Forum oddities in recent days
Wyvern
🖼️ 229 images Mapmaker
I know there've been a couple of folks mention having difficulties loading messages into the Forum recently (last few days).
Today, I noticed the automatic Draft Saving of messages option seems to have vanished.
However, I've found for some days that the Forum's been very glitchy with its autosave facility anyway; I've lost several parts of typed-in replies, for instance, and every now and then, the whole screen has seemed to reload for no obvious reason (it's just this Forum, as other webpages open simultaneously in the same browser have been fine).
Today too, the individual topic pages seem to be loading quite slowly as well - I don't mean images, as higher-res images are always a little slower to drop-in, especially when there are a lot on a topic's page; this is the entire page except its background.
I seem to recall Ralf mentioning on last week's live-stream that the Forum had been down briefly earlier that day, and I'm guessing the "missing" autosave facility now implies there may be ongoing maintenance issues, but it might be useful to know if there's anything we as users can do to assist currently, say - i.e. not using the Forum between certain times, or trying posting as a test, for instance.
Or just anything we might need to be aware of (like the possibility of losing an entire message because autosave isn't working!).
Comments
Reload happened to me earlier when I was uploading an updated map. The post reverted to the previous text and previous map.
Around an hour ago.
I've gotten a few notes about people having the reload issue during editing. I've never been able to reproduce it myself, which makes it annoyingly hard to track down why it is happening but I am looking into things. I did temporarily turn off autosave to test if autosave failures could be the reason for this reloading, but based on Jim's statement above this doesn't seem to be the case.
The problems seems to have started after the recent downtime, which is a bit weird, because the server was never down, it was a temporary reachability issue due to the host's network, but nothing at all changed on the server itself, it just happly ran in the background waiting for the network to come back.
I am not on a reliable connection a lot of times so I tend to assume that it's my end acting up, but I have encountered what I have assumed is a network reset; as if my network had momentarily lost connection and found it again very quickly, which resulted in trying to helpfully "update" the client to what the server session was at. I haven't been around long enough to realize this might be abnormal.
I've been away for a couple of hours, and coming back here, when I clicked the notifications bell to check what the new items were it was showing me, the entire homepage reloaded, and came back as if I hadn't done anything (so it was still showing the number of new items by the bell). I hadn't done anything else.
This does seem to be happening increasingly frequently, however, as I had only a few of these "time-outs" a couple of days ago, and I was on the Forum for maybe an hour or more in total. Today, in two relatively short visits (including this one), I've had at least seven "events", though only one (so far - haven't tried posting this yet!) since I came back. I did wonder if it was a browser or a Win 10 update thing, but I'm guessing not from the comments so far.
Presumably, we can just use this topic to add any comments about particular events or problems, in the hopes that might help track down whatever's causing this?
EDIT: Just to update this, in the circa 20 minutes since I posted these notes, I've been on the Forum typing replies to a couple of other topics. I've had five glitches in that time, including one where I lost part of a typed reply, and another weird one when I tried to link to the main ProFantasy site to find a hyperlink to add to one post, where the Forum "blanked" me, and then the PF homepage, before that restored itself and let me access it OK. Whatever it is, it does seem to be getting worse tonight.
I'm not a network expert, but could the past downtime result in some parts of the forums are looking at the wrong IP address ? And other parts are looking at the correct IP address ? Could be similar , just the last octet is off ?
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
So, tonight's update...
When I tried opening my first topic here just now, the "Community Atlas Project - Download information..." one, it hung momentarily and threw-up a "Temporary error" note on the browser tab. It did say more, but I wasn't quick enough to read it. When the page refreshed, it had set me back to Monsen's first posting there, at the topic's start, not the newest posting, as normal. Thinking about it, this has happened several times during the Ongoing Forum Weirdness lately. If I manage to spot anything more, or on any error lines that spring up, I'll update here again.
@jslayton - I think turning it off and on again was what started all this from Monsen's comment above!
EDIT: Just had another error message. It says "Temporary error: Redirecting", then hangs for a second or three, before refreshing the page and proceeding.
EDIT TWO: About forty minutes after my first posting here, I've been swooping over parts of the Forum hunting for hyperlinks for forthcoming topics here, and also on the main PF site, and just wanted to say I've not encountered any further issues since the first few topics I looked at here this evening. Curiouser and curiouser...
I cannot reach the server from here...
That redirecting message ties in with my feeling that there is an older url/IP address hanging around somewhere.
Need longer arms Jim ?
That redirecting message ties in with my feeling that there is an older url/IP address hanging around somewhere.
And back later, I had the 'temporary server error' message this time.
Well, this evening's "fun and games" with the Forum took a while to get started, but suddenly I've just had two events occur one after the other - "A temporary error occurred. Please retry." boxed message at the lower left of the screen. One happened when I tried to click to "Like" a posting, the second when I wanted to add a typed comment.
And while I was typing this, I've just had another, though unless that was the system failing its autosave roll, I have no idea why - no, it's just done its autosave OK - because I wasn't even typing at the moment it appeared! It's still on-screen now (but I haven't clicked to close it yet, as I wanted to make sure I copied the message correctly).
So, the Gremlins have changed tack, but clearly, they're still here. Someone's been feeding them after midnight, perhaps...
I got that when I tried to read this thread.
The most important thing for me right now, is this causing any problems (except from seeing an annoying error message)? I think I did manage to get it to stop reloading the page in the middle of writing a comment which could lead to data loss. While seeing that error every so often is annoying, what I really need to know is if situations arise where things like comments are actually lost.
And thanks for the idea Jim, but no, this isn't caused by an old address/url.
I've not lost an entire comment yet, but I have repeatedly lost parts of one recently. That "Temporary error" thing came up again just now, and wouldn't let me access my notifications list (bell), and then stopped me loading this topic again; took a couple of tries to do so.
It did happen yesterday when I tried to upload a map and a comment for that map.
Hiccup. And my new comment and new map were gone. I waited a bit and tried again. Second time it worked.