urbanMSP

Hey Shawn/Nick,

How come only the "AREA DEVELOPMENT, PROJECTS & DISCUSSION" group shows up when not logged in?

Our guests/lurkers are missing a lot of good stuff in the GENERAL DISCUSSION group ("Local Politics" and "Anything Goes") that might draw them in to create an account, but they'll never see those forums unless they create an account. Catch 22.

Discuss

P.S. I've been meaning to ask that for at least a year.

I've been meaning to ask that too, so I'm glad you did it for me.

I've been having my connection get reset several times today -- is the web server bumping up against a limit on concurrent connections?

Definitely something wrong with the site today.

Had this a few times last night-

The site keeps re-setting for me as well.

I haven't noticed problems at all today, but maybe I've just been lucky.

I think I've mentioned it before, but I've wondered if the error seanrichardryan noted was sometimes an indication of some sort of backup or upgrade happening on the system temporarily causing the MySQL server to disappear -- makes sense for a late-night outage, but generally not the middle of the day (in other words, if you see that happen at like 1am, I'd guess that it's normal, and the site should come back in a few minutes. If it happens at 1pm, then there's more likely to be a problem).

I've seen that MySQL error once or twice in the past few days, but far more I've just gotten Connection Refused or some such thing. Today has been fine though.

Yes, the problems that I was having yesterday seem to have been fixed.

Should be server-end maintenance which is routine. Nothing we can do about it from our end besides wait it out or refresh, it should take a few minutes at most for it to restart and work again.

I'm seeing daytime connection resets today. I've also recently noticed that if I hit the "back" button after reading a thread, the index page updates, a behavior I haven't seen previously. Something is causing the browser to think that the page has expired and needs to be re-retrieved. That would cause some extra load on the server, but I couldn't say how much.

I've been having issues all day today. Many "lost" posts.

Separate techie question: How come when I hit "back" in my browser, the entered text isn't there waiting for me. Instead I get an empty box. I feel like some websites, when you get an error and go back, your entered text will sometimes be saved.

I've been having issues all day today. Many "lost" posts.

Separate techie question: How come when I hit "back" in my browser, the entered text isn't there waiting for me. Instead I get an empty box. I feel like some websites, when you get an error and go back, your entered text will sometimes be saved.

I believe the answer lies in cookies and/or memory. There are add-ons for Firefox that supplement standard cookie behaviors with extra saving, AFAIK.

I've been having issues all day today. Many "lost" posts.

Separate techie question: How come when I hit "back" in my browser, the entered text isn't there waiting for me. Instead I get an empty box. I feel like some websites, when you get an error and go back, your entered text will sometimes be saved.

The errors seem to be related to cache invalidation. I don't know if that is for sure the case, but if it is you're losing your post because hitting the Back button is causing the page to reload completely.

Looking into this - our host has been having issues with our server lately.

I am prompted to log in everytime I visit the site, even when I click the 'keep me logged in' box. It's been that way for a few months.

This used to happen to me as well, and it is incredibly annoying. I fixed it by clearing my browser/cookies. I'm not sure what I can do from the admin end to fix this for you unfortunately. We're working on getting some eyes on these issues that know more about phpBB and back-end hosting stuff. I'll update as we get more info.

Can anything be done about the terrible, borderline useless built-in search function? Basically every search term one would use to find a particular thread is deemed "too common" and is excluded from the search. If I want to find anything on urbanmsp, I resort to Googling "urbanmsp.com ______ ______".

Did that fix it? As an aside, that seems (to me) like such a clunky way to view the site.

Add me to the list that browses the site this way... Since I tend to check all the threads, it seems clunky to do it the other way...

Why do so many people on this forum hit "Quote" instead of "Reply" to reply to the person directly above them? It's super annoying.

If you're responding to an earlier post, or need to clarify which part of a post you're replying to, by all means use the quote function. But if you're just straight up replying to the most recent post, then sweet baby jesus just hit "Reply".