At long last Chris has made a statement about Pensioners Forum and the ongoing problems. He is not happy that this ' forum' has been set up, poaching members from PF. As we all know and klondike in particiular has made clear - this IS just a back up incase PF finally bit the dust. We wouldn't be here if Chris had explained at the beginning of the problems that he ' had it in hand' No contact at all wasn't the way to allay any fears the site might close. So where do we go from here ? hopefully our contact details will remain on the shelf in klondike's back bedroom. :grin:
well i havent been able to get on the last four times i tried, then after being advised...lol... i got on and read Chris's 'message' that he has now set up a back=up site for when we cannot get on to the main site... but i didnt find anything saying anything was being done to stop the lock outs... but no rights of a public reply... then i clicked on Phills Free speach thread and got an error message telling me i wasnt allowed to view that thread but when i came out it was gone...
anyone who allowed their e-mail to be used to "poach" member will be 'monitored'...is that a threat?
dont close it down yet Mark, i will certainly be spending time here...
I've just tried to get in to read Phil's thread and it's freezing again. I agree with crabbyob, I'll be spending time here more than over there. But at least he acknowledged the problem, instead of silence. I didn't click on his back up site - I can't see the point of him having a back up, why doesn't he fix the original ? :rolleyes:
crabbyob he did say " It is simply that traffic is not reaching the site. This can sometimes be caused by a faulty switch at the data centre which normally quickly comes to the attention of administrators there and is quickly resolved. As the problem is ongoing I will open a ticket myself and get them to look into it.[/b
You won't be able to read it as it's been deleted, presumably by Chris.
It was a copy of my opening post on a thread I started on this forum, https://pensioners.digitalham.co.uk/index.php/topic,76.0.html
But I added a small limerick to illustrate the Harry Miller v Humberside Police Appeal Court ruling.
Well it seems some will be getting their posts moderated now. Presumably me and Scrumpy and maybe others. Well I'll be saving him some work by not posting there again. This site will remain open so long as people post here. Perhaps if Chris had commented before on the PF performance issues this issue would never have occurred.
Happy New Year
I understand how Chris feels and wish he'd acknowledged our emails earlier. The site's as bad as ever today though despite his defensiveness..Sorry K, xed posts..
Well said Mark. You have my full support here for the future and thank you.
I've responded to Chris via the link he left to his email.
I've only spoken for myself.
I've basically said that I wouldn't have signed up to this forum if I thought the goal was competition. I asked that question when I signed up here, I was assured that it wasn't the case, I believed it then & still do.
I'm no techno so Chris's explanation of the PF works for me.....hence, I can't make suggestions on the fix.
I hope it gets sorted is all I can say.
Thanks Cass. I see Alex already started a thread on this so I'll mergee the two.
Quote from: zoony on December 28, 2021, 05:24:25 PM
I understand how Chris feels and wish he'd acknowledged our emails earlier. The site's as bad as ever today though despite his defensiveness..Sorry K, xed posts..
I accidentally started a thread on this then saw Alex already had so I merged mine into Alex's one.
I'm in.. :grin:
My posts are being monitored by Chris.. I checked earlier by answering a thread.. I don't think you did anything wrong Mark.. and I was happy, as others where, to join this site.. How many will stay here is another matter..
At least we haven't been banned from the site.. and should we decide to use it is up to us..
I shall continue to use and enjoy both. All those that I spoke to about coming here were well aware it was not a site in competition with PF. What Chris chooses to believe is out of our hands.
Wise words Zoony..
Quote from: Scrumpy on December 28, 2021, 06:38:02 PM
My posts are being monitored by Chris.. I checked earlier by answering a thread.. I don't think you did anything wrong Mark.. and I was happy, as others where, to join this site.. How many will stay here is another matter..
At least we haven't been banned from the site.. and should we decide to use it is up to us..
