Notice – STW any issues ?

I was running two browsers before I gave up and created a second account.

… I should probably add, I sought Mark’s permission before creating a second account. We’ve been using it to help troubleshoot, I can compare performance on otherwise identical setups. I was probably one of the worst affected because I’m one of the most prolific posters. I intend to mothball this when the issue is resolved or the new forum gets greenlit.

I may be speaking prematurely but…

… is the search working? I just searched for something and got what I was looking for on the first hit.

The error that’s been reported about twenty times now

One presumes that some change was made that introduced this error, in which case backing out the change would have been the traditional approach.

… assuming that having the error is a worse scenario than not having whatever the change changed.

Rolling back is always an option, but usually the last one.

The members discount area, for me at least, didn’t work at the beginning of last week, worked at the end of the week and now requests an email to send a code to for access, which doesn’t work.

Edit: posting function worked fine, despite some sort of WordPress error message which going back to the ‘previous page’ resolved

Sorry to pile on, but Jesus wept the slowness is awful. Click on a focus post and…… open a new tab, browse a few BBC articles, check Guardian, etc etc- and finally link opens back on STW.

It’s never been brilliant, but this is really awful. Sorry to make snarky comments, but I supported in multiple ways for the forum upgrade and all I’ve seen is more limited forum functionality and this terrible, experience killing, slowness. Dudes, what needs to happen to get this ship sailing again?

Came here to post that I’m getting that error / message also, safari on Mac, IPad and IPhone.

Same error message every time I post on a thread now…

…I understand the desire to hold onto the old forum data, SEO and search rankings but surely we’ve come to the point were existing users are getting increasing peeved (and less likely to renew membership) and no new users will pay for such shonkiness.

Refresh page; ad, ad, ad… Including 3 for Canyon. Went to log in, assuming that I’d somehow been logged out, but I was still logged in. Clicked on Forum and the refresh had no ads. Random.

… assuming that having the error is a worse scenario than not having whatever the change changed.

Worse than the users getting an error on every single post?

The site today is slower than I’ve ever known it to be.

I’m just going to sack it off for a few days.

Teletext was faster than this.

Also getting the critical error message when I post a reply. Firefox on MacOS.

The members discount area, for me at least, didn’t work at…

Now working.

Still getting the WordPress error message but, as noted above, the posting works!

I’m a messy browser type – multiple tabs open and STW is a perma tab – logged in.

Yes, the site is crazy slow on…everything. Android phone, chromebook, home laptop (all Chrome) and work machines. (edge) Just tried the log out thing – yep, about a hundred times faster. Not just the STW, but every tab is possibly now faster…which is weird.

So I think I’ll refrain from posting (no loss to the world there) and stay logged out. I’m working on the premise that I don’t see ads when logged in as a P, so the powers that be won’t take offence if I take measures to not be slowed by the ads logged out whilst the logged in performance is improved. Good luck.

Bloody hell, the site is 7 billion times faster when not logged in. However, you don’t get all of the latest replies when you click on a thread so I guess there is some kind of caching going on? Refreshing the thread gets the latest posts. Doing this is still about a million times faster than clicking when logged in which is regularly taking more than 20 seconds.

Soooo sloooooow just now as above it’s way better being logged out.

< logs out>

Noticeably the slowest site I use – by a country mile.

And now I’m getting that WordPress error that other (paying) subscribers are getting.

much faster for me now!

still get adds on front page though

and I get the WordPress error page when posting

Yes, I’m logged in.

A refresh restores the ad-free experience.

It seems we get a new issue every few days without any of the older issues being resolved. I’m wondering if STW is involved in some sort of social experiment to see just how much paying subscribers will put up with.

I’m wondering if STW is involved in some sort of social experiment to see just how much paying subscribers will put up with.

Unless there’s a marked improvement in the next few months (March when my sub ends) I won’t be renewing.

Unless there’s a marked improvement in the next few months (March when my sub ends) I won’t be renewing.

I don’t believe STW are deliberately experimenting on us, so I’m going to carry on subscribing, assuming that they need our support more than ever while trying to get the forum working again.

UPDATE: We are testing a new forum. For those interested in these things the strong candidate at the moment is WPForo. The important criteria is not that it works as a forum but that it works as a forum AND integrates with the rest of our systems (Subscriptions, editorial, membership etc.). So far WPForo seem sto do all of that.

It will take some time to get it operational but so far we seem to have succeeded in importing most of teh existing forum into it on our development server. The performance issue that regular forum users are experiencing right now is down to the inability of BBPress (Current forum) to be able to cope with the sheer quantity of posts – despite our attempts it’s not something that can be fixed – so it’s WPForo in the new year.

The way we plan to implement it is in phases. Currently we are testing that it can exist NEXT to BBPress on the server without them falling out with each other. This is so when we launch it we can do so in a small, controlled way – probably as a replacement for just one current forum (Chat, bike, news, members, women). If that goes smoothly or after we iron out the bugs, we’ll roll it out as a replacement for all the forums.

We should not need to keep the old forum as an archive if we can successfully import all the topics back to 2009 and there be no performance issues. But we haven’t ruled out a partial import of say the last few years and retaining the old forum as some kind of read only archive.

Thanks for the update

When I’m in Browsing Mode (i.e. not logged in) as opposed to Dear Ghod This Is Slow Even Though I Paid For It (logged in) mode, the threads are not updated correctly, i.e. the index shows that the latest post is by Fred Bloggs, 10 secs ago, but when I click through the latest post displayed is by Jim Smith, 20 mins ago,

test

Update appreciated Mark.

We’ll keep everything crossed for you.

Anyone else unable to upload photo’s at the moment? I get the error message saying it is either bigger thasn 10mb or the wrong format. The photos in question are 2mb and 6mb jpgs????

Thanks for the update Mark. [inserts thumbs-up emoji]

In the knowledge a new forum is on the way is it worth pausing this thread rather than having us moan about issues that can’t be fixed?

Would help tech focus on the new forum too.

Anyone else unable to upload photo’s at the moment?

Dunno, I’ll try (edit – seems fine)

@simondbarnes, show off 🙂 weird, i can put a pic of my dog but not of a crankset. Guessing it’s a problem my end

Fingers crossed, but that persistent WP error seems to have been knocked on the head.

Would help tech focus on the new forum too.

Don’t worry. They are very focused on the new forum.

Thanks Mark, fingers toes and other bits crossed for a successful migration!

I have asked Santa for a functional, speedy STW forum for 2025. Although to be be fair I can’t claim to have been a good boy, so maybe someone else should ask him!

I get the error message saying it is either bigger thasn 10mb or the wrong format. The photos in question are 2mb and 6mb jpgs????

Try physically resizing it. I had this like 30 pages ago, resizing it to 800×600 fixed it.

test

how close are we to seeing the return of “threads I’ve posted on”. Fed up going back page by page as the list is not available and the search is not good enough

Bloody hell, the site is 7 billion times faster when not logged in. However, you don’t get all of the latest replies when you click on a thread so I guess there is some kind of caching going on? Refreshing the thread gets the latest posts.

the threads are not updated correctly, i.e. the index shows that the latest post is by Fred Bloggs, 10 secs ago, but when I click through the latest post displayed is by Jim Smith, 20 mins ago,

Mark answered this a couple of pages ago:

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.

Can anyone advise if the message function working or not?

@johnjn2000 it’s not just you, I get the same message on iOS on my phone but not my Mac.

Gratuitous dog pic to show it works on the Mac.