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Quick one: after many years here I've tried to use the member discount page for the first time and can't log in, because it doesn't send the email code to do so.
Before I dig into this. Are you using the same email address your account here uses? The email we have on file for you here is the one that gets used in the validation process with Endurance Zone.
Also, on the new system there's no restrictions for free members. Of course, it goes without saying (But I'm saying it anyway) that the same rules of the forum apply to DM's.
Quick one: after many years here I've tried to use the member discount page for the first time and can't log in, because it doesn't send the email code to do so.
Before I dig into this. Are you using the same email address your account here uses? The email we have on file for you here is the one that gets used in the validation process with Endurance Zone.
Good question, and yes, step 1 was working out what email address I have on file with STW and making sure it's enabled and receiving emails!
Discussed here: https://singletrackworld.com/forum/off-topic/member-discounts-garmin/#post-13716821
I've responded on that thread too. It does seem to be a widespread problem. I'm waiting for a response from EZ.
How do you DM someone these days?
I thought it was go to profile & push the button, but as per Cougar's screenshot up there there appears to be no button?
Have tried several browsers disabling all plugins etc & private browsing...
Weird. I can't find any way of messaging
I had this issue yesterday. Googled it and managed to find a workaround - basically 'singletrackworld.com/user/[insert username]'
Bit of a ballache, but hopefully I'll have some cheap tyres on the way soon!
How do you DM someone these days?
I thought it was go to profile & push the button, but as per Cougar's screenshot up there there appears to be no button?
Have tried several browsers disabling all plugins etc & private browsing...
Weird. I can't find any way of messaging
I had this issue yesterday. Googled it and managed to find a workaround - basically 'singletrackworld.com/user/[insert username]'
Bit of a ballache, but hopefully I'll have some cheap tyres on the way soon!
But in the posting of my reply, I'd neglected to check the last page of this thread and missed the updates re. PM that Mark has given ...
The forum was stuck on old posts for about 20 hours yesterday and today.
I don't think that it's a browser problem; the same on Firefox and Chrome on Android
I didn't try it logged in though 🤔
Logged out I can't see anything newer than hardtailonly ^^ 210pm post.
@mark we've been here before; different lists logged in against logged out
Had a few timeouts replying to posts. 3 times to get the post to take on the 165mm cranks thread. Safari/Mac.
There is a tradeoff to be balanced between a fast website for users and effective cache. Cache memory is very fast but because it's cached memory (that is copies of pages that sit in the database) they are not the 'live' versions of the page. To get the very latest version fo a page it needs to come directly from the database of the website. That is slow (compared to a cached version). To deliver a live version fo every webpage to ever user we'd have to not cache anything. That would be extremely innificient and the site would quickly grind to a halt. So there is a trade off between fast website and up to date content. The site is running quite quickly now - ceratinly a lot quicker than it has in the last few months. The reason is largely to do with cache settings. The live version of the site is most critical to users of the forum - if you post a reply you expect it to be visible instantly. If youpost a reply and the page you see next is an old cached version you will assume your post failed. You might then try posting it again. The reality is both attempts would have made it to the database and the end result is a double post.
If you are logged in you get a live page from the database. If you are logged out you get a cached page that could be out of date. Previous to our current update the forum pages were cached for 6 minutes. This meant a pretty uptodate page for a logged out user. But the fact th ecache was being cleared every 6 minutes meant the server still had to work hard and the site performance wasn't great. It's currently set at around 24 hours. The site is fast and responsive but logged out users are getting old pages. The balance is somewhere in between and we'll hopefully find a nice sweet spot very soon.
So TLDR. If you are logged in you get live pages directly from the database. If you are logged out you get an older version of the page that will likely be out of date. But how out of date that is, we have control over but uptodate comes at the expense of site speed - so it's a game of optimisation.
There are other things we can and are doing, like optimising the database itself so that if it needs to be used by more people at once it can work efficiently. We are working hard to get the site running as efficiently as possible.
If you want to see the differenec between cached and non cached pages. Click around a few pages on the front of the site and notice how long it takes the page to appear. Then repeat that but logged out or in a private or incognito browser. One should be considerably quicker than the other. The quick one is a cached page.
Sorry Mark, I'm not sure as I follow this. Logged out users get high speed cached pages, logged in you get slower but more up-to-date ones? Is that right?
I Am Not A DBA and this is well out of my comfort zone so I don't have any solutions I'm afraid, but that feels like there must be a better way. Like, why are you flushing the cache at all rather than just letting it cache? It's going to be on its arse if you're rebuilding a cache for the entire site every six minutes, surely. I Am Not A DBA, don't listen to me.
