Board down a lot lately for short time

Getting this message on and off quite frequently for the past couple of days: "Sorry but the board is temporarily unavailable, please try again in a few minutes."

It usually comes back within a few minutes or less after clicking on refresh a couple of times. Any item what is going on?

I know a lot of changes on the Church servers have been happening lately, like the household info change. It might have something to do with that.

When you see the message that "the board is temporarily unavailable", is that all you see on the page? Or, does the rest of the page appear properly, and it's only the message that is out of place? I have seen the latter case from time to time.

rmrichesjr wrote: Sun Nov 05, 2023 4:17 pm When you see the message that "the board is temporarily unavailable", is that all you see on the page? Or, does the rest of the page appear properly, and it's only the message that is out of place? I have seen the latter case from time to time.

When it happens the board is missing and I just see the message with anything else which might appear on the page less the threads. Eventually a refresh brings the actual board and threads back.

This is the notification I get when it happens.

You're unable to move forward when that happens?

russellhltn wrote: Mon Nov 06, 2023 4:29 pm You're unable to move forward when that happens?

No. As long as the Forum is not responsive, the notice appears with each attempt to access the site.

This has been happening regularly for me for several weeks. I was not been able to get here for most of this morning. Although most of the time the board comes back in a few minutes, as advertised. And sometimes it even shows up on the next click a few seconds later.

I'm seeing the same behavior. It rarely comes back on a refresh or two. I usually have to do something else and try later.

Happened to me for the first time a few minutes ago. Took 3-4 refreshes, then it responded normally.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve also been having the same issues described. Thought it was just my setup.

I also observe the same behavior periodically.

My suspicion (having no knowledge of the actual tech forum network architecture) is that some form of anti-DDOS/rate-limiting technology is being employed to prevent overloading the forum server.

Be cognisant of how frequently you make requests to the server. If you make several quick requests of the server (e.g. opening multiple posts of interest in new browser tabs within a matter of seconds) you may find the first few load properly, but later ones fail with the message in question. Waiting a short time and retrying will likely resolve the issue for legitimate users -- but if there is a sizeable aggregate spike in server requests across the network (possible bots/ddos) I suspect you may still see that message intermittently until things settle down.

I'll just add that this has been my frequent experience lately as well (today again). I've occasionally lost a post that I was iterating on with the Preview functionality, and suddenly the Board disappeared and my carefully-crafted message was lost... (some may not think my posts are carefully-crafted, but you should see my original versions!) The horrors

Also, for me it doesn't seem connected to the other usual suspects, LCR and LCRF seem to work okay most times the Board is unavailable.

One workaround for outages while composing a post would be to copy the content into a scratch Notepad or similar window. (An old joke comes to mind about someone who saves vs. someone who doesn't.

I doubt there's much in the way of strict rate limiting per IP address or per user. I routinely open 9 windows in the forum within less than a second of each other (almost as fast as opening all bookmarks in a bookmark folder at the same time), and I rarely see the 'down' notice when doing that.

Well today, 8 November 2023 the board is having lots of problems. Either hardware is failing or something in the software has a bug in it or worse.

garystroble wrote: Wed Nov 08, 2023 2:30 pm Well today, 8 November 2023 the board is having lots of problems. Either hardware is failing or something in the software has a bug in it or worse.

Yep. I tried several times to access the forum yesterday, but to no avail. It almost looked like the handshake with the SSO server wasn't happening correctly, but I may be off base.

The problem continues.