Forum Down

Stefan Mikes

Stefan Mikes

Gravel e-biker
Region
Europe
City
Mazovia, PL
The EBR Forum was down for almost a day. Can we ask the Administration for the reasons?

I was trying to convince my friends in these Forums to maintain alternative ways to communicate. Yes, I have a small bunch of EBR friends on Strava, and could find a single member on RWGPS. Probably a single friend on FB. What if the Forums go belly-up for good?
 
As an admin at other forums (none in the bike/ebike industry) as well as a server administrator for a small web site hosting farm in a previous life, I can say that... plain and simple... these things happen and should be expected from time to time. Where I graduated up from 'moderator' to 'admin' was because I knew underlying web-based database management, and how to optimize it for max throughput. Its not at all unusual for a forum like this to get 20+ db queries per second; every second. And they can involve large amounts of data thruput if the forum software is storing images in CLOB/BLOB database fields rather than as discrete files on disk.

There are also dns issues, feature upgrades that go wrong, ill-behaved search engine bots crawling the site with abandon and sucking the life out of its resources, SQL buffer brute-force attacks that are turned back but still eat resources with the attempt itself plus the logging of same, and much more; any one of which can bring a site down.

This sort of thing should be expected on occasion. If its a problem then ask for your forum membership money back :D
 
One of the causes I cited above was 'DNS issues'. My bookmark for the 'Whats New' page was

electricbikereview.com/forums/whats-new/

But now it is

forums.electricbikereview.com/whats-new/

The forum changed its DNS configuration so it uses a subdomain now instead of a deeper folder structure. IIRC that means slightly lower request response times - not something a human would notice but with zillions of requests per second that adds up to reduce some loads and its a little cleaner to work with.

A change like that would require some server downtime to make happen, and then there is going to be at least some 'dns propagation' waiting as local servers all over the world get updates that tell it where to find the new 'forums' subdomain. So the forum would be down for a bit for the first part, where the down time comes from the forum itself, and the second part where the down time is now the fault of the internet whose Domain Name Servers have not yet gotten updates so they know where the new location is.

Given the very low traffic levels going on still at this moment, I suspect the updated DNS is nowhere near fully propagated and only a subset of users can get to the forum, still. That won't be fixed until their local ISPs refresh their own DNS.

Or lets just forget all this and see what I said in the first post. To the layman, just know that stuff happens sometimes and you should just roll with it.

EDIT:
And sure enough, there's still a fair bit missing.
www.whatsmydns.net

DNS Propagation Checker - Global DNS Checker Tool

Instant DNS Propagation Check. Global DNS Propagation Checker - Check DNS records around the world.
www.whatsmydns.net www.whatsmydns.net
 
Last edited:
Thank you Matt for your explanation!
A small issue that remains is: Say I want to copy a link from my post in the EBR Forums and paste it in a Facebook post. When done and I click the link, EBR Forums tell me the page cannot be found. Only in this scenario!
 
Stefan Mikes said:
Thank you Matt for your explanation!
A small issue that remains is: Say I want to copy a link from my post in the EBR Forums and paste it in a Facebook post. When done and I click the link, EBR Forums tell me the page cannot be found. Only in this scenario!
Click to expand...
I copied the link on this individual post and it worked (look to the post, top right and hover over the "#4', which resolves to

"https://forums.electricbikereview.com/threads/forum-down.53718/#post-614943"

Link works. And as you can see the address uses the newly-configured subdomain.

If the forum tech staff installs a url redirect (something that, when it sees "https://electricbikereview.com/forums/" processes it instead as "https://forums.electricbikereview.com/", then links to the site from the past will keep working. Otherwise they will be broken.
 
m@Robertson said:
I copied the link on this individual post and it worked (look to the post, top right and hover over the "#4', which resolves to

"https://forums.electricbikereview.com/threads/forum-down.53718/#post-614943"

Link works. And as you can see the address uses the newly-configured subdomain.

