Forum Software Update

UPDATE: Forum Upgrade Complete!

Hey Everyone!

Great news - our forum upgrade was successful! We’re now running the latest version of Discourse, which will help ensure better performance and security for our community.

The forum should feel familiar and operate much the way you’re used to, with some nice enhancements under the hood.

Known Issues:

  • Some images in older posts may not display correctly - we’re working to fix these shortly ** FIXED! **
  • If you notice an other issues, please don’t hesitate to report them

Thanks for your patience during the transition! Feel free to reach out if you experience any problems.

Thanks!

Sheldon

5 Likes

Hello Sheldon
Thanks so much for the all the work you do behind the scenes, it’s much appreciated. This is the only forum I post to, and it’s because it is so well run and moderated that I post here. Thanks.

I have noticed since the update that my “new” count doesn’t seem to tally with the number of new threadsIi see. I think the same can be said of the “latest” count. For instance mine currently says “there are 6 new topics remaining” but there are really only 2, both of which are locked.
I know on occassion in the past there might have been an infrequent miscount if for instance a spam thread was in the process of being removed and afterwards the tally would resolve and make sense (the miscount would be very brief). This seems different, it feels like it’s very frequently showing the wrong number and for repeated visits.

Not sure if others have noticed similar.

Thanks so much, @sheldon, for keeping things going here. Today I’ve been encountering too many requests error messages when trying to post and then when I close and try to come back to the forum. I got a weird message saying I had my (very long) reply being edited in another window - I didn’t. I made it back onto the site and got my reply posted so I’m a still a happy camper.

Thanks for letting me know. We still need to iron out a few bugs with the new server and forum upgrade. Hopefully, they’ll be squashed soon!

4 Likes

It looked like we had a couple of bots networks relentlessly crawling the forum the last few days. This was using up all the server resources and causing those “too many requests” errors. I have blocked the misbehaving bots, and things seem to be running much better. Let me know if you encounter any more of those errors.

PS: Usually, bots crawling the site are not nefarious, suspicious or worrying. They crawl the site to index it for search engines, social media, or more recently, harvest knowledge to feed to large language models for AI development. But they are supposed to behave and these bots were not.

3 Likes

Many thanks, Sheldon!

Thanks for the update. I haven’t had the problem again. I was sure if it were something nefarious you’d handle it.