EBR on the fritz: Very slow responses, glitchy posting, no search

[Jeremy McCreary]

For a day or so last week, all EBR forum links returned a "down for maintenance" page (paraphrasing here). Then it came back up with fluctuating response times ranging from instant to several minutes. Posting, image uploading, and post editing have also been glitchy, and now I see that the search function is out. None of this seems to be improving.

All of which leads me to wonder how motivated the new owners are to keep the forum side of EBR alive? Must be expensive to host the uploaded images alone. Does the forum side still have a viable business case?

Case in point: From 2010 to 2017 or so, I was active in a large FREE international adult LEGO forum called MOCpages, where the 'MOC" stood for "my own creation" (LEGO-speak for a build that's either a substantial mod of an official set or not a set at all).

EBR reminds me a lot of MOCpages. MOCpages members put a lot of talent, time, and effort into their MOCs and write-ups thereof, often with lots of photos — just like we share our ebikes, mods, and rides on EBR.

Long story short, growth brought performance issues as hosting and maintenance costs soared. Admin eventually stopped responding to the mounting bug reports. And then one day, MOCpages and all its member-generated content just vanished.

Hope that's not where we're headed here.

 

[chunk]

Yeah, I've noticed the same thing here.

 

[PCeBiker]

I can't upload my pictures anymore. Apparently the files are too large now.
So I take a screenshot of my pictures and upload them instead.

I was on a Mazda forum for my car and used photobucket to store my pictures and post a link to the pictures.

Photo Bucket was free for years then out of nowhere, they started charging $300 a year and held all of my pictures ransom.

I managed to get into Photo Bucket one last time to download all my pictures before I was locked out, but none of the posted links worked and I just had a big file with hundreds of pictures.


There were all kinds of build threads where guys spent years and 10's of thousands of dollars on their cars, and all the photos vanished.

I'd suggest to anyone here to have a copy of your photos saved.
The Mazda forum is still up and running and you can upload directly to the forum now, but all kinds of awesome pictures and information was lost.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

That's why I advocate for having the second "foot", such as being FB or Strava friends Jeremy to keep in touch when the EBR goes belly up.

Could you @Admin explain what has happened?

 

[m@Robertson]

New owners?
There is definitely a new image size limit. I tried to upload a 3.19mb 4000x3000 image native from my phone and it was refused as too big. I downsized it to the 4k standard (3840x2880) with 80% jpg quality, which yielded a 1.26mb image and it was accepted (below). This is still an image so large it is WAY bigger than anyone's screen. The forum could do this downsizing on its own, but that incurs processing power, so its on us now. Which is kinda fair, really. As an ex-db admin for a very large automotive forum, and the builder of a very VERY large vehicle broker site that handled literally thousands of uploaded multiple-listing images every day, I have a pretty good idea of how much even BLOB-stored (in the database, not discrete files on disk) images eat up processing power.

 

[m@Robertson]

Also, EBR is not my only ebike discussion group. Frankly this ebike forum has - by far - the most vitriolic anti-ebike members of any ebike discussion group I belong to. Spread your wings and dig into a variety of Facebook groups, and other forums. Make this site a single stop on a tour of several and your experience will be a LOT more diverse, canceling out the echo chamber effect that you can't help but get when hearing the same core group voicing opinions over and over again.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

I have almost always been resizing my photos down to 960 px on the horizontal or 720 px on the vertical. Unfortunately, the EBRF (unlike other forums I participated in) always allowed very big pictures to be uploaded.

 

[m@Robertson]

I have almost always been resizing my photos down to 960 px on the horizontal or 720 px on the vertical. Unfortunately, the EBRF (unlike other forums I participated in) always allowed very big pictures to be uploaded.

Yeah that practice has made us lazy, and people who don't have a lot of breadth of experience think they are being shortchanged somehow by having to think about stuff like responsibly sizing imagery. In 2025 our browsers are much more capable of showing big images zoomed in to show all kinds of tiny useful detail (my desktop monitor is a 40" diagonal with massive pixel resolution) but the costs of hosting servers and paying for disk space and bandwidth hasn't gone down one bit.

 

[DaveMatthews]

All the pics I put up are hosted by a 3rd party, so they are merely links. Much less weight for these servers.
In any case, yes it's been dayum spotty for sure...

 

[PCeBiker]

Yeah that practice has made us lazy, and people who don't have a lot of breadth of experience think they are being shortchanged somehow by having to think about stuff like responsibly sizing imagery.

I suck at technology and don't really know what I'm doing.

I tried taking pictures from further away and using full zoom on my camera (digital zoom) to reduce the size but my phone is all shaky when I zoom in.

I'll just keep taking screenshots of my photos and cropping them as much as possible to reduce the size.

I didn't know that I had to take responsibility for that?

Why can't the forum itself reduce the picture size?
I can take a picture with my phone and send it as a text and it automatically gets reduced in size.

Why can't our uploads to this forum be handled the same way?

Maybe I can text my photos in to this forum?

 

[Jeremy McCreary]

There is definitely a new image size limit.