Well it is good news for PF that Chris appears to care at all about his forum because it didn't appear to me that he did and I gave my reasons for that elsewhere so won't repeat them. What isn't such good news is that he took the time to create a backup which doesn't sound like he is expecting the current problems PF is experiencing to be fixed quickly. If they are then well and good. Did this backup forum prompt him to chase it up? Meanwhile I have duplicated the monitor I made for PF and now have one that runs against the official backup.
PF Monitor - https://favourites.digitalham.co.uk/PF/PF_report.php
PF Official Backup Monitor - https://favourites.digitalham.co.uk/PF/PFB_report.php
As you know I considered taking a break some time back because I didn't like the way posts were being deleted with no indication they had gone. That was the reason I left as fortyone. This time I think I'll take a break from general posting on PF proper as I see no reason why my posts should be moderated. I'll just participate in the word games to see how that pans out.
Hmm.. possibly not well as they all come up saying moderator approval needed. Sorry if mine come out of sequence - feel free to ignore them. Assuming Chris approves them of course. Perhaps I'll just lay off entirely.
I was quite irritated at Chris' post. For weeks he seemed to ignore the fact that folk were having problems in accessing his site. He also ignored the quite vicious posts to which we were being subjected to by the two newcomers, but now has decided, apparently, to tar everyone who objected to that viciousness with the same brush.
As to claim this site was being set up 'behind his back', unless he didn't read the posts concerning it, nothing could be further from the fact.
Mike
I'll go along with that Mike. As I said at the time that I emailed him about it, he seemed disinterested and was quite brusque in his reply.
least said soonest mended.....deleted :nooo: [2090] [2090] [2090]
I don't think Chris reads forum posts unless they are reported to him.
I reported the 522 errors an age ago and zoony contacted him by email. I heard nothing and zoony either posted something or emailed me to say that Chris had pretty much brushed him off. He did either post or emailed somebody about raising a ticket.
A commecial server hosts thousands of sites and I cannot believe that anything but a free host could possibly expect paying customers to put up with multiple outages rarely totalling less than an hour a day for about a month and possibly more. If it is free hosting and giving that level of service I quite frankly don't see it getting any better. I have no idea what Chris intends to do about it but I can't see the host fixing anything. A hardware fault which his post on PF implies would not go unnoticed by a profesdsional host and I can't see how it would be up and down like a fiddlers elbow anyway - it would go down and stay down. I would say that the only solution would be to move host.
Depending on how much control Chris has over the DNS moving to a new host may be a relatively short outage. Having set up and tested the new host is working it is a case of putting the original host in maintenance mode, taking a database backup and uploading that to the new host then pointing the DNS to the new host. How quickly visitors arrive at that new host depends on whether they get the old DNS record or the new. DNS data gets cached and how long it takes before you get the new depends on a setting called Time To Live or TTL. That will usualy be set to a day or more for efficiency but if you are moving host and have the ability to control it you'd set it to maybe 15 minutes a day or more before the move so people would get the new one quite quickly. If you can't then it can easily take a day before you get to the new site.
I doubt anybody will read it but this is an explanation of that - https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/9622/10/dns-propagation-explained/
Quote from: klondike on December 28, 2021, 10:33:26 PM
I doubt anybody will read it but this is an explanation of that - https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/9622/10/dns-propagation-explained/
I've read it.
I confess to being lost in the technicalities but I get the gist..
If only Chris and Mark could meet for a virtual coffee..
I'll leave reading it to those who understand such things.
Mike
An alternate possibility is that a redirect to the new backup will be done to cover the period the DNS takes to propogate to a better host. If you find yourselves redirected to that backup expect the next time you get into PF the timeouts will be fixed. It's what I'd probably do had I made the effort to set up a backup forum so it could be good news for you all.
I'm not at all happy about how this has been handled and klondike will be taking a long and probably permanent break from PF. I'll leave this site running and post here as long as people come but don't feel obliged to once PF is fixed. I expected a ban anyway and for me having to wait on my posts passing scrutiny amounts to that anyway.
