Notice – STW any issues ?

Trying to post a new topic …….sigh

Ok clearing site data and reloading has worked in conjunction with whatever you’ve done in the back end.  It’s almost slick, the only slow bit being posting new posts . Good work guys, you’re getting there!

Very slow. Not the type of thing you’d expect in this day and age.

Still seeing that the forum doesn’t update properly unless I’m logged in.

Browser 1, logged in, all looks correct and everything updates with new posts as expected:

Browser 2, not logged in:

Nothing changes when I refresh this page multiple times.

(another minor thing – I notice the text “Viewing 41 post (of 41 total)” is a bit weird)

On browser 2 (not logged in) the thread shows on the list as:

I used the browser’s private mode so there should be no local cache messing things up (this happens on multiple PCs, anyway)

That’s actually deliberate.

The forum needs to avoid being cached if we want to see the very latest posts. But not caching a database powered page is very heavy on the resources especially with the very high page view rates we get. So we have a very short cache period set for logged out users of something like 10 minutes (It may not be that I can’t remember). We reserve the zero caching for logged in users. It’s a trade off kind of thing. We prioritise logged in users for the latest versions of the page.

We could set the entire forum to not be cached at all even for logged out users but that does come at a price in terms of page load performance, especailly at peak times like lunchtimes an early evening.

One thing you can do is a hard refresh on the forum index page if you are logged out and want a new page. Hard refresh on Chrome Mac is Command R on the keyboard. That requests a version of the page from the database rather than the cache.

The current issues we are dealing with are related to the problem of some users not being able to login and it telling them their password is wrong. We know this is linked to cache settings for the site, which are extremely and neccessarily complicated. (I have the settings in a text file and they are 3000+ words long and span 30 pages). We have the WP VIP engineers looking at this with Anthony at the moment. Performance problems over the weekend were down to these caching issues and until we find and fix the login bug we may need to make tweaks and changes to the cache settings which could cause things to slow up again for logged in users. We are trying to keep those instances to a minimum though.

Thanks for the explanation 🙂

Hope you get it all running smoothly soon and the WP VIP is worth the investment, for your own peace of mind if nothing else!

Thank you for the update. I’m by no means a IT person so I don’t fully understand what it means but thanks anyway.

How many previous pages do I need to read to get the current fix? I’ve got singletrackworld.com/forum as my most common page on chrome. That fails to load. I change it to singletrackworld.com/community and that slowly loads, but the URL of the loaded page is singletrackworld.com/forum.
The site is very slow to load.
On this thread page someone says it is faster, so what do I need to do to get that?
If I try http://www.singlwtrackworld.com/forum, it loads the forum but has me logged out. When I log in, it loads singletrack world.com.
So still an incredibly slow sore and still not loading properly for me, it does appear some people are having success so what do I need to do?
Thanks.

I know there have been reasonable questions about the WP VIP investment. It was meant to fix everything right? Well despite these current issues it pretty much has. The few 502 or error pages that have cropped up have been down to us changing things  and chasing down a bug rather than the server itself falling over. In the 6 months we’ve been in VIP the server has hardly broken a sweat. Of course if we then **** up the code it looks like it’s not working. Cost wise it’s around £10k/year more expensive than our previous server, which is a lot cheaper than employing another developer to try and make the old server work. Howere, as I’ve said, we don’t get to pay that bill over time anymore which makes it very stressful when money is as hard to come by as I can ever remember. This stress has been making me pretty ill over the last few weeks, which is why I’ve not been on here explaining things as well as I wanted to. It’s going to remain stressful until January as far as I can see, however, the site will stay up and it while I’m doing everything I can to keep the Singletrack bank account operational Anthony, Andy and the VIP engineers are working solidly on making the logged in user experience as good as it can possibly be. Have you tried it logged out and in a clean browser? That’s how fast I want it to be for members 24/7.

Can someone please turn off the stupid plugin that converts Amazon links to blank Kindle links as below? It’s been like this for years and it shouldn’t be hard to post a link in 2024!

Eg.

On a separate note, is the present WordPress bickering and rapid development of migration tools providing any motivation to move to another platform?

Mark, forum issues aside. I hope cashflow or whatever else needs to happen to ease the stress a little happens. Stress is shit, I hope there’s a light in the tunnel on that score.

tried twice to post a new thread now.  both times hit ‘submit’, page has refreshed, but no post.

cue 2 new threads in a few minutes?  darent try a third one yet.

EDIT:  cant be the same for everyone as others are posting new threads.  any ideas?

Squirrelking,

If only we were a big corp with teams of developers. Moving to a new platform would involve migrating millions of database entries for the forum alone. We could decide to start again on a new platform but then we’d lose years of SEO and have to deal with millions of broken links out there in the internets. It really would be the nuclear option of starting from scratch and while we are still so reliant on high levels of traffic that just isn’t a viable option right now. We are actually toying with the idea of archiving and making read only a large chunk of the forum in order to improve performance for the heaviest forum users. This is not to be confused with the current policy of closing old threads. Those threads still exist in our database and get searched and reindexed every time there’s an update to the forum. It turns out that dealing with 15 years of forum posts is quite tricky.

Mark – really sorry to hear that this has been causing you so much stress. I’m sure that the vast majority of users here would agree that whilst we do get a bit grumpy when we can’t use this place as well as we’d like, that’s only because we like it so much. And slow page loads isn’t worth you getting sick over.

I hope things improve for you soon, and that your health is OK. Big hugs!

