Given the decrease in board usage and the increase in available server power this is unlikely. Unless there are bad actors attempting to swamp the server system. (Not necessarily our part of it, but the server farm it is part of.)
Given what I’ve seen, once such an attack is detected and fought off, the server admins are loathe to talk about it since that might accidentally spill info the attackers could use to mount a more effective attack.
So a “Something happened and it was taken care of.” is often the most we will hear.
I had two periods of the things today. Unlike my personal norm if I hit refresh I usually got to the page I wanted. Compared to say a year or more ago, this was nuttin.
I just got an error, at 2036 hrs Sun 08 Dec, in the usual place for me: from my Subscriptions page, selecting to view the latest post in the Trivia Dominoes thread game.
ETA: At 2040 hrs, doing the same thing — no error.
I do note that this install is over ten years old now. And it has been worked on a lot in that time and generally beaten like a rented mule in between any maintenance or upgrade that might have occured in that time. It’s much more likely that it’s just wore out. (Like most of us.)
In our earliest days and for a long time thereafter the big problem was that whatever server capacity we had quickly got eaten up; we were endlessly trying to reach a point where there was enough pipe for everybody but as soon as the pipe got bigger demand just surged and we were back to where we started or worse, sometimes within a very short time. I vividly remember everyone being all proud about a spiffy new server and promises that “This will fix EVERYTHING, it’s so big!” and in six weeks demand had risen so high the server was thrashing around like an orca. Six weeks.
I don’t think this is the issue nowadays but there are occasional hiccups; some days are worse than others. We apologize for them and appreciate you hanging in there with us as we look for ways to improve.
I rarely had troubles before about a week ago. It happens to me more in the morning (Chicago time) and evening than in the afternoon. I can count on it happening at least once per half-hour or so when I’m on the Board.
Like Kent, I’ve been experiencing these errors for about a week. In my case, they seem to be random, never happening at any specific time of day. They happen when I try to open a forum, when I try to open a thread, and when I try to preview a post. But weirdly, when I actually click Submit to post, I rarely get them.
Interestingly, when I get the “Wait 30 seconds” message, I’ll often try again immediately; and things will work just fine.
I do have one login issue, but it may just be cookie related. If I access the board by clicking a link in an email, I’m automatically logged in, but if I just open the board in a browser I have to log in manually.