Yes. Clearing cache every 6 minutes gives an uptodate looking forum to logged out users. But do they need to have that level of uptodate pages? It’s the logged in users that really need it. Which is why it’s now NOT 6 minutes.
it’s been running at 6 minutes for a long time.
my view is that logged in users are the priority users so we have extended the cache lifespan for forum pages to 24 hours.
I agree. 6 minutes was too generous.
important note that 6 minutes was only for the forum not the whole site. We have very different caching rules and tools for various parts of the site.
Has to be said the science of forum caching is far from simple.
Right, got it I think. Six minutes is (was) the TTL rather than a complete purge, then.
Sooo... shouldn't a cache miss be a database hit rather than a day-old page?
I Am Still Not A DBA, please still don't listen to me. I'm just spitballing.
Also,
Caching is not a science, it's a black art and one I do not envy in the slightest. I had to study this crap at University and it made me want to claw out my eyeballs.
Yes. A cache miss IS a database hit. Logged in users miss the cache. That’s deliberate. Logged in users always get the freshest page. The unavoidable effect of that is that is the slowest way to get a page. Cache is fastest but out of date.
fast page load
latest updated page
pick any one, as Mr Bontrager may put it 🙂
my view is that logged in users are the priority users so we have extended the cache lifespan for forum pages to 24 hours.
The problem with that is that potential new customers see a forum that doesn't change, if my experience is anything to go by, in any 24 hour period.
Why join anything, even for free, if it appears to be dead?
I wasn't logged in so the forum was WAY out of date, figured it was broken again so didn't log in.
Seems like every other day there's a change that no one knows about until someone reports it as a problem and it turns out to be a feature but only if you know about it.
As I have raised the (lack of) speed previously in this thread I thought it was only fair to comment that the forum seems to be a lot faster now when browsing different threads.
Posting is still a little slow but again improved.
Thanks for that.
@Nickfrog I still don’t get what you mean, you need to be a little more specific then it “it doesn’t work”.
Apologies I meant to reply to that but I don't visit very often for obvious reasons.
I will try and explain again:
ANY other forums I use (5 of them regularly but others occasionally so perhaps 12 in total) behave the same way: you click, it happens, instantly. The end.
BY CONTRAST, the only forum I have ever seen where things happen very differently is STW: you click, nothing happens, you have to wait various amounts of time from 10 seconds to infinite usually.
Now, my sample might be too small. Perhaps the only forums I use are the exceptions, but with the best will in the world it's really hard to believe.
So if someone can explain why STW is different from what every single other forum is like, that would be good.
I don't mind subscribing if it transforms the forum into a "normal" forum - but does it?
(I could wait but that would genuinely feel like the early days of the internet in the 90s).
As I said, if this forum was like a "normal" one, it would have so much more traffic but perhaps that's not the business model?
I think I've outlined the problems we face in this thread but the one big issue is the size of the database behind the forum. We have over 10 million posts in the database and they are all accessible. We close of topics to new posts after I think about 2 years.
If we launched the forum from scratch with no historical posts it would be lightning fast. The simple physical truth is that the larger the forum the larger the database and the longer it takes to add or read anything in that database. Other forums are quicker - I very much doubt they have 10 million posts to deal with. There are thousands of new posts every week and hundreds of new topics. That puts a load on a server that it has to deal with. Our server has 12 CPU to power it. Server costs run into the many thousands a year. Other faster forums may have multiple servers. I know Mumsnet has literally a server farm powering what they do. We have a single dedicated server running everything from the forum to our editorial, online shop, subscriptions, payment processing. It does a lot that is not forum related. I've said this before but if we were JUST a forum it would be easy. But we are NOT just a forum - that makes it hard.
A month ago we moved to a new server host. From Wordpress VIP to Kinsta. We are still working through the configurations of the new system and every day we make improvements. Subscribers get the best experience because they pay for it. The forum is one part of the subscription. We are constantly looking to make improvements but it all costs money. Maybe we won't get the improvements done before the money runs out. Maybe we will. But that's just economics. The forum is really important to what Singletrack does - but it's not the most important thing that Singletrack does as a business. We deal with what we can with the resources we have and that's been the same way we've done things for 25 years. That's something that many other media brands can't claim. We ARE doing something right in the fact we still literally exist. But that doesn't mean we are doing everything right and the priorities of certain user groups may not be the priorities of others and it's my job to balance those priorites against the money and resources we have.
I'm sorry the forum doesn't work as fast as other forums, but we aren't the same as those forums and our constraints and economics are not the same either.
Every day we work to make the site AND the magazine be the best we can make it. That doesn't equate to it being the best it can be but every day we make progress.
