When my favorite message boards crash/go down for no good reason...

[Jack T. Chance]

The title pretty much sums it up. I really hate it when my favorite message boards go down for no good reason! There's nothing worse, In My Opinion, than being bored out of my skull, and being unable to visit one of my favorite message boards to relieve my boredom because the site's gone offline for some reason.

In one particular case, I could understand the site being overloaded if there was a new movie coming out based on the franchise the site talks about, or a new TV series, or something like that, thus bringing a flood of new visitors to the site. But nothing like that is going on right now, so it just makes absolutely no sense that the site is down tonight.

[Lace Neil Singer]

I'm looking at YOU, CS.com! XXD Whenever that board goes down and I need to rant about an SC, it's the pits.

[HYHYBT]

Hey, nothing works *all* the time Things break, and have to be maintained now and then... and there' a whole rest of the internet out there.

I'm looking at YOU, CS.com! Whenever that board goes down and I need to rant about an SC, it's the pits.

You can always type up the rant anyway, and post it, if you still want to, once the site is back up.

[daleduke17]

There's one board I frequent that will go down during heavy traffic. Usually PPV events and surprise moments on Raw will crash that board.

But, it is to be expected.

[Rapscallion]

Thanks to Pedersen, we have very little downtime on CS.com now. Used to be the case that I got up in a morning and logged on to find out how long it had been crashed.

Rapscallion

[Pedersen]

I haven't even looked at Fratching in a long time. Decided to look today to find this thread.

I'm looking at YOU, CS.com! XXD Whenever that board goes down and I need to rant about an SC, it's the pits.

Bluntly put: WTF?

I just went back through old logs and posts to find the outages that have happened recently. Whenever logs get rotated around the web server can fail to respond for a short time (less than a minute). That's pretty infrequent (a weekly occurrence). Outside of that, since Dec 22, 2008, we have had two unplanned outages.

Aug 15, 2010, 2230 EDT, a system hiccup. Web server got itself hung up, and problem was fixed within 10 minutes.

Jul 26, 2009. Web server crashed, and automated monitoring systems failed to restart it. Manual restart several hours later (5 or 6). Automated systems were made much more aggressive about restarts, and the problem has not recurred.

Beginning of Dec, 2008, was when we brought the new server online.

So, that having been outlined, I come back to my "WTF?" from above. The tone of your post makes it sound like outages are frequent. I've scanned through the problem reports on CS, the suggestions forum here, and looked for similar on devilspanties. I can't find any reports about problems.

Basically, I'm concerned: If there's a problem, and I don't know about it, I can't try to fix it. If there's not a problem, then the post made me overreact.

So... WTF?

[Lace Neil Singer]

I was being facetious, jeez. Way to read too much into a flippant remark.

Another message board I go on sometimes that used to go down all the time, is Metal Sludge. Since the server switch, it's gone down far less, but it used to be a joke shared between members about it going down.

[Pedersen]

I was being facetious, jeez. Way to read too much into a flippant remark.

Text, with no sarcasm tags, and no contradictory notes, doesn't convey that you're being facetious, especially to someone who takes keeping the boards up and running as seriously as his day job.

[protege]

Before the 'Rapsody," when CS was still owned by G, I don't ever remember it going down all that much. I *do* remember G going apeshit on people if they were busting his balls about downtime.

[Rapscallion]

I think G had far more problems with hacks than internal maintenance, though I only saw the user's side for a while. The server's in excellent hands on the internal side of things. Hacks, let's just say that for the most part we're keeping an eye out and hoping we don't attract the wrong sort of attention.

Rapscallion

[Lace Neil Singer]

O_o Who was hacking the board, disgruntled customers?

[Rapscallion]

Dunno. I wasn't privy to the details back then.

Rapscallion

[MadMike]

I *do* remember G going apeshit on people if they were busting his balls about downtime.

Remember that time he told everyone they were "acting like a bunch of customers" and removed access to everything except the general board? I freaked out because I thought all the posts were gone, but when he cooled down after a few days, he restored access and everything was back.

O_o Who was hacking the board, disgruntled customers?

One of them we believe was a certain moderator who went rogue and trashed the board, and was subsequently banned. Not sure they all had to do with him.

[protege]

Remember that time he told everyone they were "acting like a bunch of customers" and removed access to everything except the general board?

LOL I remember that. Well, that and the time shortly afterward when he flipped out in the chat room. Can't say I blame him for any of it. He was trying to get things up and running as quickly as possible...while still working full-time, and starting a family. He simply got fed up with people, and he snapped. Again, can't blame him for that

One of them we believe was a certain moderator who went rogue and trashed the board, and was subsequently banned. Not sure they all had to do with him.

I don't think they all had to do with him either. The very title of that site tends to bring all the idiots out of the woodwork, some of whom would like to see CS get permanently trashed. It makes us a target, in other words. Some of the hackers simply want to trash the site. Others, want to use it as a 'springboard' to attack someone else.

But, I do remember when that mod went nuts--I was on CS when it happened. At the time, CS had a little status bar, which showed what various members were doing. That bastard followed me (and another mod), in and out of the various forums--locking and trashing things behind us. Both of us had to explain it to G (who really is a nice guy, BTW), who was (understandably) furious. He apologized later, but at the time, I thought I was going to get booted off of my "home away from home"

[Lace Neil Singer]

Ah, rogue mods. I remember on one forum that I go on, there was a rogue admin. O_o He was the then partner of one of the owners, and when they split up, he went on a rampage; deleting loads of topics and deleting the profiles of all the staff. As soon as my profile was deleted (I was an admin on that board, too) I sent an email to the owners asking what the hell was going on.

Luckily, they'd left a back door that they could enter the forum and get rid of the rogue. We ended up having to all reregister, and we made the majority of the forum private so that the rogue couldn't view any topics. It took a while, but in the end, he got bored and left us alone. We couldn't IP ban him cuz he was on AOL and it would have meant banning several innocent forumers along with him, so all we could do was keep banning his new accounts as they came.