Notice – STW any issues ?

More of this just now

I was watching the server at the time of that 502. This is the data I was seeing. Top shows the delay to users in page loading (response time). Middle shows requests. Blue = 200 and red = 302. Bottom shows disk write operations. The spike in 302 indicates that it’s a bot having a mad crawl of our site. Not all bots are bad but occasionally they can cause havoc like this. Seems to have gone now. Lasted about 5 minutes. The number of extra requests would have caused some requests to get queued up and once the queue was full the next requests get the dreaded 502.

What we want to get to is a server set up that will autoscale itself in terms of resources in order to deal with these sudden increases in requests – even when they come from bots. More on that tomorrow.

Anyway, thought you might appreciate a little insight into what just happened.

Would it be possible to change classifieds image upload so that it strips location data please. Bit of a security hole there (for the poster)! The in thread image upload appears to do this already.

Thanks for the update Mark.  I should mention that I often get 502 errors mid afternoon, most days tbh (yep, retired and spend way too much time on here).  Does that pattern of it often happening around the same time help you deal with it?

We use a third part for image uploading for the classifieds. We’ll definitely look into it but it may not be something we can fix easily. I’ll let you know what we find out.

Thanks Mark.

Life member for quite a while, but I have to say this site is the slowest one I use by a huge margin. I guess I have got used to it but the interminable wait between every page loading does sort of limit my use of the site (unless slightly drunk where I don’t care) Is STW sponsored by the breweries?

Never been able to insert a photo from my phone, get a message saying permissions need setting, but adding images is allowed in settings. Not sure if this is an Android/Edge issue or the website.

Just tried to donate to the 502, and it wanted £2.82 for postage!

Oddly it seems that depsite selecting no postage it is still adding it for some people. Fixing that now.

Have just worked out what I am doing wrong with the quote function

Still no quote buttons etc.
Just a white box only.

Tried clearing cache and cookies.

Still nothing.

Android
Chrome

I’ve got no box to start a new forum post – checked on PC using Edge and Mac using Safari.

Still unable to upload images to the classifieds – gets to 100% uploaded but then doesn’t do anything else. Tried on various devices and browsers and with resized images.

I’m sure you don’t want to prevent the good people of STW from seeing my OLFI 1.5 Black action cam with a variety of mtb specific mounts in excellent condition which I’m selling for the low low price of £75. 😉

iPhone. I can’t click classified link in menu as ad is in the way.

I’ve noticed issues with some for sale posts in the classifieds. In particular on the below link I can’t find a way to message the seller and the button that I can see on some posts is missing. I’ve clicked on the sellers username but I also can’t seem to message him directly that way.

https://singletrackworld.com/advert/schwalbe-racing-ralph-29×2-25/

I’ve had this issue on mobile and desktop devices, using Firefox/Internet Explorer.

Thanks STW!

Aha. That will be because the seller has turned off PMs in their account settings. That’s an issue that we can perhaps solve with some better signposting and notices for sellers when they are creating their ad. Make sure your privacy settings will allow people to contact you. We’ll definitely work on that. Thanks for the pointer there – very helpful.

The issue with the comments not being available on classifieds is because we chose not to allow them in order to stop ad comment spam and also because currently the software doesn’t alert sellers to a new comment being posted on their ad. Sellers needed to keep checking back in to their ad to make sure they don’t miss any important communication in the comments. Using the PM system fixes that because users get alerts when they get a PM. However, we see the issue here when a user has privacy settings set so tight that they can’t get PMs. That’s not the sellers fault – the system should be able to cope with that and allow messages to come in. We can look to develop notifications for comments too so we can reactivate comments on ads.

This will definitely be on the list to develop when we get the server migration done.

I’ve got no box to start a new forum post – checked on PC using Edge and Mac using Safari.

Are you in the overview ‘forum’ rather than bike or chat? Create new post only appears in https://singletrackworld.com/forum/forum/off-topic/ and https://singletrackworld.com/forum/forum/bike-forum/ but not https://singletrackworld.com/forum/

Nerdy question @mark. Do you use Cloudflare or similar to try to prevent bots causing all that extra load?

