Admin

Welcome to the site! It's such unfortunate timing that you joined the day before the site's longest ever downtime.

I hope you'll consider giving the forums another chance now that everything is back up and running. :)

12 minutes ago, norfie654321 said:

Yep everything seems to be back to normal now. In response to your post about the video gallery too...i would lose it, i personally never had any plans to subscribe to it and came to use the site just for the forum. Im also encountering an issue where the site isnt keeping me logged in after each topic i click on either.

Could you try clearing your cache? Failing that, clearing your cookies for this site and logging in again. Please let me know if the problem persists. 

Can everyone now access the gallery? 

@bpb, I've added a list of tday's birthdays to the bottom of the homepage - clicking their username will take you to their profile. :)

12 minutes ago, norfie654321 said:

For me the forums formatting either hasnt yet loaded, or is not available at all. What im getting is just blank white screens and pages with no images or formatting as per the previous server...

Any better now? May need to do a hard refresh. 

Though a lot of images won't load yet as they're still uploading, but that will be fixed very soon. 

14 minutes ago, bpb said:

Sorry, I missed the view all button.  With this I saw the entire list.  As the Avatars are there I could get to the Profiles to wish them the "Happy Birthday" where I use to drop the greeting.  I am not sure that every Profile has the permission to be written on.

Great, glad it's all working. You're right though, a lot of users haven't changed their setting to allow profile posts, though you can always privately message them instead. 

It's fine to upload new images/avatars now, but any images/avatars uploaded before April 2017 are currently in the process of being restored. I hope this will be completed fully in the next 24 hours. You'll notice all images posted in 2014/2015 are already working.

8 minutes ago, likesToLick said:

Something weird has happened.  The site is not rendering properly.   All graphics and formatting have disappeared and it's just text on a grey background.  It started happening just 5 or 10 minutes ago.

All working now?
 

5 minutes ago, bpb said:

On the old calendar there was a list of everyone who had a birthday on that date.  I rather enjoyed wishing each one of them who appeared to have been on in the recent past a "Happy Birthday"

I went to the present date on the calendar and found that there were 46 birthday on today's date.  I clicked on 46 to see if I could see who they were and I got a very short list with no clue as to their activity, also no clue as to how to see the rest of the list.

I went to my own birth date to see if was listed.  The list was very short and I was not on the list, nor was Vikka's who I know that have the same birth date.

Do you not see the 'view all' button underneath the short list? If not, it may be those members have not selected to publicly display their birth day. 

As for when they were most active, simply click on their profile and it says when they were last online. :)

If you can't see these things, it may be a permissions issue, as I can. If so, let me know.

I also edited my post above with responses to your other comments. 

Just a quick observation though - there is a calendar feature ( http://peefans.com/index.php?/calendar/ ) that does provide a list of birthdays. Is this similar to what you were looking for?

As for the other things you mentioned:

- You can still look people up without avatars using the advanced search function.

- If people go to their profile and select 'edit profile', they can 'enable status updates' which brings back the discussion section on their profiles - it's simply an optional feature here rather than the default as before. 

- The last thing you mentioned sounds like a positive.

So actually, I think some of these things may already exist, just are maybe not as well known? :)

4 minutes ago, bpb said:

I liked that original (xenForo) better than the current form (IPS).  I would like for this to be taken as a soft vote.  However, there are things that I miss from the original form.

I miss the birthday panel and was using it as a way to estimate the percentage of active people who had listed their birthdays.

I miss the ability to look up a person's Profile even if their Avatar was to available due to not being on for a long time.

There seemed to be more readable information on the Profiles under the old system.  Take for example Vikka's where she explains her bipolar situation.

I like the present Online Users somewhat better than the old users active.  The old form allowed one to go incognito where I haven't found this action on this present form.

If going back raises many possibilities of problems then I would vote to staying on the present forum.

Once everything with the new transfer is fully sorted and everything completely back to normal, I'll be sure to take a look at trying to introduce these features. I am not as familiar with the new software either, so I can't make any guarantees, but some of those features should definitely be possible. :)

Is this problem still occurring? 

http://peefans.com/index.php?/topic/7387-were-back-please-read/

More details above, but to quickly summarise: the past administrator had to shut the site down for legal reasons, I (site founder) have re-taken over. I am currently in the process of getting everything running smoothly again, and there is now a new section at the top of the site where developments and issues can be posted. Pictures will return shortly, but it is fine to continue posting in the meantime - most other things should be running fine. Thanks a lot for your patience. :) 

Please read this thread first: http://peefans.com/index.php?/topic/7387-were-back/

Whilst I occasionally checked back to the site after the new administrator took over, I have missed a lot of what has been going on.

