Anyone who tried to post a new entry into the forum may have noticed that they're acting a bit strange. Specifically, you hit the submit button and nothing seems to happen. So you click it again, and again, etc.
In reality, your post is getting submitted every time you hit that submit button.... though you would have no way of knowing that.
The reason for the strange behavior is that the server running this site is getting hit hard by something, and this is causing weird behavior in any function that needs to directly access the server's cpu, such as posting a new entry.
Exactly what that something is that's stressing out the server, neither I nor the engineers at my web hosting company are sure of. Traffic to the site has been higher than normal, thanks to the site being mentioned on Slashdot and BoingBoing, but it seems that the stress might be from search engines aggressively spidering the site.
Anyway, I spent much of yesterday on the phone to my web host trying to sort it all out (they were the ones who initiated the calls, since my site was bringing down their servers). And they've gently suggested that I might want to move the site to a more powerful, dedicated server (though they don't offer upgrades like that). So I'm looking into that.
If anyone knows a webhost that can provide good, reasonably priced dedicated servers, let me know.
I've decided to switch the site to what should be a better server. This means that sometime during the next week the entire site might disappear for a few days as the domain name is transferred. Or maybe the transfer will go seamlessly. I've never done this before, so I don't know.
Actually, it should never disappear. But for a few days it may be at a different url (one of those strange ones that are just a bunch of numbers), before all the internet domain name servers reassign the name to the new host.
Glamcat, your new topic didn't appear because of whatever the problem is with the server. I'm having trouble posting anything also. The weird thing is that your topic hasn't been erased... I can see it if I look in the site database, but the server's not reading from the database correctly.
That's why I'm moving the whole site to a new server, which should end this problem. Within a few days this problem should be over.
For some reason my browser here at work now hates the website where my avatar was located. It took me forever to figure this out. Occasionally before the move and absolutely always after I couldn't view any page I had posted on. It would load for 10 minutes and then timeout. But only some pages. It finally dawned on me what the connection was. I moved my avatar to a new host and everything works fine now. [My freaking company] sucks. Any day now I expect them to block the museum and then I'll be screwed. I'll have to resort to working to pass the time.
I had to get rid of the small line of code that allowed me to place the first line of each post beneath the title on the forum's main page. The code seemed to be conflicting with the new server. Must be software gremlins at work again.
Charybdis, your avatar is actually quite a large image file. About 40kb. Which means that the browser has to download this every time the page opens, but since the image gets shrunk down once it appears on the page anyway, there's no need to use such a large image file. I created a smaller version for you and placed it on my server. Exact same image, but it's only 1kb instead of 40kb. Try pasting this in your avatar field:
I wasn't really worried about the size since I knew your software would shrink it. It works fine since I changed hosts. I tried viewing the image on the old host directly and got the same thing so I know it's my company blocking it, it just took forever for it to dawn on me.
Plus, for whatever reason, your software shrinkage results in a finer image than I could achieve by manually shrinking it. Since I only had Microsoft Photo Editor to work with my results weren't very good. Yours is better than what I could get but you'll notice that even yours is a little fuzzier than when the site shrinks it for some reason.
Sorry Alex. I just posted a new entry and hit submit, ummmmm a few times! I thought it was something I was doing.
For a few days? What will I do. I will surely suffer from Museum of Hoaxes withdrawl!! LOL