Totally understand why this might be necessary for EBR's long-term viability. Would just like to know what the new limit is so I can prep images accordingly.

Hope members can manage to stay civil about changes to come. Everyone has their own struggles, including the folks who provide the EBR forum as a much-valued FREE service. Abusive complaints aren't the way to keep this good thing going.

 

[PCeBiker]

I downsized it to the 4k standard (3840x2880) with 80% jpg quality, which yielded a 1.26mb image and it was accepted (below). This is still an image so large it is WAY bigger than anyone's screen.

I zoomed in on your picture, and it would only zoom so far, so I downloaded it and zoomed in again.

Then I took a screenshot of that,..

There's still plenty of pixels left.
The Canadian is easy to see.

I still think the forum itself should downsize the pictures for us, then people like me don't have to think about it.

 

[MartsEbike]

I don't think it's worth jumping to any conclusions just yet... There's a lot of configuration to consider when moving servers, apache/nginx php/db etc... and issues can easily occur... All will hopefully be resolved soon enough.

 

[Admin]

For a day or so last week, all EBR forum links returned a "down for maintenance" page (paraphrasing here). Then it came back up with fluctuating response times ranging from instant to several minutes. Posting, image uploading, and post editing have also been glitchy, and now I see that the search function is out. None of this seems to be improving.

All of which leads me to wonder how motivated the new owners are to keep the forum side of EBR alive? Must be expensive to host the uploaded images alone. Does the forum side still have a viable business case?

Case in point: From 2010 to 2017 or so, I was active in a large FREE international adult LEGO forum called MOCpages, where the 'MOC" stood for "my own creation" (LEGO-speak for a build that's either a substantial mod of an official set or not a set at all).

EBR reminds me a lot of MOCpages. MOCpages members put a lot of talent, time, and effort into their MOCs and write-ups thereof, often with lots of photos — just like we share our ebikes, mods, and rides on EBR.

Long story short, growth brought performance issues as hosting and maintence costs soared. Admin eventually stopped responding to the mounting bug reports. And then one day, MOCpages and all its member-generated content just vanished.

Hope that's not where we're headed here.

We are working on the issue, fyi. Thanks for the comments and heads up, and sorry for the glitches. We'll keep you updated. Also, we won't let this forum become anything close to what happened with MOCpages.

Everyone here has put too much time and effort into building this community, it would be a shame if we didn't keep it going.

 

[Admin]

That's why I advocate for having the second "foot", such as being FB or Strava friends Jeremy to keep in touch when the EBR goes belly up.

Could you @Admin explain what has happened?

Stefan, we'll let you know as soon as we get things back up and running smoothly.

I also want to re-assure you that we will not let EBR forum go belly-up. We've purposely not changed things in the forum since acquiring EBR, as we didn't want to rock the boat and/or hurt the amazing community here. We do plan on making some changes going forward, but all changes are meant to make this a better community and start interacting with everyone more. Please message us any time you see problems, or think we are making mistakes.

 

[PedalUma]

I would like photos to be automatically shrinking with time. There is no reason to have an outdated photo of 15mp. When it is topical and fresh, such as someone's new bike then fine. After five years it could be a thumbnail.

 

[steve mercier]

For a day or so last week, all EBR forum links returned a "down for maintenance" page (paraphrasing here). Then it came back up with fluctuating response times ranging from instant to several minutes. Posting, image uploading, and post editing have also been glitchy, and now I see that the search function is out. None of this seems to be improving.

All of which leads me to wonder how motivated the new owners are to keep the forum side of EBR alive? Must be expensive to host the uploaded images alone. Does the forum side still have a viable business case?

Case in point: From 2010 to 2017 or so, I was active in a large FREE international adult LEGO forum called MOCpages, where the 'MOC" stood for "my own creation" (LEGO-speak for a build that's either a substantial mod of an official set or not a set at all).

EBR reminds me a lot of MOCpages. MOCpages members put a lot of talent, time, and effort into their MOCs and write-ups thereof, often with lots of photos — just like we share our ebikes, mods, and rides on EBR.

Long story short, growth brought performance issues as hosting and maintence costs soared. Admin eventually stopped responding to the mounting bug reports. And then one day, MOCpages and all its member-generated content just vanished.

Hope that's not where we're headed here.

New owners? What is that about? What happened to Court?

 

[PCeBiker]

,.. When it is tropical and fresh-water, such as someone's new fish then fine.

Salt water fish deserve more pixels be cuz they be more colorful.
Fresh water fish don't need no pixels cuz they be bland.

 

[Gionnirocket]

I would like photos to be automatically shrinking with time. There is no reason to have an outdated photo of 15mp. When it is topical and fresh, such as someone's new bike then fine. After five years it could be a thumbnail.

There's absolutely no reason to load a high resolution massive photo files for web viewing on a phone or tablet.
A more than large enough 1920 x 1080 is only 199kb

I ask you... Does it need to look any better than this?

 

[Gionnirocket]

Salt water fish deserve more pixels be cuz they be more colorful.
Fresh water fish don't need no pixels cuz they be bland.


View attachment 188413View attachment 188414

My one time fresh water aquarium. . .