Cap'n Refsmmat

Unfortunately our domain name registration happened to expire on Wednesday, causing us to go down for about a day until the, uh, responsible party could be hunted down politely asked to renew the domain. We should be back now, though you may find it takes a few hours before different ISPs catch up and start letting you access the site. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I hate to spoil the fun, but it really is "just deserts", not "just desserts"! The "deserts" is a noun related to "deserves". To quote from Garner's Modern American Usage: Obviously this is the most important thing I have to do in the office on a Monday morning.

I'm pretty sure you can just use math bbcode tags, as in [ math]\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}[/ math] without spaces produces [math]\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}[/math] Unfortunately you have to reload the page after you post for MathJax to notice the tags in it...

Yes, you'll be able to change your avatar and profile after you've made a few posts. We had a lot of spam robots which registered, posted nothing, and added spam links to their profile, which was hard for us to detect because they never posted anything. Sorry for the inconvenience.

What kind of format and topics are you thinking of? We did indeed have debates years ago, but scheduling them, picking a good format, and getting participants is a fair amount of work, and the right format is important to make the debates work.

In the United States, a lot of police and fire radio systems operate in the 800 MHz band, which has sections reserved for public safety use. https://www.fcc.gov/general/800-mhz-spectrum

What types of topics or discussions do you think would belong in such a section that wouldn't be covered by the Politics section?

Could you be specific about the error message and any details it provides? Oddly enough, Googling "Googleheads" doesn't turn up any information that would help me track this down.

If you click the "Share this post" button at the top right corner of a post (the three dots linked by two lines), you'll get a direct link to the post, which you could use to refer to a specific post.

IPB is Invision Power Board, the old name for the software we use. (Eventually they rebranded as Invision Community or something.) There are two separate problems we're experiencing: The new version of IPB was saving a bunch of cache data to the hard disk with every request, causing enormous load on the hard drives. That seems to be part of why SFN was so slow -- every request was delayed waiting for its turn to use the hard disk. Dave switched it to use the database instead, which can be much smarter about keeping the data in memory instead of on disk. The "bad gateway" errors are a bug in PHP which make it crash occasionally. Our HTTP server, nginx, notices that PHP has crashed and failed to produce a webpage, and reports "bad gateway" to you. If Dave's tweak is right, it should fix problem #1 but not problem #2. I've searched for solutions to problem #2 and haven't found anything yet -- either we're the only people experiencing the problem or it's an artifact of something unique in our setup. But if you encounter the "bad gateway" errors you should be able to refresh and get the page loaded quickly. We'll monitor the changes over the next couple days and see if problem #1 is conclusively solved or if we need to make more tweaks. Big thanks to Dave for spotting the issue and fixing it.

Was it this page? http://www.scienceforums.net/online/ You get that by hitting "See full list" on the Who's Online box.

Their excuse is that post counts can vary. Moderators can see posts that were hidden for breaking the rules; posts may be deleted after members already referred to them by number; and posts may be in the mod queue awaiting approval. I could refer to post #48, but its number may be different by the time you look at it, because post #47 was deleted. I suppose every post could be assigned a permanent number, displayed at the top right, and if #47 is deleted the thread simply skips from 46 to 48, but then you could see when we delete things, and the more censorious forums would get upset that their members could see behind the curtain.

The makers of our forum software believe they know better than we do, and don't intend to create an option for adding back post numbers. This is one of the many reasons why I hate all forum software. However, if you click the little Share icon at the top right of a post, you can get a direct link to the post, which you can use to send people directly to the post you're referring to.

The advertisements (Google AdSense) should be asynchronous: waiting for the ads to load should never block the rest of the page from loading. I believe the ads do make periodic requests while a page is open, though, so if you're waiting for another page to load you may see some ad requests appearing in the mean time.

Yeah, I was trying to debug things further and screwed up for a while. Sorry about that. Should be running fine now, though I'm still puzzled by the high latency.