I intend to continue using this site as well as PF (fixed or unfixed) and I hope others do as well. To my mind two sites, like two minds, are better than one!
Mike [2090]
I find Chris's attitude to be both childish & petulant.
All he had to do was to engage with you in sorting out the problems with his PF forum, or at least explain to the members the cause of the problem & what he was going to do about it.
Very reminiscent of the kid in the playground who takes his bat & ball home when the cricket match doesn't go his way.
Quote from: klondike on December 29, 2021, 07:37:38 AM
An alternate possibility is that a redirect to the new backup will be done to cover the period the DNS takes to propogate to a better host. If you find yourselves redirected to that backup expect the next time you get into PF the timeouts will be fixed. It's what I'd probably do had I made the effort to set up a backup forum so it could be good news for you all.
I'm not at all happy about how this has been handled and klondike will be taking a long and probably permanent break from PF. I'll leave this site running and post here as long as people come but don't feel obliged to once PF is fixed. I expected a ban anyway and for me having to wait on my posts passing scrutiny amounts to that anyway.
I expected a ban anyway and for me having to wait on my posts passing scrutiny amounts to that anyway.
:grin: :grin: :grin: And you took this old gal down with you..!!
I have never been banned from anything in my (colouful) life..
Wait til I tell the kids and Tracey from the Co-op.. I will be spoken about for months..
Famous at last..!! :smiley: :smiley:
Quote from: klondike on December 28, 2021, 10:33:26 PM
I don't think Chris reads forum posts unless they are reported to him.
This must be the case because I posted the solution to the Error 522 nearly a month ago.
Quote from: GrumpyOldFart on December 06, 2021, 05:36:02 PM
Almost certainly Cloudflare's IP ranges are being rate limited by the hosting provider's firewall. The hosting provider needs to be told to whitelist them.
Welcome to the party GoF :smiley:
I don't know enough about how Cloudflare works to comment on your fix but as I said most webservers host hundreds or thousands of small sites and paying customers wouldn't put up with this which must surely affect them all so it has to be free hosting. I've used free hosting in the past myself and wasn't through Cloudflare but that was unreliable too. It could even be the free hosters business model to provide a rubbish service to push customers into buying better although that wouldn't work with me as I'd just go elsewhere either free or paid.
The demands the forum code place on a server aren't high and when the current host is working the PF response times are not bad. A lot faster than the backup that Chris set up and does seem to be reliable so far. Must turn off my pi-hole to check but I'm guessing that one is advert funded. Nope doesn't seem to be - just Facebook and Twitter links.
I feel more comfortable on PF Mark II so I'll be staying here too. I am pixxed off that Chris locked his thread about this site and even more pixxed off he locked a thread I started about the original locked thread - if you see what I mean :waiting: :waiting:
Quote from: Michael Rolls on December 28, 2021, 08:54:04 PM
I was quite irritated at Chris' post. For weeks he seemed to ignore the fact that folk were having problems in accessing his site. He also ignored the quite vicious posts to which we were being subjected to by the two newcomers, but now has decided, apparently, to tar everyone who objected to that viciousness with the same brush.
As to claim this site was being set up 'behind his back', unless he didn't read the posts concerning it, nothing could be further from the fact.
Mike
I remember the last 'break off' group when several people went off to form their own forum. That one was done in secret by private messaging but this one was done in the open due to problems on the original forum. klondike's new forum seems to be easier to use but as I have said before, thanks to both Chris and klondike.
If this forum retains a reasonable number of posters I'll maybe get a domain for it and put it on commercial hosting. Running it on a Raspberry Pi in a back bedroom is all well and good but if I get a power outage or even just clumsy or a broadband problem it would go down and proper websites don't do that.
well do it asap...i dont like the idea of our girls in your back bedroom.... :cool:
i havent even tried to get back on... i love PF it was a great find, at a grey point in my life and has brought sunlight into many a grey day...BUT... i worked down the pit i am one step up from being a technophobe.... :nooo:... when i push the button i do expect it to open, i can expect it to be monitored, but not randomly... the two plus one assasins should have been dispatched in the first few days, if he didnt want to monitor it he should have/could have deputised several of the saner members, as i hope K will on here, of course there are those who must be kept away from a big stick.. :yell: .. so thanks Mark for looking after us in dark days, you will never be alone on here...
