown. 

Many other subscription systems offer a free trial period. I can see how that might be a bit more difficult though, not least in checking that some folk don't abuse it through the use of multiple "new" accounts. 

Its not my wi-fi, I test it regularly, and every other website works fine, including other forums, or is it fori

Posted by: scotroutes

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@Mark - would it be possible (technically and financially) to have a "no Ads" day?

I'm thinking that it might show some of the Free Members what the forum actually looks like and might also give some folks an opportunity to see if their response time/lagging/display issues are solely related to Ads being shown. 

Many other subscription systems offer a free trial period. I can see how that might be a bit more difficult though, not least in checking that some folk don't abuse it through the use of multiple "new" accounts. 

TBH i'm not sure that would help 😀 

PErformance is still as bad as anything i've seen in the last few years. refreshing/moving topics/threads is absolutely dire at the moment.... Like 10s + ... Posting is 25-30s.... It's really really slow.

I would just like to add to the list of people suffering from very very long loading times. Between pages / threads is better (like 10s) but to open the forum from switching on my browser its a good 30s which is quite a long time.

I never really had a problem with the forum performance, although I did get the 502 errors, I can't remember ever having the persistent logging out issues that many people seem to suffer with, I was happy with the functionality we had once I'd got the hang of posting pictures. I think what's interesting is that all of the things that have been done over the past couple of years to improve performance have had either no effect or have made things worse and to my mind the aesthetics are worse. Currently I'm seeing a consistent 10s to open the /recent page, and about 4s to open a thread - which isn't catastrophic, but is definitely slower than a couple of years ago. Given the amount of work and money that's been invested, I just think that this is really unfortunate and it must be tough on the team. I'd like to say thanks to them for all their efforts, and wish them luck for future developments.

<edit> and 5s to save the edit and redisplay the page - again, not catastrophic </edit>

Just here to aknowledge the slowness. 

Currently investigating with Wordpress VIP engineers. There is a huge amount of activity in a lot of very old threads right now. Our suspicion is that we are currently being mined by bots. My hunch is AI learning bots. We are looking at options to block this. This is sending our server response times through the roof.

Update: The scraping is very well distributed so there's isn't a single or even a group of IPs we can simply block. In short it's working like DDOS attack - albeit one that isn't designed to take the site down completely. we pay for a high level of support so we are waiting for a response from VIP engineers.

Posted by: Mark

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Just here to aknowledge the slowness. 

Currently investigating with Wordpress VIP engineers. There is a huge amount of activity in a lot of very old threads right now. Our suspicion is that we are currently being mined by bots. My hunch is AI learning bots. We are looking at options to block this. This is sending our server response times through the roof.

Had this recently on my forum which is PHPBB based and we were getting 100,000 hits an hour from Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam, i ended up with Cloudflare and blocking the specific countries with all the attacks. Cloudflare wasn't too bad to setup and configure. My Provider ended up shutting down our server/service temporarily until i got that sorted as it was being absolutely hammered. The whole of the PHPBB community were affected by it.

To try and help with the logging out problem, only happens with Android and Edge. Android and Chrome ok (which is a little bit odd), ok on several Windows PC and Edge.

Just blocking Singapore while looking for a long term soloution with VIP engineers.

Posted by: Viktor Balzac

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Its not my wi-fi, I test it regularly, and every other website works fine, including other forums, or is it fori

I wasn't suggesting that it was your Wi-Fi at fault, I was saying that your Wi-Fi performance and your Internet connection speed are unrelated metrics.  Your end-to-end connection is only as fast as the slowest point, you could have a 100Gbps FTTP connection and performance would still be garbage if your client device was connected to the router with two tin cans and a bit of wet string.

Posted by: Mark

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Just blocking Singapore while looking for a long term soloution with VIP engineers.

Out of interest, what do (legitimate) overseas stats look like?

In a previous role I worked for a company who dealt almost exclusively with the UK.  We had a couple of outliers, and we had a remote worker in Canada and people who occasionally went on holiday and took their laptop with them.  When we had hailstorms of traffic it was always from countries which had no reason to be connecting to us at all.  I was pushing for geo-blocking at a website & firewall level and then whitelisting the few who did actually need to connect, but it fell on deaf ears.

Is this any use?  Seems to block AI bots a la robots.txt whilst allowing spiders you actually want such as Google.

Posted by: matt_outandabout

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[url= https://i.ibb.co/FbGQHnpF/Screenshot-2025-07-01-164743.jp g" target="_blank">https://i.ibb.co/FbGQHnpF/Screenshot-2025-07-01-164743.jp g"/> [/img][/url]

Was just about the report the same absolute mess that seems to have started in the last week or so...

That’s my mistake. It started yesterday evening. I will clean it up shortly.