There appears to be two distinct profile pages at the moment, both of which you can edit the information on but neither seem to talk.
e.g. for me;
https://singletrackworld.com/participant/nixie/
On one I can see what threads other users are subscribed too which feels a little wrong! e.g. Mark's subscriptions https://singletrackworld.com/participant/mark/subscriptions/
The overlap is deliberate but temporary. The old profile was where the old Direct Messaging system lived. We are retiring that and the new profile will be the one you see when you click a username. The reason for the overlap is to simply allow any existing conversations that may have been ongoing to play out. That DM system was used in the classifieds for contact between buyers and sellers and so we don't want to just switch it off.
Ok, is that also why new conversations (sent via https://singletrackworld.com/participant/{username}/messages/) result in emails with links that say 'dont have permission' to read (or similar, this was mentioned by someone I tried to DM rather than directly experienced)
The recent 'goadfree' login system does not work for me on my phone (Samsung A54). It keeps saying incorrect password.
Instead I have to accept adverts and then once in the STW website go to the login page and log in there using the exact same information.
Though I do not always have to re-login it is odd and annoying when I forget the work around.
Apropos of nothing,
Search seems to work. I was looking for an old thread, my trusty "search this site" browser plugin failed and the embedded search returned what I was looking for.
Don't let it go to your heads.
There seems to be a problem with logging in. I tried several times on 2 different machines and did a hard refresh of the page but no joy. Then I tried using my email address rather than my user name and it worked. So, for anyone having problems and reading this (in about 5 hours time), try using your email address to log in.
How's "zero" work on a post count?
From https://singletrackworld.com/forum/off-topic/it-hurts-it-really-bloody-hurts/#post-10509781
There's plenty on that thread with apparently 0, 1, 2 post count who have obviously posted way more. One of them is mentioned in the OP.
A variation on caching for questions
I keep failing to log in first go. A big red banner pops up saying, "An error has been encountered. Probably page was cached. Please try again."
Invariably I log at the second attempt; this is the same on phone or PC.
Like other current "features", this is a repeat of an older problem on a previous forum version update
The danged Ad-Free pop up is danged annoying again. Im trying to log in on my PC, using the existing subscribers login here link, I enter my details on the page, it tells me there's an error in a red nlbox, but before I can read the red box, the adhfree pop up is back and the loop starts again.
It doesn't have to be this annoying and dysfunctional surely?
I can still post this from my phone, but fully expecting to be shut out here as well
I don't know if this has been mentioned, but messages aren't working atm, for me at least. I had an email notification of a message, but when I look in my message folder on here it's not showing?
Existing subscribers go to this page to login. Dont click the login on the CMP popup. That’s for subscribers to the adfree subscription service provided by AdFreePro.
Log in failure as above takes a second attempt
still no skip to last page
loading times very slow again (chrome)
Does anyone know why are there 2 search links, each of which bring up totally different results?
Search forum and search website, i think. Forum one being the bottom one.
Probably been said before, but phone posting is awkward.
Usability of the forum is a real challenge for me with posts and especially edits on iOS 26. The positioning of things like the ‘quote’ button conflicts with the irritating move of iOS copy/cut/… dialogs to below selected text. 30% forum problem, 70% iOS problem imo.
Normal posting is bad enough. With the screen like this there’s not much space to manipulate the post or re-read a quote or earlier posts for reference. 
Search forum and search website, i think. Forum one being the bottom one.
Ah OK, thanks. Maybe this is something long standing members just know, but I didn't and it's certainly not going to be obvious to anyone not from around these parts. Would it make sense to combine them for simplicity and a cleaner interface? Or at least to label them for clarity if it's felt we genuinely need two?
It is arguably intuitive. The top menu is the website menu, the bottom menu is the forum menu. The search is that section, but I agree it isn't clear. The navigation on the forum has always been clunky. For example we have the "previous topic" and "next topic" buttons that are effectively useless but no button to take you back to the forum overview. Unfortunately nobody at stw actually uses the forum so nothing will change.
Free members should now be able to reply to private messages. As is typical it was a tck box unticked
_Please_ can we have the button to skip to the last message in the thread back? I'm fed up of having to scroll scroll scroll...
You don’t have the double arrow thingy next to the thread title?
Arrow at the end of the title takes me to the last page and last post...are you not seeing an arrow at the end of the thread title?
I do have the double arrow. Sometimes it goes to the last post as it should, but often (might be specific threads, e.g. old or big, I haven't investigated thoroughly because my perception is that there's a seemingly random component) it just goes to the first post on the last page of that thread.
The workaround used to be to hit the little button near the top of the thread to go to the last post, but a couple of weeks ago that button disappeared.
I *think* that the intended behaviour is that if we click on a thread title, then we're taken to the first post that we haven't yet read, and the double arrow should whizz to the last post. But neither of those work remotely consistently for me, and never have.