Posting and connection stalls

[Siggy_G]

Several posters have reported significant stalling in the posting process. This is currently being looked into, including ways to optimize and clean up the forum. A possible reason for the stalls is the ever increasing banning lists of random generated spam bot users (dozens every day) that the forum server runs through upon posting.

Usually one can assume that a submitted post has gone through after a few seconds. Refreshing the forum afterwards usually displays the submitted post, despite the apparent stalling. However, it is adviced to select all your text and take a copy before posting (Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C), in case the post isn't properly submitted. This is also handy in case of other time-outs, if you have been composing a text for a while - which is even more frustrating to lose.

Again, this will hopefully improve soon.

Regards,
- Siggy

[Sparky]

Siggy, thanks for letting me know that the problem isn't me and my dellosauras...

[chrimony]

This may have just been a one-off, but once when viewing (not posting) I got the following error:

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysql4 ]

User thundes2_thunder already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

I've never seen more than a handful of active viewers, so 1203 connections seems quite high. It only happened once, though, on May 15 around 7:50 PM EDT, so I just ignored it. In general the forum does seem quite slow just to browse considering the low activity, but that isn't very unusual with phpBB in my experience.

[davesmith_au]

OK guys, gals, and bald-headed babies, finally we've got some action around here!...

Seriously though, it's taken some time for us to access the right information and help with the posting issues, but now we should see a vast improvement. We're only half-way through the process, so there's more work to do yet but the main issues have been rectified.

In the meantime, it may be that our email notifications (when someone PMs you or a post is made on a thread you're "watching") will not be working. We don't know yet if we'll have to leave them disabled or not.

A huge debt of gratitude is owed to user "justcurious" who has been instrumental in assisting us with these fixes. Without the selfless input of such generous individuals, the whole site would be nothing like it is today. So for your part justcurious, a huge THANK YOU!

Cheers, Dave Smith.
Forum Administrator.