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Tell me about it.
I must have had 502 of them.
Same, down tools Friday?
Absolutely flying now! Whoosh... 🤗
Absolutely flying now! Whoosh… 🤗
Hamsters clearly now feasting on Waitrose finest mince pies 👍
Obviously forgot to feed the ones in Scotlandshire
Still doing it.
502 Bad Gateway is the Chrome thumbnail for this site on my desktop PC
Yep back to being borderline unusable again.
502 and 504 errors and running like a pig again.
Then there’s the random ads and pop-ups telling me about the subscription I already have. <br /><br />It’s also possibly the slowest and least responsive website I’ve used since about 2005.
add resource hungry to that list. Within a couple of minutes browsing this site the fan on my Mac mini kicks in. No other website does this.
Weird?, that’s been happening to my iMac over the previous week, I’ve never heard the fan in 3 years of owing this iMac and it only happens on this site.
Site has been falling over every few minutes for months now, not been stable all year.
I'm still worried they're using all our computers for BitCoin mining, got to keep the lights on somehow!
Then there’s the random ads and pop-ups telling me about the subscription I already have.
Getting this every page right now, a black box with yellow writing saying about Member discounts for subscribers urging me to join.
Yep, I thought it had been fixed yesterday, but back to same old, same old. Barely been able to use the site this morning. The shortcut icon on my phone and Chromebook for this site have both renamed themselves '502 bad gateway'. To be fair it's been a little better in the last hour or so.
I've just had the annual email to renew my subscription. I have renewed but I gave very serious consideration to not doing so. The content is worth it, but that's no good if I can't access it when I want to. I know the team is small and are constantly fire fighting and trying to make it work. I genuinely wish them well in that and want it to succeed, but it's getting harder to justify paying for a frequently poor user experience.
Then there’s the random ads and pop-ups telling me about the subscription I already have.
Yep, what they need is some form of database with which they could store member details and then they could look up the member each time they visit and serve appropriate messaging....
I occasionally get these, but it depends on what browser I’m using, and rebooting sometimes helps as well. I’m using an iPad Pro 10.5”, with 512Gb of storage. It is around six years old, mind, and is used for quite a few hours every day.
I think a replacement might be in order next year.
I have renewed but I gave very serious consideration to not doing so. The content is worth it, but that’s no good if I can’t access it when I want to… but it’s getting harder to justify paying for a frequently poor user experience.
This, constantly hanging up, being logged out, bad gateways etc. When posting becomes a chore one has to question re-subscribing.<br />A USP of “it’s even worse for the free users” isn’t the best business plan.
I've been getting the 502s again today but the only "pop-up ad" I've seen was that highlighting additional member discounts and that only appeared once.
A USP of “it’s even worse for the free users” isn’t the best business plan.
Yep, "give us some money and it will be slightly less crap" doesn't motivate me one bit.
I'm sorry to say, and I know it sounds unappreciative, but this is undoubtedly the worst web site I frequent.
I'm not a web developer but I run my own business that relies on a good web presence, and I don't get how a business can base it's web site on a platform that (AFAIK) was never really meant to host a forum.
I'm on a number of other forums that are just as busy and never have an issue.
Maybe it's because STW isn't just a forum? (I don't look at the rest 😬)
Edit: I should add it's fine today on my Pixel 6 but with certain "features" being blocked.
sometimes this site crashes the browser on my work PC (Chrome), meaning I can't get to any other web sites at all, even the ones internal to work. Clearing the browsing data /history & cookies etc doesn't fix it, the only way to reset it is to restart the PC. It doesn't happen on my own PC though, same browser.
I have never understood why the forum isn't separate from the rest of the stuff?
At the fear of sounding like a stuck record, yet again I have struggled to use the site this morning. Endless 502 bad gateways and a new one to me '405 not allowed'. When the chat summary page does refresh, it's often an old, hours out of date version. No issues with any other website.
I know I'm opening myself to accusations of whingeing but **** me it's frustrating!
@blokeuptheroad JPA is more reliable than this and that's a proper shit system. 😉😂
^^😆
Looks like they just turned it off and back on again. Speedy now.
