Problems With The Forum Today

dvds2000

dvds2000

Gone But Not Forgotten
Joined
May 1, 2003
Messages
2,448
Location
Sunderland
Hiya

As you know I have had a few problems with support whenever there has been a problem, either they deny there is a fault or don't bother replying.

A few times this evening I have had 'page cannot be displayed', and the 'cannot connect to mysql database' errors.

Can anyone else who has had any problems at all today please post below.

The reason being - this is the response I got when I reported the last one.

Dear Colin,

Thank you for your email.

I have just tried this website and have not recieved no errors. Please get back in touch if you have a real problem.

Kind regards,

Luke
Sales & support Assistant
Click to expand...

Obviously I was imagining the errors I was getting :angy:

Thanks

Col
 
I've been getting intermittent errors all night - everything from basic "unable to connect" errors to the usual MySQL errors. If that shitty reply is anything to go by, you'd be best off getting a new host.
 
I frequently get errors, and they're bloody annoying.

It's usually just a plain white page, with 'Could not connect to mySQL 658239843' or something like that, then a big text box underneath with some other internet babble.

I also second the motion to change hosts, especially considering their 4 second long investigation into the problem. Dreadful customer service, simply dreadful.
 
Yep, quite a few times lately. "please get back in touch if you have a real problem" :D .
Tell em to shove it mate.
 
I've never known a forum with so much downtime - they're hopeless.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. Friday evenings seem even worse than at other times. As I said before, I don't encounter problems visiting other forums. I remember it happening just the once at Ted's place. Never at trf.
 
Originally posted by dvds2000@Oct 2 2004, 10:54 PM
I have just tried this website and have not recieved no errors. Please get back in touch if you have a real problem.

Kind regards,

Luke
Sales & support Assistant
Click to expand...
[/quote]
For starters, if one of our customer service staff sent an email as grammatically poor as that one they'd get the sack!!! Absolutley appalling!! It's also pretty damn rude!!

Anyway, I digress....I wasn't online last night but the errors have been bad of late - would it help if people emailed you screenshots everytime they get an error message? At least they might not be so rude to you then & maybe they would try to do something about it?
 
I certainly get problems at times, but as the problem is intermittent the reply you had was at best superficial.
I am assuming that you will be sending a copy of that reply to Luke's supervisor, I don't think any reputable company would be happy with one of their employees sending such a message.

Colin
 
Please keep this thread for problems only - it has been forwarded to support to show the problems are real and I'm sure they don't have time to go through other things not relevant :)
Thanks
 
Reply from support - hopefully the errors might stop now

Dear Colin,

Thank you for reporting the "forbidden error" as mentioned below. This was generated for aproximately ten minutes this afternoon due to our engineers migrating your website, which is explained in detail below.

Thank you also for taking the time to raise your issue regarding server performance yesterday, and in the past weeks. Our engineers have been monitoring your website following these reports for some time.

SupaNames operate a large number of different server systems, and support over 20,000 customers with many more websites spread over these. As in any shared hosting environment (rather than a dedicated server environment), each website shares the server resources with a number of other users.

Because of this shared nature several busy websites, such as yours, that demand a large amount of server resources as part of their everyday usage can create a situation in which slowly, over time, the amount of resources available to each website on a particular server decreases. Whilst this may not visually affect a typical website running HTML or light PHP it can cause an issue on websites that use a higher than average amount of resources to process each request (such as those running forums).

To resolve the problems that you appear to have experienced our engineers have chosen to move your website to an alternative machine with more resources available to it, which will result in your website performance increasing.

This email serves to let you know that we have completed the move of your website from the original host server to the alternative machine mentioned above, and the website is now being actively served from the new location.

I must also take this opportunity to apologise for the tone of the email correspondence issued by a member of our support staff last night. Luke has assured me that he made an error of judgement on the wording of his email, and that he did not intend to appear rude or sarcastic in his email, although he acknowledges that this is how the email did indeed appear. I have raised my concerns and he is very aware at why the poor wording of the email caused you serious concern.

Whilst your website is fully active at the new location, it is possible that your ISP have cached the DNS you are using to connect to it. Therefore, if you experience any issues in accessing your website over the next few hours, please do let us know.

Kind regards,

Steven Paine
Click to expand...

only took over 8 months to get this far but hopefully...
 
Excellent Col and well done Steven Paine for a very good letter of explanation and apology! Goes some way to making amends to Col for all his efforts, I hope.
 
Well done & thanks for the hard work Col - nice to see that Steven Paine apologised for the email from his staff member & had a word too.
 
Well I have been checking the site for most of the day and it has seemed much better

A couple of my replies to the first email were:

what do you mean a real problem?
Instead of being sarcastic, how about I forward all the emails I get from my
members whenever there is a problem, and you can tell them that it isn't
real? Or I could post your email address on the board for them to complain
directly to?
Can you please give me your supervisors name and email address.
Click to expand...

and

Hi Luke

it is on www.talkinghorses.co.uk/forum
The page cannot be displayed errors tend to be the whole forum, the errors
to do with not being able to connect to the database can be either on the
main page, when users try to post a reply or new topic, when you click on
any link, when you try to send a private mesage etc, the list goes on. The
problem is the errors tend to be intermittant so are hard to pin down.

Regarding your reply - what did you expect me to think when you said when I
get a 'real' error to get in touch? I don't just sit here thinking 'oh I
think I'll report a fake error to my hosting company today', I do have
better things to do!

These problems have been ongoing since I was upgraded to the premier host
package (well before actually but nowhere near as bad). I get an average of
3-5 mails every day telling me of problems. Considering we don't have that
many users I think that is extremely high.

To be fair to you - you are about the only member of support who regulary
replies, and i do appreciate that.

To show how long this has been going on for, this is an extract from an
email I recieved from 'Andy' in your support department on the 2nd of Feb
this year

Now as far as I am aware, the service problems that you have reported are
caused by too many connections to the MySQL service, which has only lasted
for a second, as the server performs maintance to restore the number of
connections, which has *not* resulted in any server downtime. I can confirm
that our engineers are working on an advanced solution to this issue, which
is caused by a few customers with very heavy sites (running at a scale
larger than the Premier account was designed for). We are attempting to
isolate this however the solution is advanced and needs to be tested before
final release. I would like to thank you for your understanding and I would
like to thank you for your time.

As you can see he admitted there was a problem, although as the largest
number of people ever on the board at one time is 33, I don't entirely
accept his explanation of the cause! Regardless of that - if you were
testing back in Feb, that was 8 months ago. Surely the testing is complete
by now?
Click to expand...

So at least they raed them :)
 
Going into the I Dunno thread I get

mySQL query error: SELECT t.*, f.topic_mm_id, f.name as forum_name, f.quick_reply, f.id as forum_id, f.read_perms, f.reply_perms, f.parent_id, f.use_html,
f.start_perms, f.allow_poll, f.password, f.posts as forum_posts, f.topics as forum_topics, f.upload_perms,
f.show_rules, f.rules_text, f.rules_title,
c.name as cat_name, c.id as cat_id
FROM ibf_topics t, ibf_forums f , ibf_categories c
WHERE t.tid=7875 and f.id = t.forum_id and f.category=c.id

mySQL error: Lost connection to MySQL server during query
mySQL error code:
Date: Tuesday 05th of October 2004 11:59:07 AM
 
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