9 hours ago, TheVat said:

That's some mighty fine grub, pardner.

I'll take that as a complement☺️

1 hour ago, geordief said:

I'll take that as a complement☺️

I didn't realise termite flat bread was a real thing until I looked it up just now. I've eaten fried alates, of course; Mrs Seth and her sisters are quite fond of them. I'll have to drop a few in my next batch of roti. Thanks!

Forum was unreachable again yesterday, just a white screen.

This is getting pretty crap.

Was down most of Tuesday and all of Wednesday here. Starting to wonder if Invision Community is really the best place for SFN. No idea why I kept getting a 502 error, but am logging it here in case it's ever useful.

3 hours ago, TheVat said:

Was down most of Tuesday and all of Wednesday here. Starting to wonder if Invision Community is really the best place for SFN. No idea why I kept getting a 502 error, but am logging it here in case it's ever useful.

Curiously, what I got was apparently a successful log in, with no error messages and no hesitation on the horizontal bar at the top that shows progress towards logging on. But having apparently completed the handshake, it just presented a white screen. I had that last time as well.

4 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Curiously, what I got was apparently a successful log in, with no error messages and no hesitation on the horizontal bar at the top that shows progress towards logging on. But having apparently completed the handshake, it just presented a white screen. I had that last time as well.

I got a very quick "site cannot handle this request" message a few times.

These both sound like bad gateway (502) problems, where a middleman server accepts your request but the actual website is overloaded. Again, this makes me think Invision Community is another cheapo web service which cuts corners and doesn't allocate sufficient ports for its hosted websites. Be sure and clear your cache after these glitches happen.

37 minutes ago, TheVat said:

These both sound like bad gateway (502) problems, where a middleman server accepts your request but the actual website is overloaded. Again, this makes me think Invision Community is another cheapo web service which cuts corners and doesn't allocate sufficient ports for its hosted websites. Be sure and clear your cache after these glitches happen.

Why is clearing the cache important? It's a pain, as I have re-enter various passwords etc when I do that and lose history, so I prefer not to do that very often.

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

Why is clearing the cache important? It's a pain, as I have re-enter various passwords etc when I do that and lose history, so I prefer not to do that very often.

Depending on your browser, it's usually easy to delete cache without deleting passwords/logins that are stored. In a "delete browsing data," menu there is usually a column of boxes to check or uncheck - I leave saved passwords and sometimes autofill form data and history unchecked, so it just clears cache and cookies. Once you've checked only what you regularly want deleted, it will store that.

The cache is where corrupted file debris tends to build up, causing problems....things like outdated temp files - old images, scripts, or layouts. Clearing the debris will force your device to fetch the fresh, correct data directly from the server.

I’m currently on a month-long long-distance hike in the Alps, and have been crossing the border between Germany and Austria multiple times along my route. I noticed that I can’t access the site in Austria - it gives the very problems described by others above -, but as soon as I’m on the German side and my phone connects to a German provider, all seems fine.

Maybe just a coincidence, but it is strange.

On 6/4/2026 at 4:27 PM, TheVat said:

These both sound like bad gateway (502) problems, where a middleman server accepts your request but the actual website is overloaded. Again, this makes me think Invision Community is another cheapo web service which cuts corners and doesn't allocate sufficient ports for its hosted websites. Be sure and clear your cache after these glitches happen.

We're no longer on Invision's hosting after they kicked us off late last year. We're on a virtual server from Hetzner. I'm looking into tweaking settings so I'll have more information about the problem when we get these errors.

I also increased the number of PHP processes available to serve requests, which might help with the 502s. I assume they're happening because no PHP process is available, but that's just a guess; I need to tweak the logging settings to keep more history so I know.

I'm also going to update our robots.txt to ban some AI bots. Check out the top user-agents accessing SFN today:

  11141 "meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)"
   4692 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Bytespider; spider-feedback@bytedance.com) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
   1254 "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36"
    754 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DataForSeoBot/1.0; +https://dataforseo.com/dataforseo-bot)"
    552 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)"
    510 "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm) Chrome/116.0.1938.76 Safari/537.36"
    422 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AhrefsBot/7.0; +http://ahrefs.com/robot/)"
    420 "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0;) AppleWebKit/537.36 (HTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)"
    401 "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.4 Safari/605.1.15 (Applebot/0.1; +http://www.apple.com/go/applebot)"
    279 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; DotBot/1.2; +https://opensiteexplorer.org/dotbot; help@moz.com)"
    258 "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Bytespider; spider-feedback@bytedance.com)"

That's how far you have to go before you get to humans. And there are only 25,000 requests in that log file, so more than half are bots.

12 minutes ago, Cap'n Refsmmat said:

That's how far you have to go before you get to humans. And there are only 25,000 requests in that log file, so more than half are bots.

This is what I have been seeing these last few days.

Before that the site was simply slow, as I have already posted.

Now the site seems normally fast again.

Note the webaddress shown was a dummy to simulate the rest of the page.

Hmm, "Server Not Found" suggests a DNS problem. I haven't seen any sign of DNS issues yet (my personal website relies on the same DNS server). Was that intermittent, or did you have that issue for a while?

5 minutes ago, Cap'n Refsmmat said:

Hmm, "Server Not Found" suggests a DNS problem. I haven't seen any sign of DNS issues yet (my personal website relies on the same DNS server). Was that intermittent, or did you have that issue for a while?

If you scan back over the thread I have posted screenshots / descriptions of the different difficulties I have been experiencing over the last couple of weeks, in the hope the information might be useful.

Sorry I can't give you the posts as they are not numbered on this site, so once again may I make a plea for post numbering ?

Edited Friday at 10:12 PM3 days by studiot

2 hours ago, Cap'n Refsmmat said:

We're no longer on Invision's hosting after they kicked us off late last year. We're on a virtual server from Hetzner. I'm looking into tweaking settings so I'll have more information about the problem when we get these errors.

Ahh. Thanks. If you're using Hetzner (German firm) that might explain

16 hours ago, Markus Hanke said:

noticed that I can’t access the site in Austria - it gives the very problems described by others above -, but as soon as I’m on the German side and my phone connects to a German provider, all seems fine.

2 hours ago, Cap'n Refsmmat said:

also increased the number of PHP processes available to serve requests, which might help with the 502s. I assume they're happening because no PHP process is available, but that's just a guess; I need to tweak the logging settings to keep more history so I know.

I'm also going to update our robots.txt to ban some AI bots. Check out the top user-agents accessing SFN today:

Seems likely these were part of the glitching. And banning more crawlers and bots is never a bad idea. That log file is sobering.