Maybe it needs treating like Windows 95 and have a weekly scheduled reboot at like 3am on a Sunday.
Oh no it's not, random 502 errors all over the place. I'm really questioning my subscription when it comes up next year. It's always been OK for me as a paid user but the last couple of months........
502 Bad Gateway is the Chrome thumbnail for this site on my desktop PC
😀
And only 2 free members in the complainers. 😉
😀
<Whispers> For the last few weeks the forum's been the most stable I've seen it in quite some time....</Whispers>
Yeah, forget that, it 502'd when I hit submit.....
I opened a load of tabs, after I clicked to open this one the ones after all 502'd.
Maybe if you don't look it doesn't exist?
Hi folks. Tech is (and has been) looking into it, and has been trying to figure out the problem. They're currently looking at whether it's the Megasack entry forms that's causing the problem - the timing seems to suggest this may be the case. It's as frustrating for us as it is for you, so please be reassured it's getting Tech's full attention.
@stwhannah I reckon it's more do do with the PSA's that aren't PSA's and the missing links. It's caused a disturbance in the force.
and it has been happening long before mega sack started.
Why don’t you sack off the historical posts and just do a new forum
It's not even like you can update the threads as they're closed after a year or so...
Sure, some are informational, that goes without saying... but i think a new forum on a completely different platform has to be an option.
I'll be the first to admit my forum is a lot smaller than here, we only have 300,000 posts (in 2 years) but using PHP i never get these issues... maybe twice a year when the host it's sitting on has a problem... but i mean really really rarely.
I don't know what to say really. Today has been unbearable at our end. One error after another that is directly related to the megasack comp. The software we use (and pay for) for the forms and data collection for some reason is causing havoc to our server. It's the excat same software we used last year and the year before that. It's exasperating and I can only apologise. We are ding everything we can to keep the site up and running along with the megasack competition. This is on top of ongoing, random server errors that we continue to try and track. Our server is plenty powerful.. We run Google cloud servers (2 of them) one with 16 cores and one with 4 (database). Honetsly we should be able to run the internet itself off the grunt that can kick out.
Honestly, I'm personally at my wits end here and I totally appreciate the frustrations for you guys. This is not the service I want to offer. But with extremely limited and rapidly shrinking resources each day we survive is a victory although it's doing nothing for my health.
We will fix it. Or we'll collapse trying.
I've explained a bit about how the stack here works in the past but it is as far from being just a forum as you can get really. By that I mean we run a forum. BBPress is the software. It's common and supported and fits perfectly into Wordpress. But our forum is linked across multiple database in order to do things that out of the box it cannot do and that's where it gets really complex. Access to the forum and how it is used and who uses it is directly related to memberships, content access through paywalls and directly into multiple payment systems that manage the membership system. Add on to that API connections to discount providers and app access and it becomes a very complicated stack to manage. as I said, we have enough server grunt to run a small economy - we have software that is paid for and supported but we also have conflicts that are frustratingly hard to track down. Running just a forum is easy. There are many on here who have done it and still do it and don't have our issues. What we have is scale (hundreds of thousands of users), complexity and **** all money to spend managing it.
It must seem so simple to fix from the other side of the wire. It's just a website with a forum. But we have 2 people to manage it when other similar media sites, like PB and Bike Radar have teams. It's beyond frustrating and it's ridiculously hard to fix with just 8 of us running the whole ship.
As I intimated earlier in the thread Mark there is a huge reserve of goodwill for you guys. We know things are on a shoestring and you are doing what you can. But in the last couple of weeks it's been almost unusable at times as a subscriber.
It does help a lot when you come on here and explain the issues and how you're trying to resolve them. The frustration mounts when people comment, we hear nothing and it feels like (probably incorrectly) nothing is happening to resolve the issues.
I really, really hope you get it sorted. I love it here, I just want to be able to check in without constant crashes. I get that you want that too. Good luck! 👍
Echo @blokeuptheroad. Must be hellish frustrating for you guys. Thanks for the update. 👍