Firstly, I think the name change (PeeFans) is excellent, and far better reflects what this site has become. 

Secondly, the forum is now running different software. To those that remember the original software (xenForo for anyone familiar), which of the two do you prefer? Presumably there are positives and negatives to both, although I am reluctant to switch back to the original unless consensus is exceptionally strong as this could cause more potential problems. Whilst the new software is more expensive, it does seem more robust in terms of additional features available.

Finally, I'd love to hear what else I've missed. Please fill me in on any major developments. :) 

With the exception of images not loading which I am currently fixing (there are a vast amount, so please allow up to 48 hours for this process), are there any other problems you're currently experiencing with the site?

Any issues whatsoever, please post below and I'll do what I can to solve them.

The site will be transferred to a new server tomorrow so there may be some further very brief downtime (nowhere near as extreme as last time). This should make everything run faster/smoother. I'll be restoring all the images too, and will post a full explanation of what's going on. 

Whilst there are clearly a few problems at the moment,@steve25805 you mentioned not even being able to post without getting errors, is this still happening, as posting seems fine for me? 

Hi bpb, I'm in the process of fully restoring the site - a full explanation and details of what's happening will be posted shortly. :) 

On 2/13/2017 at 11:30 PM, likesToLick said:

I clicked on the "Gallery" link on the second toolbar today, but the "gallery" page shows no content.   What happened to the photo albums that many of us uploaded?

I only added a few images,  but others contributed a lot.  Are they lost?

Did you click on member albums?

I am curious about how this would work exactly. The IP address of the server that hosts this site is hidden behind CloudFlare, so they wouldn't be able to effectively block the site by IP. If they try to block it using the domain name, I could always create a generic sounding domain name and redirect it here. 

After doing some research on the error that was posted, it appears that the type of SSL certificate we use isn't compatible with computers running Windows XP. I would note that this doesn't have anything to do with the forum software itself. That being said unfortunately the only way to fix this would be for users to upgrade their operating systems which is a good idea anyway, as windows XP's end of life date was about 2 1/2 years ago, and it no longer receives security updates. Removing the SSL certificate would make everyone's connection to the site less secure, so I am not going to remove the certificate.

- A

Thanks here is the cloud flare description of that error: 

A 524 error states that CloudFlare was able to make a TCP connection to the origin, but the origin did not reply with a HTTP response before the connection timed out.

Our edge will typically wait for a HTTP response from your server for 100 seconds.

If no response is sent by your server in that time, we close the connection and serve a 524 error page.

This error is commonly caused by a long-running process on the origin server, such as a PHP application or a database query which the web server must wait on before responding to a request.

A 524 can also be caused by your origin server being overloaded- if you see this error it's a good idea to check your server's available resources, including CPU and RAM, and overall traffic levels. If your server has a high CPU load, or is low on memory, this could indicate a resource problem.

I will keep an eye on it, hopefully the down time notifier will help diagnose it. I think this is actually server issue rather than an issue with the software itself. 

16 minutes ago, steve25805 said:

Yes, all seems fine again now. Whatever the problem was, it seems to have resolved itself. But with none of us knowing what caused it we cannot know when and if it will recur. I wondered if the problem was geographically limited to my part of the world, but Scot_Lover reporting lack of access from Australia siuggests not.

I am glad it's working for you and I appreciate you trying to help figure it out. 

1 minute ago, steve25805 said:

Yes, all seems fine again now. Whatever the problem was, it seems to have resolved itself. But with none of us knowing what caused it we cannot know when and if it will recur. I wondered if the problem was geographically limited to my part of the world, but Scot_Lover reporting lack of access from Australia siuggests not.

I have setup a monitoring service to notify me when the site is unreachable. It checks every 15 minutes. Hopefully if it continues to happen I can diagnose it based on the down time pattern. 

I want to make clear that I am not trying to deny that you're having issues. The problem is that i am thus far unable to replicate them. There also appears to be a few different things going on that may not actually be the same thing. It would help me immensely if you could post a screen shot of the errors you receive, or paste them in to the reply box. Here is a break down of the issues from what I understand: 

1. The shout box doesn't have the same features as the old one did, and it doesn't function very well on Apple devices 

2. The site occasionally gives a 502 error and is unavailable, this is consistent with the server being busy or the host having some temporary issues. However, thus far we have not come close to over utilizing the available resources so I tend to lean on it being a sporadic hosting issue. 

3. The site is slow and some people are unable to post or login, but the site is reachable. I have not yet experienced this issue and I would appreciate if people would screen shot any errors related to it. I am on here A LOT and I haven't had this happen, I've tested the site on various machines, and even a VPS in another country and not seen this happen.