At this time, for some unknown reason, I am not able to transmit e-mail from my mail server. Rest assured that I am still receiving though, so any material for submission to members' comments is still coming in.

I will post a further notice here once I fix the issue.

At present I am in the process of shifting my in-house e-mail service to an external provider. Tonight I can announce that I am once again able to both receive and send messages relating to this website on the address on my profile page. Any mail received in the last week that requires a reply will be dealt with over the next couple of days as time permits.

Does the move to an external provider mean that you will be able to receive emails about problems with the site?

Yep.

To be honest I hadn't thought of that when deciding to go ahead with the changes to e-mail.

I'm thinking also about automatic notification via a monitoring box, as mentioned some time ago.

I am a moderator on Antique radio forums http://antiqueradios.com/forums/index.php?sid=9188c063e5ae204b0f9d195ffc4bcfb0.

This is a huge forum it does have an automatic notification of reply to any post that you are commenting on or watching. Likely because of the time it has been running, it retains a "Private Message" function between members & for those interested, there is a huge gallery of photo's of radios that will take a considerable amount of time to look at.

I would suggest that there would have been considerable input from several to get its wheels moving & in keeping them moving.

Marc

As Brad would be aware, I am referring here to automatic monitoring of the forum's operational status.

Subscription to threads is something that Brad has mentioned elsewhere in his list of enhancements under consideration.

It already has one form of fall down monitoring: You attempt to bring it up & it does not work. Then you ask yourself "if you send an email announcing the fact", will it can get through?

Both functions are possible with external mail but the early warning of a network outage isn't possible internally without two connections. I once did have two connections but at this time am only running one. External mail accounts are cheaper than a second connection so that is the way we'll be heading.

Forum and thread subscriptions probably aren't difficult to set up however I would have to set up a test bed for that and at the time of implementation there'd have to be testing in the live environment and this would be a bit disruptive.

Whilst I think of it, the password retrieval service is most likely not working due to the shift of my VR account. I will have to sort that out next week.

Then you ask yourself "if you send an email announcing the fact", will it can get through?

Seems you're not following. The idea of a monitor is an interdependent web service that pings the subject server regularly. If the the pings fail, then the monitoring script sends an email from the independent web service to an external address, which can be monitored by the site owner via smartphone.

As a further level of sophistication, remedial action can be then be attempted by remote control. I gather that Brad has implemented such remote control to some extent.

Remote restart has been in place for a long time now.

The monitoring was something I used on most of the sites I once operated between 2000 and around 2006 to monitor the performance of the external webhost. They started spamming me after changing their terms of use however, so I ditched it.

I cant remember the name of it but it is like most things that don't cost subscribers money, you have to accept advertising.

Just a note to say that the password retrieval service is back online after being programmed with new mail server settings.