I'll be staying as well, hope your back bedroom is comfortable Mark. :grin: I think the original Site should have had Mods as Chris wasn't going to be there all the time, BUT, what's done is done. I'll bop about between the two as I have been doing and hopefully things will improve over there. I know all forums go through bad patches but most can and will recover. That's all I'm going to say on the subject. :shh: :shh: :lipsrsealed:
Chris's comments seem to say he thinks I set this up to get away from the couple of new boys. He really doesn't seem to understand how hacked off people got with the outages.
I have deliberately added some questions to the registration now as I've had to bin off some new userids that were clearly just bots setting up accounts ready for future use in spamming. Whether that will keep them out I doubt but better than nothing.
That's what my daughter and I did with our forum, we were very careful of who we let in. It was not a big forum about 30 of us who left Yahoo Answers, as we kept getting in trouble for yacking instead of questions/answers, so we set up the Site. It still runs and most of the members are there, but I moved it over to Facebook as a private group because the Hosting Site was taken over by another firm and they changed every damn thing. We all hated the new layout so I took us to Facebook. :upvote:
Our little forum on Xobor is free, but the basic is € 6 a month, let us know klondike whichever route you go down so we can chip in. :upvote:
I could have done an email confirmation but I'm still dubious about the forum and emails. Plus bots are getting ever smarter.
Real people can miff me too. Often happens on PF. Roll up ask some oddball question about a pension then vanish never to be seen again. Maybe the sort of think you might do on a manufactures support forum but just a glance would show PF and here to be a chat place not a place likely to help with complex questions on pensions probably better asked of a professional.
Quote from: klondike on December 29, 2021, 12:16:18 PM
Real people can miff me too. Often happens on PF. Roll up ask some oddball question about a pension then vanish never to be seen again.
Is it not possible that the name "Pensioners Forum UK" is the actual problem? People coming across it may not realise it's a chat forum, not a help forum. :rolleyes:
Quote from: Alex on December 29, 2021, 12:15:12 PM
Our little forum on Xobor is free, but the basic is € 6 a month, let us know klondike whichever route you go down so we can chip in. :upvote:
No need to chip in anything. Amazon do virtual hosts that would be plenty fast enough that cost peanuts. Well dollars actually but not many of them.
I will hold fire as the Pi can cope easily it's just that proper hosting has secure power and connectivity plus very quick problem fixing.
Quote from: Raven on December 29, 2021, 12:20:31 PM
Is it not possible that the name "Pensioners Forum UK" is the actual problem? People coming across it may not realise it's a chat forum, not a help forum. :rolleyes:
Maybe but I'd be inclined to keep it. Something you could set up a poll on. I don't want to be autocratic. As I said before I host this forum but I don't own it and I'd like the folks here to have an input on what does and doesn't happen.
For instance the original setup said (and still does) that members here should also be registered on PF. Now after having been virtually chucked out as I won't post if every post of mine gets scrutinised I'm inclined to just remove that. Would that make others uncomfortable? I think now it probably would. In any case a brand new subdomain of a long dead website with an unrelated name won't show in Google searches anytime soon so there will be no new visitors anyway until that is addressed.
Does this site show up on Google then ? that means we could get Sciatico's brother registering ! :rolleyes:
I didn't actually mean this one Mark. I was refering to people popping onto the other place with a question and vanishing.
I post on both fora and will, hopefully, continue so to do.
Mike
I must confess I am utterly bemused by the recent events. I was impressed with the members and the forum and saw the deadly duo as a pain. The response of the moderator/owner of deleting posts because the Deep/Sciatico were upset was puerile and pampered to their over inflated egos. He seems not to have learned from his errors and will soon only have himself and them to blame.
