What happens now ?

[Michael Rolls]

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

[zoony]

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.

[crabbyob]

least said soonest mended.....deleted 

[klondike]

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/

[Diasi]

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.

[zoony]

I confess to being lost in the technicalities but I get the gist..

If only Chris and Mark could meet for a virtual coffee..

[Michael Rolls]

I'll leave reading it to those who understand such things.
Mike

[klondike]

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.

[Michael Rolls]

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 

[Diasi]

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.

[Scrumpy]

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.
    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..!!

[GrumpyOldFart]

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.

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.

[klondike]

Welcome to the party GoF 

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.

[Alex]

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 

[Sheila]

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.