At Mike's suggestion, we should all be on the look out for links or functionalities that don't work with America's Debate.

I believe it is useful if you clear your browser cache before doing so because your browser may be looking for pages at an IP address that has changed. Just a friendly suggestion.

Find anything else? Post it here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay I have one.

When you are on the start page and not logged in, there is a large "Click Here to Start".

When I click it, I get an error which takes me some Dell/Google page that says the page cannot be found. The error says something about unable to find http://ams.americasdebate.net/alt.php

Thanks for starting this, Amlord.

I meant to start a topic last night, but after 14 hours of continuous work in restoring the site, my brain apparently wasn't working.

I'll be going through as many areas of the site tonight to try to find things that are not as they should be, but I am sure there are areas I will miss.

I truly appreciate any reports of broken/missing portions of the site.

Thanks!

Mike


OK, that is the ad server. It shows internal ads when there are no other ads to be shown. Honestly, I haven't updated the ads in years. I will, for the time being, probably just eliminate it. This is on the list to address tonight.

And by the way, Amlord, did you know that you can (and should!) remove the ads on the site? Anyone who donates can remove all of the ads. You're free to leave them, but it is not necessary. The ads are mainly here so that guest traffic, who offer nothing to the site in terms of content or participation, can actually pay the bills for the rest of us. You can remove the ads in your control panel.



Mike

I do have the ads turned off. This particular screen is only when you are not logged in (which I usually am, but this morning the cookies must have been reset because I wasn't logged in).

Thanks for all of your hard work Mike. You are the invisible engine behind America's Debate!!

No bugs to report, but I am now acutely aware of how important it is for me to get the e-mail addresses of some of my America's Debate colleagues should something drastic happen again.

Oh, and even more importantly. The lesson today is having reliable backups are your friend because if your computer died RIGHT NOW, would your data be safe?

Ounce of prevention. Pound of cure.

Found a dead link: Redirect add. Thanks Mike!

Heh! We're not going anywhere. That was our longest stretch of downtime since we started in 2002, though.


Exactly. I have seen dozens of forums lose everything after a server crash or a hosting mishap. In fact, I was contacted yesterday by someone who runs a forum who was on the same host as ours. Their site is much larger than ours, apparently having about two hundred times the activity. They had no backup, and are negotiating to get their data back from the host's host. Until then, they are out of service.

I put a good backup system in place about a year after we started the site, and pretty much haven't had to think about it since. All of the data is backed up nightly in four separate locations. The server generates a backup and copies that backup to another server. My home computer automatically fetches that file a few minutes later. It is then backed up again a few minutes later when the nightly backup of my home network takes place. In the end, I have a rotation of four separate copies of the data stored in several different locations.

Since we were on shared hosting, I could only run the backup once per day. That means that the worst-case scenario is that we could lose just short of 24 hours worth of activity. In this case it was a fourth of that. I hope to come up with a better backup system now that we have much more flexibility in our hosting.

Backing up is good. $50 for an extra hard drive now could save you thousands of dollars worth of data recovery later.

Mike

I have no idea why, but I'd been unable to load americasdebate.com (since about 1:00 PM EST) until about ten minutes ago. The site was back (for me) for a few hours this morning, then just wouldn't re-load - I kept getting "timed out" messages). Every other web site was downloading just fine. I'm hoping it's back for good now.

Odd, Wertz.

Please keep me updated if it occurs again.



Mike

Heh - if I can.

I wanted to mention that the same happened to me, and it lasted a few days. Today is the first day its worked for me. I thought it was because I was in Azerbaijan, but since Wertz experienced the same problem, maybe not...

I suspect it was caused by a DNS issue.

When you make a DNS change to a domain, it can take up to 48 hours for the change to make it to your ISP's DNS servers. I had to change our DNS twice within about six hours.

If it still happens anytime on Thursday or later, I'll start to worry. Until then, my bet is that it will self-correct.

Thanks!

Mike

For what it's worth, and this is probably more due to the time difference than anything else, I didn't even notice went down until I saw Mike's announcement of it.

Which speaks well of the promptness of your response, Mike.

I'm currently in Okinawa and had the same situation as you did Julian. No clue until this thread popped up.

This seems like an appropriate time to mention that if you love and appreciate the hard work and dedication that Mike and Jaime put into this site, send a donation to the support the cause!

I can confirm that this was a DNS issue. DNS changes do take a while to propagate. Some NAT routers cache DNS entries as well as your computer. In the past, I've explicitly purged my local DNS and my NAT router DNS entries to force an update more quickly. This doesn't help speed up your ISP's DNS updates, of course, but does eliminate some of the slowness.

The site would have been down for you between about 4:30PM Monday and 4:30AM Tuesday. I became aware of the problem around 11:30AM Eastern (4:30PM your time), started working on it by 12:30PM, had the site up for testing by 10:00PM, and back open around 11:30PM.


I'm glad you weren't impacted. And thanks for the donation plug... heh.


Yeah, I have Comcast, and their DNS servers are painfully slow to update. The move was complicated by the fact that we have our own nameservers now. I had to register their hostnames before our registrar would allow me to set the nameservers for the domains to the new nameservers. It all happened very fast, though. I remember when DNS changes would actually take 48 hours to take effect... heh.


In any event, things seem to be running smooth on the new server. The site seems faster and more responsive in general. I am trying to give myself a crash-course in optimizing the server, and I think I have a pretty good grasp on what can be done to tweak the server to increase performance even further.

I'll be working on the issues listed above in the next two days or so.

Mike

I have no idea if this is related to the hosting issues or not (and don't really see how it would be), but I've never noticed it before. I was doing a "quick edit" on a post last night and, when I completed the edit, my [url] tags had been translated to <a href> tags.

I meant to mention this earlier, but it's not that big a deal. The Online List page still has a broken ad link at the bottom (whether one is logged in or not).

OK, I believe I have everything fixed that is listed in this topic.

If you find anything else, please let me know!



Mike

I've been getting extras in my posts after they have been finished. I have been finding stuff like I tried to highlite or make something bold or change font size. There is nothing there but my post will have the html tags visibly sitting somewhere in my post. I can edit them out and they stay gone. it has only been in the past 2 days.

Christopher, is this still happening?

Stopped. Only lasted for 2 days. Happened a few times. It started with my signature acting screwy with its tags displaying themselves or half of the tags then spread to random tags appearing in my posts. Then it stopped.
Glitch in the matrix. I knew it.

I tried using the 'chat' feature and failed to connect. Connection timed out. Any ideas?

Were you trying to use the Java applet or an IRC server?

Java.

Hmmn. I'm not sure then. Have you tried it since? I'll sometimes get disconnected just after the log-in, but if I reload the widow, it usually stays connected on a second or third try. If it keeps happening, you'll probably need advice from Mike or someone with a bit more expertise.

I had some problems with the applet myself a year or so ago, so I started using mIRC instead. But I went back to the Java applet a few months ago and it's been working for me since. It can take a while to load sometimes, but I haven't had any other problems lately. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Does the chatroom see any action anyway?

Wednesday nights it gets some simulcommentary action when AD Radio is on. Otherwise, not so much. The "Chat" link at the top of the page has a participant count (in parentheses) when someone's in the chatroom.