Quote from: Michael Rolls on December 29, 2021, 01:01:57 PM
I post on both fora and will, hopefully, continue so to do.
Mike
Well, I will if I can into PF. So far today it has twice frozen on me whilst trying to post, and once refused to let me in. To be fair, I have accessed it OK twice, but three failures out of five isn't very encouraging.
Mike
Now four failures in six attempts - it really is getting beyond a joke
Mike
Why not leave it until tomorrow Mike :upvote:
I'll just go along with the others on here..
I doubt I will be posting on PF because I am being monitored by Chris so what i reply will always be a few steps behind other posters.. The games are a 'No No' because of this reason..
I am finding it interesting to see who .. out of those who came over.. respond on here.. Or just shy away... Even if the just said 'Thanks klondike for trying'..
Quote from: Michael Rolls on December 29, 2021, 01:51:15 PM
Now four failures in six attempts - it really is getting beyond a joke
Mike
Mike, I got chucked off PF late last night and didn't bother shutting it down. When I switched on today I was already in and, so far, haven't had a problem..
It isn't fixed. I still have my tracker running...
HTTP/1.1 522 from 2021-12-29 00:29 to 00:47 - down for 18 minutes
HTTP/1.1 522 from 2021-12-29 07:32 to 07:48 - down for 16 minutes
HTTP/1.1 522 from 2021-12-29 10:50 to 11:06 - down for 15 minutes
HTTP/1.1 522 from 2021-12-29 13:35 to 13:53 - down for 18 minutes
4 outages with a total downtime of 67 minutes
Ah - from those times I see why you had no problems. :grin:
Just checked and all tickety here..
It was when I posted todays outages so far. I was just saying that I reckon you were probably in bed or in the process of getting up when those outages happened. Luck of the draw.
Quote from: Akbuk on December 28, 2021, 05:27:26 PM
I've responded to Chris via the link he left to his email.
I've only spoken for myself.
I've basically said that I wouldn't have signed up to this forum if I thought the goal was competition. I asked that question when I signed up here, I was assured that it wasn't the case, I believed it then & still do.
I'm no techno so Chris's explanation of the PF works for me.....hence, I can't make suggestions on the fix.
I hope it gets sorted is all I can say.
This forum wasn't set up a to compete with PF, it was set up to ensure that PF members could stay in touch if PF went down & didn't reappear.
Chris was asked about the problems, he was offered help but he chose not to respond & what he obviously can't or isn't prepared to understand is that for some of us, who live alone, the PF was the main means of any social interaction so klondike created his forum to ensure that we didn't lose touch.
His childish tantrum about moderating posts by klondike & Scrumpy could well lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy about PF losing members & the fault will be 100% his.
It's a bit Upper IV isn't it ? :rolleyes:
More Lower VI, hormones still competing with acne and Led Zep albums.
Quote from: Diasi on December 29, 2021, 03:30:50 PM
His childish tantrum about moderating posts by klondike & Scrumpy could well lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy about PF losing members & the fault will be 100% his.
He should know that he only needs to ask me to stop doing something and I will. Back in the dark old days of arguments with The Deep and Sciatico he obviously spotted that I was a trustee of the profanity filter. I got this email...
Hi, can I ask that you stop circumventing the censored word filter by using foreign characters. I have cracked down on rule breaking by others who have been disrupting the forum, but I can only do that if everyone else is abiding by the forum rules.
• No swearing. Don't 'hide' swearing by replacing certain letters with others or inserting spaces.
Thank you.I stopped. Had he asked I stop asking for people to email me I would have done so - I think I only actually did so the once as Scrumpy did a bit of this...
(https://gallery.digitalham.co.uk/images/forlorn_hope.jpg)
just keep right on to the end of the road... [1050]
I'm hale and hearty sir.
As you know I almost binned PF a while back anyway. I didn't want to lose all you lot but the way it was being run or rather not run was getting me down.