Logging out and the forum is seriously fast (and for some reason singletrackworld.com/forum also works)…I had cleared out all my cookies and other data before doing this, but once logged in, same issues – very slow load times and singletrackworld.com/forum isn’t responding.

I was getting a few Ezoic errors over the last few days – same as those posted earlier in the thread. It is good to hear things are underway to get this tracked down and resolved. It is never easy when you have end users moaning about things and the fix isn’t just a quick 30 seconds click.

Seems to be working better but still taking in excess of 10 seconds to load pages and when navigating the site my iMac fan has kicked in and I keep getting “this web page is using significant energy, Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac”, I’ve never heard the fan in the 4 years I’ve owned it.

I’ll clear cookies/cache and restart to see if it makes any difference

@mark I don’t know much about it but it was a discussion point recently and there are migration tools out there. Seemingly it’s never been easier as a lot of folk have the same problem. Also appreciate it still costs but I can’t see how it isn’t inevitable sooner or later.

FWIW I can’t imagine any big Corp runs their site on WordPress.

Al jazerra, time magazine, vogue, cnn, BBC America, Mercedes Benz

all on WordPress to name but a few.

we are on WordPress VIP at their lowest corporate tier of $30k/year

oh and Spotify.

Image hosting is now borked

It’s not wordpress that’s the issue I suspect it’s the forum plugin. I don’t think any of those big corps run a forum do they? It’s a dying business model

For some reason I rarely ever experience the issues most people post up here… but over the last day I’ve had a lot of “There has been a critical error on this website” messsages.

First it was on PC Edge (but not Firefox on PC or IOS). Then it was on Firefox PC as well… now it’s only on IOS but fine on PC.

Wasn’t us that time. VIP engineers broke our site for a bit following a WP update.

Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. It happened again for about an hour … on all browsers.

It was meant to fix everything right? Well despite these current issues it pretty much has.

I hate to sound negative but it really hasn’t. It still (even before this week) takes 7-10s to browse between pages. Back 12 months ago it took 1s… All other forums take 1s. That’s harsh i know, but click>open not click>>>>>> >>>>> >>>>> open is just how it should work.

That back 6 months ago was the issue for many ‘loading time’ or opening time if you’d prefer. I accept it wasn’t necessarily the issue that you guys felt was the massive problem but i can tell you from reading threads and this one in particular, performance is a major issue.

Add to that the PM issues, Pictures, Smileys…

Well it’s just not really any better as a user perspective than it was 12 months back.

We are actually toying with the idea of archiving and making read only a large chunk of the forum in order to improve performance for the heaviest forum users.

Forgive my daftness, but most older threads are closed to new replies anyway, so how is this different to archiving them?

I usually don’t get the problems that most people complain about but for the last few days the forum has been painfully slow to use. Page loads are taking ages and posting is making the page freeze for 15-20 seconds.

Painfully slow….

This stress has been making me pretty ill over the last few weeks, which is why I’ve not been on here explaining things as well as I wanted to. It’s going to remain stressful until January as far as I can see, however, the site will stay up and it while I’m doing everything I can to keep the Singletrack bank account operational

Ok I feel churlish for moaning now. Just do what you can but prioritise your own health.

Hope WP are giving the support you need.

The big corporation I work for uses WP for all our sites BTW, it’s getting more of an industry standard, not less IMO

Forgive my daftness, but most older threads are closed to new replies anyway, so how is this different to archiving them?

This.

Seems like a good idea but does changing the write status do much though?

The only issue with that could be searching across two databases but since the search doesn’t work anyway that’s a moot point.

Closing threads and making them read only doesn’t remove them from the database. A proper archive would mean they are latticed somewhere else.

we have several lines of attack on this. Working through some now. Some could improve what we have and others are more fundamental and bigger projects. I’ll try and keep you updated.

I may have missed it, but why are you tied into WP so much ?

Do other forums/sites have the same issues as over here ?

I honestly use a fair few forums using different back-ends and none have the same issues as here in terms of performance.

I understand that this ‘place’ is more than just a forum. I guess the closest are MTBR.com and Pinkbike.com, what do they use as their back end ?

It’s saddening that this is affecting your health and to be honest mate, if it were me, i’d close the forum and keep the ‘site/mag’ active instead. If the forum is that much of an issue, kick it into touch.

We could decide to start again on a new platform but then we’d lose years of SEO and have to deal with millions of broken links out there in the internets

Got to give a big +1 to this.   I’ve had to deal a couple of times now with the fallout from someone coming in and just replacing an existing site with a WP version because it’s great (read ‘what they know’ because they’ve tinkered before).   In one case it took 5 years to get traffic back to previous levels because it was done so badly.   I can’t imagine what that would do to stress levels in STW towers

Anyone got a working link to their forum history?

Using Chrome, the forum home page looks like this. That’s on a Win10 desktop. On that machine, it works fine using Edge. On another Win10 desktop, it works fine on Chrome.

We’ve gone a day with no reported issues – something must be going right! 🙂

It’s certainly sped-up over the last couple of days.

Keep up the good work. [insert thumbs-up emoji]

We’ve gone a day with no reported issues – something must be going right! ?

Still *super* slow here but at least not getting errors now.

Still got that delay before page load, but when it loads it loads really fast. In my experience, when stuff behaves like this there is something that is waiting for a timeout. All you need to do is find out which bit of code it is…

That’s much, much better.

Possibly a daft question but is there an app option for forum and would this help in any way? STW is about the only thing I access on my phone via a browser. At user end, apps are much cleaner. I assume same data issues exist at the other end but I’m honestly interested to know what is involved in supplying an app.