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Site Update: Things have changed, but nothing is final.

Ashal

By Ashal,
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llokii70

llokii70

Posted
Posted

I've heard this from a ton of people and i actually have to turn some of my features off in brave browser in order to submit a post due to some cross site scripting you have going on. Not sure why that is it was never a problem in the past.

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Psalam

Psalam

Posted
Posted
13 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

The content from the public feed on my profile has disappeared and I didn't get an announcement about the last contribution to it.

 

9 hours ago, Ralph.B said:

Second that. The search function brings up zero results, no matter what keyword you enter. Even terms I used countless time in the past and that brought up hundred and more results come up with nothing. Just the message that there is nothing that matches my keywords.

 

8 hours ago, llokii70 said:

I've heard this from a ton of people

I suppose I'm the "eternal optimist." It turns out when the content stuff was down Ashal was "fixing" it so that it would only show the most recent post from a thread (rather than 10 posts from a single thread). So, I hope that this current issue with the public profile portends improvement here too. Perhaps a return of the much desired "following" ability?

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Grey Cloud

Grey Cloud

Posted
Posted
14 minutes ago, mircislav said:

Are there some problems with the site - when posting or uploading? Maybe it's on my side, but never experienced such things - like delay on posting, have to hit F5 to refresh the status of the post...

Read the posts on the previous page.

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tasairis

tasairis

Posted
Posted

As someone who's familiar with IP.Board (the software these forums run on, aka IPB), here's a little background information.

 

First, Ashal didn't program the site himself. IPB is part of a large suite of applications including forums and user management and file storage and calendars and blogs and a bunch of other stuff. It's full of nice features and requires a paid subscription. Most customization people do is with themes (eg. Carbon, quite possibly the best dark theme available) and extensions, most of those costing more money, but it's also fairly straightforward to make minor edits to styling and some stuff on the page. Fancy customized extensions to do more are neither easy nor fun to create. But like a lot of other software out in the world, it's old and has grown a lot over time, and more often than not that means it's a horrible mess of moldy spaghetti.

 

Essentially, when you pull back the curtain, IPB is a very pretty and highly polished piece of shit.

But don't misunderstand me: I'm not really blaming IPB for what's going on. It deserves criticism for some aspects but not for everything.

 

Anyway, things like site searches and activity feeds are powered by the same "search" system. There are a couple main ways of setting that up, some better than others, and I don't know what we use here. As such, site searching and activity feeds and other similar features tend to all work or all not work.

 

Notifications are another system. If you look at the various options when you want to follow something then you can see that it's not a one-size-fits-all system, and notifications tie into all sorts of aspects of the site.

 

AFAIK what's happened in the past with people attacking LL is that they abuse both of those systems to the point where the servers have a hard time keeping up. The better the search system is (and I'm not saying search is particularly good) the more complicated it has to be, and as it gets more complicated it gets easier to spam. As for notifications, what can be done is have many people create many accounts following many different threads/users/whatever, and every time one of those notifications needs to get sent, that costs a little bit of server power. (Some of you may remember a follower purge not that long ago to address this exact problem.)

 

"But we have Cloudflare!" Yes, when Ashal activates that it does help, but it's not perfect.

 

tl;dr: Chill. This isn't the first time LL has had slowness problems and unfortunately it probably won't be the last. But odds are it will all blow over in a matter of days so hang on.

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tasairis

tasairis

Posted
Posted
10 hours ago, mircislav said:

I wasn't complaining, just wondering if I am doing something wrong because I don't know anything about managing forums and such. Thank you for the info. 

 

Not really accusing anyone of complaining. It's not like we're the Creation Club forums, where basically every day there's someone bitching that there isn't new CC content and that Bethesda has abandoned the game and that they don't care about the community and whatever other forms of selfish bullshit, when there's literally millions of people dying of a fucking plague and yet "but if people are working from home then they can just do CC releases from home"...

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Vyxenne

Vyxenne

Posted
Posted
On 5/14/2021 at 6:41 AM, DocClox said:

Possibly unrelated to recent changes, but I'm suddenly getting 404s from Clownflare whenever I post anything. I can refresh the site immediately and it comes right back, so it seems unlikely that LL was down as is being claimed. A minor inconvenience, but maybe the report is helpful.

[EDIT]

Yep, every time. This post too.

Me too. Every time. All hours of the day and night. For the past week or so, the site reluctantly loads pages (much slower than usual) but editing or posting times out (after I hit "Submit") to a CloudFlare Error 404 page.

2 hours ago, DeepBlueFrog said:

But .. but.. the site still times out when posting new messages!!

Once, I got a bar across the upper part of my display that said LoversLab.com was down but CloudFlare's "always online" feature was displaying an archived copy of the site for my convenience. Never seen that info-bar before!

 

Oddly enough, in some cases, re-navigating to the site reveals that my post actually made it. So something in the post-posting process is hanging and timing out.

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Buridan

Buridan

Posted
Posted

Yep, it seems to hang after submitting reply ("Saving..."), but refreshing the page will show that the reply got submitted just fine, every time so far. So a bit offputting but not a huge deal.

 

Also, anecdotally, some old follows appear to be broken? I didn't get notifications on a blog I was following, though unfollowing and refollowing seems to solve the issue.

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Inte

Inte

Posted
Posted

I have a question. 

When I hide one of my own posts, shouldn't I be able to access it again. Because I cannot, it is completely gone. Or, shouldn't I be the only one to see it? Because I cannot, no one can see it.

So, if all that is by design, what's the point of 'hide' and how does it differ from 'delete'.  

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tasairis

tasairis

Posted
Posted
15 hours ago, Inte said:

I have a question. 

When I hide one of my own posts, shouldn't I be able to access it again. Because I cannot, it is completely gone. Or, shouldn't I be the only one to see it? Because I cannot, no one can see it.

So, if all that is by design, what's the point of 'hide' and how does it differ from 'delete'.  

 

IP.Board doesn't allow users to view their own hidden posts - it's all or nothing. So when you hide something, it's still there, but you can't see it.

 

Hidden content is still available to sufficiently-privileged "staff" (eg, mods and admins) while deleted content is completely gone and unrecoverable.

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tasairis

tasairis

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Inte said:

Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. That does seem a bit counterintuitive, tho. 

 

It's a little easier that way. Consider that people hiding their own posts is a rather privileged thing to allow; for the most part it will be used by moderators who want to remove a piece of content from public view (while keeping it around for possible future reference), not by the posts' authors themselves. Hiding posts from their authors also gives mods a little more power to decide how to handle something because they don't have to consider whether they want the authors to know that their posts still technically exist.

 

But honestly, IMO the people who develop IPB are rather opinionated about what is Good and what is Not Good in ways that aren't always what I think reasonable people would agree with, so there's that.

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