...might I suggest a Contact Administrator entry in one of the strip menus

Done. That blank space at the top right doesn't look so awkward now.

Sorry for this but the problem still exists so it is being caused by something I am still yet to find.

I will have to deal with it when I get back to civilisation on Wednesday night. In the meantime I will pop on when I can and check that the site is up.

Humm bummer on the site mate

all I can add is there seems to be a little bit of slowness at times
maybe that is cause of the puter's busy with something thats chewing its resources

that of course if its there and not the net being a pain which at times it is or even this box doing the same above..I guess I could as the question has anybody else noticed this ?

Doubt that will be helpful but maybe

Edit ...Probably the net or me it seems a lot more responsive now 4:38pm 27/10/14

Anyway mate I hope the gremlin pokes his head out so you can give him a face lift by that I mean make him beautiful again though the other idea is more probably how your feeling about Mr Gremlin at the moment

Okay, the site timed out again last night at 23:22 so I have reverted to a previous snapshot, backed up before the last few modifications to the place. If things go smoothly from here on for the next few days I will have to do those mods again but that is a secondary concern, placed behind making sure the site is available 24/7.

So far the problem is intermittent, doesn't cause an adverse event to be logged on the operating system or site logs and seems to happen whether there's 1,000 visitors here or only 1 or 2 and can happen at any time of the day. There's no way of diagnosing that so the only possible course of action has been taken and we'll see how things go for the next week or so. Until that time has elapsed I will refrain from making any changes or upgrades.

Update: I should point out, for those who are concerned, that the database is a separate entity and is not affected by the problem we've experienced and thus no data is at risk of being lost. The database is subject to a separate backup regime as well.

The rollback seems to have done the trick as the site has been stable all week.

From here on I will re-add the updates as per the last time but will add them by hand rather than cut and paste what could be defective code.

First item that will get re-added tomorrow will be the 'contact administrator' link suggested earlier on by GTC.

At some stage over the weekend I will be working on the database and during this time the site will not be available. This will only last for about twenty minutes and will be done most likely late on Sunday night when few of us are here so I won't worry about making a special announcement about it.

Opps somehow I read post #30 by Brad and replied to that with this comment
(must have missed 3 and hit next)
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deleted cause its not relevant
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The only thing I notice now and not sure if it cause of the *move is a definite delay
(* assuming new hookup etc different net connect now)
There just seems to be a finite wait time...for the truly paranoid some could guess at reasons for that ROFL

Its not a bother just I dont remember it being there before thats all

Oh and that not to say its you or your connection just that it seem to be there now...like I said they are NBNing up here so god only knows

Thanks Brad

I've noticed the same delay but figured it might be the new https. It's not very long but consistently there.

The site is on the same connection as has been since about July. Shouldn't be any issues there and I sometimes test on an 'outside connection' to make sure.

With regard to the transition to the NBN, connections should remain as-is until they are shifted from Telstra copper to the NBNCo fibre. Work on transfers should not affect existing copper customers. After that happens the said connections should be faster for most things - remembering that download speeds are affected by a lot of things, mainly the upload speed of the server's connection and how busy the server is.

Here, the server will upload at 2Mb/s which is double the normal domestic upload speed. Whether you have a copper or fibre connection, the speed the site renders in your browser will be much the same because it is less than the theoretical download speed of your connection.

Just had a "server error" message.

Yes, it's been on and off for most of the day.

Because I can't trace the cause I may well have to resort to a fairly stern measure - a rewind back to the last version of the site before I embarked on the widening of it. It will mean a very long delay for the photo uploading feature and a few other things but at least the site will work correctly.

I'm going to try one or two other things first and then make the big decision on Friday.

As the site completely collapsed about half an hour ago I have decided to revert to the narrow site for the time being. A priority has to be placed on site uptime for obvious reasons and this move has been done with that in mind.

For now, members can still log in over a secure connection but will need to manually ensure that the prefix in their browser's address bar is HTTPS rather than HTTP and that the padlock icon is on display.

I'll continue to monitor things and we'll see where we go to from here.

At this point in time it looks like I may be spending the Christmas break rebuilding the wide site from scratch - one thing I am definitely not looking forward to should that be required.

ensure that the prefix in their browser's address bar is HTTPS rather than HTTP

Are you sure that the change to HTTPS isn't behind the recent instability? Have you considered reverting to plain HTTP?

I can't see that being a problem though I have given it some thought.

It is the only other thing that has been done since the stability became a problem so it if were to continue it'd be a logical next step.

Either way, it has to be said - an issue that isn't being diagnosed by the system is a webmaster's worst nightmare. If I am going to have a problem I'd rather it be a hard disc failure. At least I know I can recover the site from that without a scratch. Intermittent faults such as what we've all experienced for the past few weeks are quite stressful.

When I got the e-mail about the site being down this morning I was in town and I haven't set my phone up with the capability to remotely contact the server - not too sure even if that is possible though I may look into it when I can confirm things have settled once and for all.

Whilst it has been a goal of mine to find the time to commit to a brand new site there hasn't really been the time to devote to it and the several attempts I've made at starting that project have never come to more than the front page. Being forced into it due to a problem I can't find isn't exactly how I planned to get that sorted.

Anyway, for the time being, I am gunna leave the site alone and see how she goes.

Hi Brad ...yeah as I said it was slow yesterday to me and been pretty dead today

I know I keep mentioning the NBN thing but the thing is I've got no idea what other infrastructure may be happening (or possibly should be happening to support that) and now we are going to get a mixed labour liberal system up this way who knows
my local will be the libs save a buck (sub-) system So I just keep that as possible variable in mind for me

Yes I know the net is very variable thing too, my DL speed are quite good considering but time and location can make all the difference, not to mention throttling of servers you might be trying to pull from generally speaking there.

Are good point Scraps thats probably it as it seems finite in the time it was taking.

For you Brad I sincerely Hope not on a rebuild but well sometimes its a quicker route in the long run, thing is something is amiss thats for sure which is sad but I guess the nature of computers and servers

Anyway hope something twigs and you nail the gremlins that are happening, the ideas for improvements would be good and worth the effort but not at the risk of site stability, true.

Thanks Guys and Brad for keeping us in the loop

its a quicker route in the long run

Not a chance of a new site being quicker. Although sites like this are never really finished - new things will always get added from time to time - to replicate this site from a clean sheet of paper would take several weeks working from dawn till dusk daily. And that is if I stick to the current technologies. If I upgraded to .NET it'd take longer because I am not as experienced with it.

Looking back to when the forums were first brought online I managed to code the basic structure in about six days. Though at the time I already had the site and just bolted the forums on. The other thing was that the original version of the forums had no real features aside from the membership engine and the ability to post comments if you were logged in. Anything else that is here, editing one's own comments, being able to change account details, all the site logging and admin features, display of avatars, postcounts and all the other little nicknacks have been added in dribs and drabs between then and now.

Next time this job gets attacked it all has to be done in one hit, along with adding five or six other necessary things and it's all got to be tested bit by bit to make tracking and fixing bugs easier before the project goes live. Then once everything is shown to work in all three modes the site can be navigated in (visitor, logged in with temporary cookie and logged in with permanent cookie) the theme has to be developed and that is the bit I am definitely not good at and never have been.