Topic: Website problems: Please reply!

[Indofunk]

Hello Filmwasters! The executive team is aware of the recent errors on filmwasters.com and we're working to get everything back to normal! In the meantime, I can't guarantee that any threads you start or reply to will be preserved, but feel free to browse the forum as long as it's up. I'll update this thread when I have more details. Thanks for your patience!

- Satish & Ed

[Indofunk]

Update: Bluehost diagnosed the problem as a cache problem (which would explain the suspiciously DDoS-like errors we were getting last night). They cleared the server cache and it'll take a while for that to propagate to the internet, so be patient! (Although if you're reading this, then that means that you've been patient up till now 😊)

There's another problem, which may or may not be related, which is a formatting problem. You'll probably notice it in the header where there's a SMF logo that shouldn't be there. Ed & I will have to (carefully!) figure out why this is happening and try to fix it without breaking things again 😁

Thanks as always for your patience 😊

Satish

[Indofunk]

Yet another update, and a request for feedback: As of yesterday, the forum still wasn't working for Ed (it's been working for me because I forced a load without the server cache, and it's been working for me ever since). I was out all day today, and when I got back, this post had 75 views, which seems to me to indicate that people can see the site again. Could you please reply to this thread and tell me 1. can you interact normally with the site (navigate around, post replies, etc) and 2. do you see the formatting problems that I see (no left margin, and a SMF header that shouldn't be there)? Any additional comments are also welcome 😊

[Harvey]

Hi Satish,
I can log in fine and navigate with care. I can see compression at the top of the screen  where the ‘Home Filmwasters Which Board Main Forum menu links are sat over the date and Main Forum, which affects clicking the right link. The Search icon and box is also over the menu selection. The SMF logo is visible. The Filmwasters name is there but tiny. No left margin on home page.
I see the Topic Summary posts here have newest at the top which is different to the other posts but may be deliberate?
Hope this helps.
Shaun

[Harvey]

Okay. That’s weird. The posts here are now in oldest to newest order.

[Indofunk]

Thanks Harvey, that's helpful, and you're seeing slightly different problems than I am, possibly because of browser and/or OS (I'm on Chrome/Windows). Still seems to point to theme formatting problems, which maybe solved by simply ("simply" ... HAHAHA) reloading the theme. I think Ed is going to schedule that at some point. Ed, please warn us before you do that so we know that things might either be fixed or get broken even more 😁

Everyone else, please feel free to sound off here! Thanks for being the most chill website/user base that I've ever webmastered 🤣

[Bryan]

I checked this morning and still couldn't bet on.  Finally got on this evening.  I do see the simple machines forum logo on top.

[irv_b]

Hi Satish
Like most people I can see the post and read them but I tried to start the weekend thread and It wouldn't let me post, with pictures.
Cheers Irv

[Pete_R]

Had problems seeing the forum yesterday but OK today.

All attachments seem to have gone missing. E.g. my attachment to this post https://filmwasters.com/forum/index.php?topic=10814.msg143217#msg143217 but all others I checked are missing too.

[Francois]

Apart from the Simplemachines logo, things seem OK on my end of things

[Pete_R]

Just went off again. Now back.

[Mike (happyforest)]

Seems to be behaving itself at the moment apart from SMF logo.

Thanks for whatever magic you are working on it and hope it can only get better from here.

Regards

Mike

[Pete_R]

Been off again for the last few hours but has just come back. Very intermittant.

Update: Went off again for the rest of the day yesterday but back today. Doesn't seem to be regional. Tried a VPN in the US and got the same.

[Indofunk]

UPDATE: As you've noticed, it seems to be intermittent 😕 The worst kind of problem to diagnose, because it's not reproducible. Ed & I will try to follow up with our webhost as we have time. Thanks for your patience, I'm hoping we can get to the bottom of this soon!

[Francois]

I don't know if it could be related, but yesterday AWS had a major outage on their east coast servers that had worldwide repercussions.
At one point, I couldn't even log into my Bell account and didn't even have telephone service...
It might be somehow related.

[Indofunk]

I don't know if it could be related, but yesterday AWS had a major outage on their east coast servers that had worldwide repercussions.
At one point, I couldn't even log into my Bell account and didn't even have telephone service...
It might be somehow related.

The same thought occurred to me, but our problems started happening well before the AWS issues. I don't believe they're related, although the AWS problem may have compounded our preexisting problem.