Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

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Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by |darc| »

We had a few issues with excessive resource usage on our host. Unfortunately, they disabled the site in the middle of the night, a surprise which caught me off guard and as such the site had to remain down as I found the time to fix it.
During the downtime, I took the opportunity to upgrade the phpBB board software to the new 3.2 branch.

Regarding themes....

The default theme is now Elegance.

The subsilver theme most people know as the default theme is available for selection in your User Control Panel . It is, however, a new version of subsilver based upon the now-phpBB-default prosilver theme, and as such, it will look a little different and that means the avatar/rank appears differently and on the right side of the screen.

For dark theme lovers, there is an excellent dark theme called Digi DarkBlue.
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by nymus »

Phew! It still works! I've switched to the recommended dark theme, perhaps as a coincidental symbol of my embracing the important parts of my life.

I'm glad everything went smoothly. Thanks for keeping the site running.
Last edited by nymus on Mon Mar 26, 2018 11:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by BlueCrab »

Glad to see it's all back up and running nice and smoothly. Hopefully there won't be any further issues after the upgrades.

One (small) thing to note is that the special banners for the top of the page are gone from the Sylverant, reicast, and /dev/null forums.
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by Eviltaco64X »

Looking sleeker, phpBB.
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by |darc| »

Update on the excessive resource usage:

The excessive resource usage was specifically in regards to the site's database, as the SQL DB is quite large.
As a temporary solution I am hosting the database on a secured FreeBSD jail on a box at my home (I have business/server-class internet connection at home). Having the database locally accessible was also ideal for me when upgrading the phpBB software, making it easier to run the CLI upgrade script (which took over a damn hour for this large database) without worrying about web page timeouts, etc.

Looking this morning there are 40-60 "guests" roaming the site. They are all SEO/advertising bots scraping the site for data mining purposes. Not sure if this has been consistent behavior, but there aren't ever more than a handful of real people browsing the site, so this bot behavior is likely the cause of the excessive resource usage. I have added the offending bot to robots.txt and blocked its IP range, so hopefully this will resolve the issue. I will have to keep tabs on site access logs and resource usage more carefully going forward.

If all goes well, I'll be able to migrate the database back to my webhost soon (which will mean more downtime but shouldn't be too bad).
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by |darc| »

MediaWiki was brought up to the latest 1.30 branch.
Dumpcast's separate phpBB board was brought up to the latest 3.2 branch.

After perusing access logs for the week prior to the site being disabled, I believe the excessive resource usage was because of bots/crawlers generating massive amounts of traffic. One marketing bot, AhrefsBot, was generating 65% of all page requests alone. Several bots/crawlers were blocked and/or banned, especially marketing/SEO bots, which have no useful utility for this website, and thus will blocked from crawling it.

I believe the excessive resource usage situation is resolved now, so I migrated the site's database back to the webhost from my home server. Everything should be OK now, just need to tweak a few things like recreate the unique banners for hosted subforums, etc. and I want to clean up/better organize files on the backend.

Please let me know if you run into any errors or problems!
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by Aleron Ives »

Spoilers and code boxes no longer work properly with the subsilver theme. If a post has multiple spoilers, clicking "Show" on any of them will only show the first spoiler's contents, so seeing the other spoilers' contents is impossible without viewing page source or quoting the post, removing the spoiler tags, and previewing the message.

Code boxes mostly work, but they no longer have any word wrapping functionality, so text without newlines will appear on one giant line. Both Firefox and Seamonkey are broken for me, but I don't have any non-Mozilla browsers to test.
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by BlueCrab »

I just fixed the spoiler tag issue, I think... Test it out and let me know if it's not working.

As for the code tag, considering its use, I'd think that it should not automatically wrap text myself (since it is supposed to be used for pre-formatted text).

That said, I've just added a variant on the code tag that will do automatic word wrapping as well: wrapped-code:
This is just a test to see if really long lines of code do indeed wrap or not. Of course, I normally write code and documentation such that there is no more than 80 characters per line, for comfortable display on a terminal, but not everyone does that. So, this should have word-wrapped at some point, let's see if it did...
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by Aleron Ives »

Yep, spoilers work now. The new codebox does work, but it doesn't really solve the problem, as all codeboxes in posts made before the forum update are still broken. Forum codeboxes aren't just for posting computer code; they're also used for posting anything that requires a monospace font for alignment purposes, as well as to just make long text blocks take up less vertical space on the forum, as codeboxes have their own vertical scrollbar. IMO the wrapping behaviour should be restored for the original code tag, as that's how codeboxes worked on the old phpBB software (and pretty much every forum that has a codebox tag).
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Re: Downtime, and forum software updated to version 3.2

Post by mankrip »

The link to the "view active topics" page is missing in this new layout. The page still works, but there's no way to reach it without manually entering its URL.

[edit] Oh crap, it's in a drop-down menu in the blue bar!
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