If the forum tech staff installs a url redirect (something that, when it sees "https://electricbikereview.com/forums/" processes it instead as "https://forums.electricbikereview.com/", then links to the site from the past will keep working. Otherwise they will be broken.
Click to expand...
Matt:

1690891751447.png

A Facebook link

The actual link posted: "https://forums.electricbikereview.com/threads/forum-down.53718/#post-614943" (without the quotation marks).

1690891884686.png

The outcome.

Don't tell me it is right...
 
Stefan Mikes said:
The EBR Forum was down for almost a day. Can we ask the Administration for the reasons?

I was trying to convince my friends in these Forums to maintain alternative ways to communicate. Yes, I have a small bunch of EBR friends on Strava, and could find a single member on RWGPS. Probably a single friend on FB. What if the Forums go belly-up for good?
Click to expand...
I don't have any friends on RWGPS - maybe I should get some?
 
I hope they create all the redirections from old addresses to new ones properly, so all the links that have been distributed don't become invalid....
 
scrambler said:
I hope they create all the redirections from old addresses to new ones properly, so all the links that have been distributed don't become invalid....
Click to expand...
Agreed. Search is also compromised with no messages between late Sept 2022 and yesterday showing in the results.
 
My old bookmark to get to the forum still won’t work but I got to it through Google and that appears to work.
 
Stefan Mikes said:
Matt:



Don't tell me it is right...
Click to expand...
But it is. If a link works perfectly for me, and not for you, thats a sign the problem is what is known as 'upstream'. The problem would be a not-updated DNS server somewhere that does not know how to handle 'subdomain.domain.extension'. DNS for a domain has several of what are known as "A" records, and if that record is not in a DNS server upstream from you, whatever you try to view with that link is going to come up broken. By contrast, the DNS servers in my area are updated. And the link as a result works perfectly.

There is another possibility, albeit unlikely. That is, your browser cache is somehow interfering. Holding down the Shift key while hitting Enter to visit the domain address should tell the browser to bypass the cache and get a fresh read on the page and all of its component parts.

This is all voodoo if you aren't technically proficient at this stuff. But bottom line is there are many places where a signal can fail, over and above ast the server's source. And the failure can be partial so you don't receive a 404 (page not found), or a 500 (at-the-server failure), 301 (redirect) etc. etc.
 
m@Robertson said:
But it is. If a link works perfectly for me, and not for you, thats a sign the problem is what is known as 'upstream'. The problem would be a not-updated DNS server somewhere that does not know how to handle 'subdomain.domain.extension'. DNS for a domain has several of what are known as "A" records, and if that record is not in a DNS server upstream from you, whatever you try to view with that link is going to come up broken. By contrast, the DNS servers in my area are updated. And the link as a result works perfectly.

There is another possibility, albeit unlikely. That is, your browser cache is somehow interfering. Holding down the Shift key while hitting Enter to visit the domain address should tell the browser to bypass the cache and get a fresh read on the page and all of its component parts.

This is all voodoo if you aren't technically proficient at this stuff. But bottom line is there are many places where a signal can fail, over and above ast the server's source. And the failure can be partial so you don't receive a 404 (page not found), or a 500 (at-the-server failure), 301 (redirect) etc. etc.
Click to expand...
Fine, thank you. Now, the question is how come posts between some dates cannot be found, as @mjh5 reports?
 
Stefan Mikes said:
Fine, thank you. Now, the question is how come posts between some dates cannot be found, as @mjh5 reports?
Click to expand...
From what I have seen there was a software upgrade. That could mean a lot of things.

I know when I was working on vBulletin-based forums, there was a whole secondary, duplicate posts database that had to be rebuilt from time to time - there is one database that users use to view content, and another whole duplicate of it that is used to perform searches on. The idea being that searches are resource-intensive and bog down the users' ability to view, edit and add data. So the forum software keeps two identical copies and then uses one for viewing/updating and the other for searching. If the two get out of synch - typically after some kind of software update, then the re-synching process takes days to chug thru and you'll often see gaps as the search copy is purged and rebuilt.

But something you have to keep in mind here...

i-dont-always-aliens[1].jpg
 
I'm PatriziaK on RWGPS, if anyone wants to establish a "plan B" communication group...
 
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