Scott =)

1 hour ago, comicquant said:

Will you be using S3?

Yes!

1 hour ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

Does this include attachments that were posted before the "new Boards" switchover?

A look at this thread shows that the attachments never made it after the switchover.  Weird!  Images show in the preview but not in the screenshot I took.

@Scott =)

 

 

That thread doesn't really prove that the move to the new boards earlier this year caused images to be lost, considering that if you scroll down on page 1 you can see that some images are still available. Same thing if you jump to random pages. I jumped to page 1000 (from 2008) and saw a combination of broken images and images that still work.

Images in that thread could have been uploaded directly to boards, but people also could have just posted links to images that were hosted elsewhere. It's not uncommon for images that were hosted elsewhere over a decade ago to no longer work. For all I know the image(s) in that first post have been missing for many years, or were never even there to begin with.

As far as the thread preview, I'm not sure what logic that uses to decide what image to show. I'm guessing it just uses a random image that still appears somewhere else in that thread (sorry but I don't have time to look through all 2500 pages to confirm )

To answer your question, tonight's move applies to ALL images that are currently visible on Chat boards, including stuff that was posted before the move earlier this year. More than likely, images that are currently broken/missing will remain broken/missing.

Let me know if further Qs.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Everyone!

STARTING TONIGHT, we're moving all attachments on the boards to a new location on Amazon. We're doing this for performance reasons and to ensure that we have plenty of disk space available on the boards. All attachments will be moved (images, etc), including attachments posted in Threads, Journals, etc.

There is a LOT of content to be moved (many, many gigabytes) and the transition will more than likely take at least 24 hours to finish. We're hoping it'll be done by Monday morning.

When the transition is started tonight, all existing attachments will immediately disappear and gradually reappear throughout the weekend. The pic below shows you what an old image will look like during the transition.

Once each image has finished moving to its new location on Amazon, it will appear as it did previously, instead of like it does in the pic above.

--

If you post a new attachment during the transition, it should display correctly. It's only the old attachments that will be temporarily unavailable.

I'm sorry for any inconveniences that this may cause, but it's a necessary step to help ensure that the boards run smoothly long term.

If you have any questions about this move or if you notice any related issues, please let us know by replying below.

Thanks,

Scott

On 10/28/2017 at 11:04 PM, n2wdw said:

Can someone tell me the syntax to link to a specific post?  I know I can just copy the address line of my browser to link to a page of a thread, but what I'd like to do is link directly to a post.  Thanks.

There are two things that you can right-click to copy the URL for a specific post:

1. "posted yesterday at XX:XXpm" at the top of every post
2. The "Share this post" icon at the top right of every post (looks like a < with 3 dots)

Hi - I merged those 2 threads together. Give it a few minutes and you should only see it listed once under "Popular now"

Scott

That issue should be fixed now for everyone except admins.

If anyone else still sees it please let me know.

Scott

On it! Looks like it should be a fairly simple fix.

Let me know if you spot anything else.

On 10/9/2017 at 9:07 AM, Bosco685 said:

Wasn't sure where this is covered. But is there some trick to making the Search feature work consistently? I notice over the past month if you search for a topic, it hangs for an extended period of time when trying to add the Movies-TV-Games sub-forum to your forum search options. The progress indicator will just circle for an extended period of time. And it doesn't matter the browser, as if functions the same whether you use Firefox or IE 11.

We released an upgrade for the boards this morning which was supposed to resolve this issue with searching subforums. Unfortunately, I'm still seeing the issue 

I've followed up with the boards vendor to let them know that this still isn't working, and hopefully they'll provide a real resolution soon. Thank you for bringing this up.

Interestingly, upgrading the NGC/PMG chat boards to the latest version did successfully resolve this issue. Not sure why the CGC boards would be different... 

On 10/6/2017 at 3:02 PM, davedawgbg said:

Is there a way to link to a specific post in a thread so when selected you jump to that page and it navigates down to said post and not just the top of that page?  Whether going to 'Content I started' or 'Content I posted in' it only shows the overall thread and not an entry for each post I've made. 

 

I'd like to use this for selling recaps so I can make a list on the last page of a thread and link directly to the books still available and not just the page they're on.

Yes there is. See the image below.

I haven't forgotten about you! But I don't have a substantial update yet.

My post towards the bottom of page 5 of this thread is still the latest info I have to provide about the general slowness and intermittent errors you all have been reporting in the last few days.

I WILL say that the boards are being upgraded to a recently released version (4.2.5) about 10 minutes from now, which means a couple things to you:

1. The boards will be unavailable for about 5 minutes during the upgrade.
2. Some of the issues that people have been reporting lately should be resolved by this upgrade (issues when editing posts, etc)
3. The upgrade will probably NOT solve the general boards slowness, or random errors you all have been reporting lately. But as my post on page 5 describes, we are working on solutions for this.

The next release after 4.2.5 (4.2.6) is supposed to significantly improve search speed in the private messages section, especially for people with big inboxes. Hopefully 4.2.6 will become available in the next week or 2.

Thanks for your continued patience.

Scott

The boards vendor made a fix to hopefully stop people from getting those errors. If anyone sees that error again, please post here!

Thanks,

Scott

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

For now, I'm going to focus on doing whatever I can do to help make the nasty errors that everyone's been seeing today go away.

