Are we back?

[herbie747]

8 hours ago, Moo said:

Sorry about this - this was a calamity of technical errors and boring life ones.

I will look into having a "dead man's switch" that will open up a backup chat or lighter weight community when the server is throwing errors or uncontactable. That way at least there is something - rather than a useless error page.

As I mentioned on the announcement above - please do email moo@ukff.com if you notice us down and pop "TKO" at the start of the subject line - it helps just in case alerting fails.

Do Invision still update and support their forum software? I spent so much time on Invision forums around 20 years ago, but this is the only one I still visit now. 

[Moo]

25 minutes ago, herbie747 said:

Do Invision still update and support their forum software? I spent so much time on Invision forums around 20 years ago, but this is the only one I still visit now. 

They do - we pay a fairly cheeky license fee for them to build a whole heap of stuff that isn't really that useful. I apply all security updates pretty regularly. Unclear to me if this database corruption was related to them but feels quite unlikely - to be fair to them, we haven't had any significant bugs caused by their upgrades that I can remember in many, many years.

@Ronnie was telling me they are eventually going to force everyone off self-install/self-hosted and onto their SaaS / Cloud offering which is much more lucrative for them. If/When that happens, I'll switch us to something else.

[The Reverend]

Thank fuck we're back - thought we may be off and I'd miss the obligatory annual, this time x years ago (32 this year) this happened on August 31st. 

[Ronnie]

9 hours ago, herbie747 said:

Do Invision still update and support their forum software? I spent so much time on Invision forums around 20 years ago, but this is the only one I still visit now. 

They're currently alpha-testing version 5, which will only be available on their cloud platform. (They lose a lot of support time to hosting problems. This new version requires quite a sophisticated set-up which isn't part of a standard hosting package.)

That's a lot more expensive than their current self-hosted licence, where you only pay for the apps you want. Their model going forward is to provide all their apps in one bundle, which is overkill here. (Although would help the cash-flow situation, since they have a module to manage membership, ie pay to become a paido, then get removed from that group if you don't pay the renewal price.)

The version we use here is planned to become End of Life in 25/26, so won't receive upgrades or support thereafter. It will still work into the future until the server removes the latest version of PHP that the software can run on once that has become obsolete. Some hosting companies keep these versions long into the future; others keep follow the life cycle more closely.

[Johnnyreggae]

So glad its back! Been on here daily for the last 12 years. I was getting withdrawal symptoms. 

[DCW]

Delighted this is back. Resorted to Twitter and even breached squaredcircle on Reddit before I remembered why I actively avoid both of those shiteshows! Ian on Twitter provided some respite at least.

Also, probably a stupid question, but how do you go about becoming a paid member here? I really appreciate this little corner of wrestling internet and fried breakfast sanity, so interested in contributing something!

[Onyx2]

42 minutes ago, DCW said:

how do you go about becoming a paid member here? 

https://donate.ukff.com/

[Scratch]

I just had an error message for about 5 mins so tried the TKO email to Moo. 
 

 

But now it’s working again, so hopefully a minor glitch.

[Moo]

11 hours ago, Scratch said:

I just had an error message for about 5 mins so tried the TKO email to Moo. 
 

 

But now it’s working again, so hopefully a minor glitch.

Thanks for testing the TKO system! I want to spend some time digging into this - because it has happened sporadically for a fair while but I was never able to find exactly what is causing it. It normally recovers quickly and this time my own alerting picked up the downtime and the recovery too, so that's a positive!

[CavemanLynn]

"Argo Tunnel Error" sounds like a euphemism for pooing wrong, well on brand.

[Moo]

I caught a couple of blips today and it's memory usage on the server I think causing everything to fall over. I have found at least one culprit and will experiment from here.