Forum outage 2/12/2023

[xantia_v6]

The forum had an outage that was caused by the hosting company taking down a number of sites for emergency maintenance.

As there was no sign of the server coming back after several hours, I decided to move the forum to a new server which we have been preparing for this purpose.

As the forum database was restored from the daily backup files, some posts have been lost. Anything posted after Sat Dec 02, 2023 1:28 am and before Sun Dec 03, 2023 4:51 am (forum time) is gone. Please accept our apologies for that. If this data becomes available later, we will inform the affected users.

There will be a few things that (temporarily) will not be working properly, I will add to the list here as I find them:

• The wiki will be offline until further notice
• Some (mostly old) pages with externally hosted images may show as insecure
• The format of notification emails is slightly different
• External links are not opening in a new tab

A permanent change is that forum pages should load significantly faster than before.

If you spot any other anomolies or missing data, please report them here.

[mickthemaverick]

It certainly does load much faster Mike. A pity about the lost posts but not the end of the world. Thanks for sorting the upgrade.

[NewcastleFalcon]

Thanks Mike. Very much appreciated.

Thought my machinery had gone kaput or it was a case of the recent selection on the "Word/Phrase of the Day" thread....Resistentialism directed at curtailing my usual ramblings on the forum!

ie "seemingly spiteful behaviour manifested by inanimate objects", where objects that cause problems are said to exhibit a high degree of malice toward humans.

Is it possible when such things occur to put a "do not adjust your set" screen when frenchcarforum.co.uk is searched for/selected and the site is down for whatever reason. I think my information on failing to connect was something like check your proxy server settings or some other such gubbins.

Neil

[xantia_v6]

Is it possible when such things occur to put a "do not adjust your set" screen when frenchcarforum.co.uk is searched for/selected and the site is down for whatever reason.

Once upon a time it was easy, and we even had a backup site configured for just that purpose, but these days with site authentication, it is necessary to keep the certificates up to date on the backup site, which has some logistic difficulties. I will see what I can do in future, but it is difficult to prepare for all eventualities.

BTW, I have been administering this forum for about 15 years, and this is only the second time that I have needed to restore from backup, the other occasion was in 2016 and only required a database restore, not a complete rebuild of the server software.

[NewcastleFalcon]

Thanks Mike, definitely not worth the hassle of trying to make that happen for an extremely infrequent occurrence

Neil

[bobins]

Just a note that the 'Citroen', 'Peugeot', 'Renault' and 'Diagnostics' icons don't appear to be displaying on my phone. It may resolve itself in due course.

FCF index page - own work

[myglaren]

Same here, not on a phone but Firefox, Brave and Chromium.
Never noticed a difference, weren't they always like that?

[bobins]

It may just be a cache issue or somesuch. It was displaying fine on my PC from the get-go this morning.

FCF good index

[myglaren]

Odd. Never missed them. Still not there, just the "No new posts" thing.

[quintet]

Just a note that the 'Citroen', 'Peugeot', 'Renault' and 'Diagnostics' icons don't appear to be displaying on my phone. It may resolve itself in due course.

This is happening to me using google/chrome.

[mickthemaverick]

Just for info, perfectly ok on my phone with Opera or Duck duck go and my laptop with Brave

[myglaren]

Still the same here, both laptops and all three browsers.
Can't say it bothers me as I never noticed them until it was pointed out.

[xantia_v6]

Just a note that the 'Citroen', 'Peugeot', 'Renault' and 'Diagnostics' icons don't appear to be displaying on my phone. It may resolve itself in due course.

This is happening to me using google/chrome.

The missing logos should now be reinstated.

[bobins]

Yep, normal service has been resumed Ta muchly for your efforts with the whole forum

[xantia_v6]

We should also give a shout out to Jim, who has been responsible for taking daily backups of this forum 7 days a week for many years... (give or take the odd day off).