Not cloudflare but er.. something else. That’s a question Anthony or Andy could answer in detail.

Aha. That will be because the seller has turned off PMs in their account settings. That’s an issue that we can perhaps solve with some better signposting and notices for sellers when they are creating their ad. Make sure your privacy settings will allow people to contact you. We’ll definitely work on that.

Thanks Mark, appreciate it.

How do you post a new topic?

Start in the forum you want to post to.
scroll to the bottom of that forum.
new post box is there.

To start a new topic go into Chat or Bike section and scroll to the bottom

I’ve been having ongoing issues with the Full Member photo/image button

Variety of messages after trying to upload mostly of the check it’s a valid file format (it is) and it’s under the size limit (it is).

It’s not all the time but it is every time I try and upload a photo from a mobile device (Android/Chrome).

Ezoic’s being silly:

Also had it “verifying your browser, won’t be long” for almost 40 seconds 🙄

The site in general seems to have slowed to crawl in the last few minutes.

Yes it bloody will!

When that happens it’s usually a defence mechanism against a DDOS attack. It essentially puts the brakes on requests to the site. Requests count right now have doubled in the last 10 minutes. It should pass when the attack realises it’s not getting anywhere.

Thank you but I cannot see any way to post a new topic.

Edit if I switch from firefox focus it does indeed show a new topic and post box , bizzarre, and apologies.

i know you guys are working hard but you did ask! It seems you have set “click return to send” in the messages section. Please turn it off. Messaging on a phone and trying to avoid a “line break less” black of text results in multiple messages. plus here a return creates a double line break  more clunkyness

And why oh why if I leave this page during posting does my text disappear? Up to date iPhone chrome browser

Plus, something I’ve written in about before – in messages I’ve a flag in on the icon that shows 5 unread whereas they are all read.

I’ve one very old message that is stick on unread (red dot) despite my attempting to get rid of it. I’ve hidden it but it’s still there with its red dot 🔴 Clunky!!

Agree with the above, having your message ‘send’ when all you wanted was a line break is annoying.  Also, you effectively get two notifications every time you get a message and have to clear them both to shift the red dot.  One telling you you have a new notification, one telling you you have a new message.

Those are ‘features’ in the software we use (Ultimate Members) and while we agree those are issues that could be better, it’s software we pay for and not our own software. Essentially what this means is we could get into the code and make the changes but any changes we make to the code would be overwritten with each subsequent update that comes from the vendor. We’d need to remember to go in and re-do our fix each time there’s an update. We can, however, make it a feature request and inform the vendor and hope they make those changes in a future update.

Moral of the story here is that the code of the site is made up of a mix of software we have written and software we have bought and is supported by a third party. Some things are relatively simple for us to modify and others are a case of passing along the request to the support team at the various software developers.

My intention with this response is just in order to manage expectations and also to let you know we are listening.

Thanks Mark.  It’s a minor irritation and doesn’t warrant being anywhere near the top of your to do list, but if the supplier can fix it at some stage in the future, that would be great.

Malware reported by the usually relaible Malwarebytes today on the STW site.

That’s not malware. That’s our video server.

No link/quote/image buttons in the editor. Firefox Windows 10

Ditto no buttons except for image. Android 14.

Ditto also error message rejecting a photo upload for being more than 10MB when it’s 100KB. Windows 10 PC.

Are we getting the non-fancy editor back? The fancy one is a random mess.

As I’ve said, we haven’t deliberately deactivated it. It’s a bug. It’s on the list to be fixed. Worst case is it’s been deprecated by the software vendor. But right now we don’t know. The main focus of tech work at the moment is server migration. To manage expectations only major bugs will likely get attention until we’ve made that move.

Would it be possible to change classifieds image upload so that it strips location data please. Bit of a security hole there (for the poster)! The in thread image upload appears to do this already.

Burglars’ goldmine really. I reported it privately by email over a year ago.

We use a third part for image uploading for the classifieds. We’ll definitely look into it but it may not be something we can fix easily. I’ll let you know what we find out.

Perhaps as a low-effort fix a notice could be added near the “I own the copyright” box? Could link to a page or forum post with an explanation of how to use the Windows properties dialog to remove the metadata.