The forums have finally died

To answer the immediate question of "Did we really need another thread about this?" Yes. Yes we did and we do. Because this is becoming absurd.

What's going on with the forum software? Seriously. I remember when we used to complain it would occasionally log us out or maybe fail to load sometimes, and I look back fondly on those memories, because the way the forums are now is just insulting. Why? Well...

They take ages to load. Every. Single. Page I open loads for a minimum of 60 seconds, and that's if I'm luck. They just load and load and load and load, and at the end, half the time they fail to load anything anyway. I just get a blank white page with nothing on it. So I force the page to reload, upon which time it takes another 10 minutes to MAYBE load. Or, you know, maybe not. Sometimes the boards feel like there's nothing like spreading the holiday cheer like forcing me to reload a page three times and wait five minutes each.

I haven't been logged out yet, for what that's worth, but the wait times and load failures are intolerable. I've taken to setting a page to load, Alt-Tabbing back to the game, running through a few rooms and then Alt-Tabbing back to see if the forums are done loading. And most of the time they're actually not. I went through half an instance like that one time, and I'm not a speed player.

It's almost comedic how we used to complain about the old boards before the changeover, about how they were slow or they'd drop posts or whatnot, and how they didn't have all the functionalities we used to grief each other and the developers disabled anyway. And I wish we never changed over, because this forum software has been a gigantic piece of crap ever since it was first introduced, and it's been getting progressively worse and worse ever since then.

Yeah, Merry Christmas, indeed.

*edit*
Posting this was so much fun. First I waited 30 seconds, then got a blank page. Hit back, waited another 30 seconds, my post was gone. Good thing I'd saved it. Posted it AGAIN, and this time the forums loaded for SIX MINUTES before they went through. I could have watched a Zero Punctuation review in that time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well, I don't know what's causing the loading problems for you today but the forum seems to be loading just fine for me. But I do agree that in general the new forums haven't worked all that well.

Everything loads fine to me.

Loading seems fine on my end...but I did get logged out twice yesterday

Lately images haven't been loading for me.

I haven't had any problems with loading, but they do seem to have some sort of progressive, degenerative disease.

Hopefully they root it out sooner rather than later.

Well, I know other sites are loading fine, and I'm not talking about local sights. I've actually been watching ThatGuyWithTheGlasses videos while I wait for the boards to load. In fact, it took five minutes on my stop watch for this page to load so I could reply.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

No problems over here... could well be an issue with the ISP over on your end (posting from the UK whilst maxing out the bandwidth downloading from steam)

I honestly don't know what needs to happen, be it a convert, a revert or what. But the fact of the matter is things have been getting progressively worse, to the point where I want to use the forums right now... But I literally can't. Very soon I'll run out of new TGWTG material and I'll just lose patience for waiting five minutes between each page load.

This is not tolerable, and it doesn't look like it'll be getting any better.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It seems that if a page starts taking forever to load, I can make it load faster by continually interrupting and reloading it. From what I'm seeing, pages that don't load instantly get caught in a VERY long loop, so it seems faster to just keep reloading until I "hit a slot" and my page loads, rather than waiting ten minutes for my browser to wake up.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Do you use Firefox?

I used to use IE, but these new forums took FOREVER to load anything so I switched when I noticed they load way faster on Firefox. Still slows down sometimes lately, but generally no problems outside of getting logged off.

I have occasional really long loads / not loading at all. It's really annoying.

OK, I give up. I'm sick and tired of sitting there, looking at my browser say "Waiting for boards.cityofheroes.com" This is making me far more angry than I need to be on Christmas Day.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Lol how long has this been going on? It may just be a holiday thing.

My internet usually doesn't ever go down or get wonky (could probably say it only happened 2 times in the past 8 months) but yesterday, my internet went down for a whole....2 hours! I reset the router and everything, but nothing worked so I just did other things for a while and checked back. I didn't want to call my ISP cause I knew they'd probably be understaffed on the holidays.

But just to add on, I'm having no issues with the forums. There's the occasional log out once a day and every time I turn on my PC but a-okay here.

I have not had any problem with these forums and the only time i have been logged off the forums is if i am idle for too long... other than that whihc i think is by design rather than a problem...have not had one problem once!

I have a question. Are you by any chance behind a proxy? At work, I have a LOT more problems with the forums than I do at home, and the obvious difference is that at work, I'm behind a proxy server.

The typical problem I have is getting logged out. That wouldn't be so bad in and of itself, except that when that happens, 1) any message I was writing is irrevocably lost, and 2) all forum threads are magically marked as read.

When I'm at work, when I try to post anything longer than a one- or two-paragraph message, I frequently get a message saying something like, "Bad characters, please do not use characters such as <, >, ..." (although I know good and durn well that these characters are allowed). If I hit refresh a few times and resubmit, resubmit, resubmit, it eventually takes my message and posts it.

To be fair, when they were considering new forum software, they actually asked people what their thoughts and experiences were with the forum software they used. There were a lot of people swearing by vBulletin, saying that it was commercial-grade, bulletproof, high-quality software. Personally, I'm more of a fan of PhpBB, which generally got comments like, "it's not secure" (not true), "it's not commercial-grade" (lots of bigger forums than these run it), etc.

Oh well, I honestly can't imagine that they'd switch again. I don't know what is causing the current problems. They must have done some kind of upgrade or work on the back end, because it hasn't always been this bad. Or maybe the commercial-grade, bulletproof, high-quality software can't handle the load. Whatever the case, I too hope that someone on their web software support team can take some cycles to troubleshoot what's happening soon.

I'm seriously starting to lose patience here. Let's hope this improves by tomorrow, because I REALLY have had enough for today.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TonyV I have a question. Are you by any chance behind a proxy? At work, I have a LOT more problems with the forums than I do at home, and the obvious difference is that at work, I'm behind a proxy server.

No, none that I'm aware of. I suppose my provider may be using one, but I've no way of knowing. I know I don't have any proxy settings set up in either browser, though my network goes through a router (they called it a modem when they installed it, but it's a router if ever I saw one) which does tend to block some of my ports (and to which I lost the access information O.o), but this hasn't been anywhere near as bad as it is today. Ever.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This sounds more like a routing issue than server issue. Have you tried running traceroutes during the slowdowns? It should tell you where the hiccup is.

I'm having no loading problems. And in fact this thread just made me realize it's been over a week since I was auto logged out.

No slow loading for me today (or auto-log outs, so far) but there have been times recently when even trying to go back to the previous page will take a loooooooooong time.

I'm having no problems at all with slow loading. I do get logged out at least once and often more times per day, though, and have for a while.