Regarding the long-term slowdown a few people have been mentioned, it's definitely something we've been monitoring and talking about how to solve. Our performance metrics suggest that the average load times have gradually worsened over the last few months. Not by a huge amount on average (less than a second), but still noticeable for a website where you load so many pages. 

Some features have worsened more than others. Some are mostly the same, while others show a more dramatic difference. In particular, things that involve heavy indexing (searches, using a large private message inbox, pulling up a profile page where activity displays, etc) have had some problems. Some of these problems are supposed to be improved and/or fixed entirely with upcoming boards upgrades. One such upgrade is planned for this Friday morning.

We're also exploring other ways to make things better, whether that be changes in hosting, adjusting plugins, or upgrading to higher membership levels with the boards provider (among other things)

I'm not exactly sure which things we'll wind up doing or when exactly they'll happen, but I wanted to at least let you know that we're aware of the problem and are working to solve it. I know that every fraction of a second of waiting time counts!

Thanks,

Scott

Thanks for that feedback. Can either of you help me understand what you mean by "not working that great for quite a while"? Does that mean lots of errors? Slow load times? A combination of issues? etc.

Hi All,

I've entered a support ticket for the boards vendor to make sure they're aware of this issue. At this point, I'm not sure if this issue is specific to these boards or something wider-scale.

I'll let you know as I learn more.

Thanks,

Scott

4 hours ago, Marwood & I said:

Hello @Scott =)

On the subject of searching, can you remind me how far the search function goes back now? Is there still a limitation (I think 2 years has been mentioned in the past)?

Also, if I create a thread now, and then there are no more posts, is there a point in the future where it would stop showing up in searches and therefore, be effectively 'deleted'?

Cheers

 

It goes back 4 years for now. It's a rolling 4 years, which means that the thread you create now will no longer be searchable 4 years from now (assuming that no settings have been adjusted during that 4 year period).

I wouldn't call threads older than 4 years "deleted", because they are still findable if you use the pagination tools on the site.

Note: Since older content is findable via pagination, that means that it may also be findable if you use Google for your search...   (see image below - that thread is currently on page 800 of Comics General and not updated since 2011, but findable via Google)

That issue has been fixed! 

22 minutes ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

@Scott =)

Thanks for reporting this. This issue was introduced a couple hours ago as we were cleaning up the themes, and it's being investigated now. Hopefully it'll be resolved today.

Thanks,

Scott

On 9/27/2017 at 1:10 PM, Mr.Mcknowitall said:

Note to CGC: Hire the NGC cyber stuff guy/girl/it. Has not had a problem all day. It also has a water cooler. and you can go to the upper left and click on browse, and then click on registry and then click on CGC and voila, can get into CGC.

Are you saying you still can't sign in to the CGC boards via regular means? The sign in feature should be working correctly now, and the number of online members has looked normal for the last few hours.

The CGC boards have a water cooler too by the way... you just need to be logged in to see it 

58 minutes ago, Marwood & I said:

....and now I can't access profiles at all:

 

Release the nanomeds!

 

The Profile Page loads just fine for me. Are you seeing this error consistently? If so, are you seeing it for all profile pages or just your own?

The profile images issue you're describing is interesting. The source image for Arch's profile banner is a extremely large, and his account has a custom positioning of that image saved. It looks like when the page first loads, it shows the top part of the image (all white), before quickly flickering to the repositioned part of the image he intends you to see. I'm guessing this would be less noticeable if his source image wasn't so big. My profile image looks fine, although I will mention that it will display slightly differently for different devices / resolutions...

59 minutes ago, BlowUpTheMoon said:

I'm still getting the error.

@Scott =)

I think this was a temporary issue, most likely connected to troubleshooting that is being done to investigate. Are you still seeing this consistently?

1 hour ago, skypinkblu said:

I'm not sure "fixed" means what you think it does, I keep getting the screen that pops up when you have a message (only there is no message) and the last time whatever that grayed out screen is, froze my computer (about a minute ago;) 

Darn! Sorry about that.

Could you take a screenshot of what you're seeing and post it here? (or PM it to me if you'd prefer)

Also: does that issue go away if you sign out and then sign back in?

Hi everyone,

I was very surprised to visit the boards this morning and find that the sign in function was bringing me to the wrong place, and Single Sign On between the boards and the main CGC site was not working.

I entered a support ticket for the boards vendor, and they just applied a fix. We haven't done thorough testing yet, but at an initial glance it looks like we're back in business.

I'm very sorry for the inconvenience! Please post here if you continue to notice any unusual system behaviors.

Thanks,

Scott

Thought I'd share a little info the vendor provided about this issue:

Quote

When a user views a topic a temporary 'view' record is stored in a separate database table. This table is then checked every 5-10 minutes and the views are copied over to the main database table, which means that view counts for content items (such as topics) can be 5-10 minutes behind, resulting in topics that have replies but do not reflect any views yet. I apologize for any confusion this causes.

So they're acknowledging that this can be an issue sometimes. Based on your screenshot, it looks like maybe 5-10 minutes is more like 5-30 minutes, though... 

Scott

The boards vendor just made some tweaks to minimize the likelihood of this issue. Let me know if you continue to see it!

Update:

I entered a support ticket for this issue to get more details from the boards vendor about this. Here's what they had to say:

Quote

This is a limitation of MySQL fulltext search, 'who' is on the stopword list (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/fulltext-stopwords.html) and words that are less than 3 characters are not stored within the index.

We are currently evaluating improvements to the search system for a future version.