Forum Updates

[milesburton]

Well you'll all be happy to know I've updated and added lots of new avatars.


Theres about 15 obtainable ranks to choose from (but I wont tell you what they are ). If you have any questions or suggestions please PM me.

PHPHelp.com Administrator.
Miles

[milesburton]

Hi Guys,

Sadly i've lost my high-speed net connection and thefore cannot get on the net at the moment, i'll be popping in and out as often as I can.

Hopfully all should be sorted out within the next month, for the time being the java based IRC client will be offline.

Thanks for your time,
Miles

[builder]

Offline Browser Policy

It has come to the attention of The Moderators and The Administrator that some users are downloading the complete forums using offline browser software, such as WebCopier, WebZIP and Teleport at high rates. Due to the load this presents to the shared database our hosting provider offers, as needed, offline browsers will be excluded from the forums. Please do not hit our fora with offline browsers.

[builder]

Forum Technical Problems


User Id, Strange Stuff

If you experience any problems related to your user id, if your material seems mixed up with anyone else's, please send me a private message.

This problem is considered resolved.

Critcal Error: Session Failure

If you see a message something like

Code: [Select]

Critical Error

Can't write session

It means phpBB's session table has become corrupted. We do not know why this happens, but when it does I must reset the session table to restore the board.

Update: a large number of Guest sessions builds up prior to the board going down. Perhaps this will help resolve the issue.

A cron job (a program that activates daily or once per 24 hour period at a random time) has been setup to delete all sessions on a daily basis. So don't be surprised if you're logged out occaisonally. The purpose is to restore functionality to the board should session table corruption occur. This should at least restore the board in 24 hours without any human intervention.




This problem is being monitored.


Possible explanation for this problem:

By monitoring session activity it was discovered that the table was becoming corrupted by an overload of Guest sessions. These were apparently produced by heavy web robot activity, some by users downloading the entire forum content in a very short time. Measures have been take to reduce this activity. I hope this issue has been resolved. Please do not hit the forums with offline web readers or robots.

[builder]

You can now make references to the php manual in your posts.

Make references to the PHP Manual to any PHP function or topic covered by the online manual at php.net Just enclose a function name, etc. in [phpref][/phpref] tags and a link to the php manual will be created.

This generates in your post a link php.net where their automatic search system translates it to the most appropriate section of the site. If it matches a php function, the browser is directed to the online manual (as in this example).

Please see the [phpref]isset[/phpref] function in the php manual.

If you enclose some other term, it will go to the section php.net thinks most closely matches.

If no match exists, php.net returns a search results page.

Steve

[builder]

You may notice there are fewer posts and topics than before. We had reached about 13,000 posts in the General forum. The board was slowing down a bit and we were reaching the maximum allowed database size our hosting provider allows per database.

So we intended to enable automatic pruning of messages. This deletes any message that has no replies after a certain time. Most of the forums were to be set initially to 360 days or more so that purning would start around the edges so to speak. Later it would be reduced to a year or less to keep the database size under the limit. As I had time, I was going to abstract the better posts.

However, when I enabled prune today, phpBB docs nor admin gives any warning that it takes a maximum of 255 days. It accepted my 360 and turned it into 255 without any warning.

So now we have about 7,000 posts in general.

Steve

[builder]

Tutorial forum topics are reporting an error that has something to do with Polls. I do not know the reason. Please be patient while I troubleshoot this issue.

Steve

[torrent]

You may notice there are fewer posts and topics than before. We had reached about 13,000 posts in the General forum. The board was slowing down a bit and we were reaching the maximum allowed database size our hosting provider allows per database.

So we intended to enable automatic pruning of messages. This deletes any message that has no replies after a certain time. Most of the forums were to be set initially to 360 days or more so that purning would start around the edges so to speak. Later it would be reduced to a year or less to keep the database size under the limit. As I had time, I was going to abstract the better posts.

However, when I enabled prune today, phpBB docs nor admin gives any warning that it takes a maximum of 255 days. It accepted my 360 and turned it into 255 without any warning.

So now we have about 7,000 posts in general.

Steve

Does this affect our post counts?

[builder]

The phpBB developers say no. When a topic is deleted, yes it does reduce your post count. When a topic is pruned, users post counts are retained. I have deleted a few topics, so some may have seen their post count go down a little, but only if you posted to the board a year or two ago.

Steve

[builder]

If my visits to the forum are infrequent this month, it is because I am working on

• project for a client
• XHTML compliance for this site
• a new more readable "light weight" presentation for this site
• content management system to replace the current one

Steve

[milesburton]

Hello all,

After a long, long wait i'm back online and i'll hopfull get back into the swing of things fairly quickly.

The PHP-Live Java client will be back online as soon as I find the on button on the server .

-Miles

[builder]

If my visits to the forum are infrequent this month, it is because I am working on

• project for a client
• XHTML compliance for this site
• a new more readable "light weight" presentation for this site
• content management system to replace the current one

Steve

[builder]

Web page compression has been enabled on the site. Please reply here if you have any trouble with pages loading.

Technically, ob_gzhandler has been enabled for compression in browser that can accept it. Other browsers should be fine.

It has come to my attention that some _minor_ versions of certain builds of Internet Explorer fail to handle standard web page compression. The symptoms are a blank page loading and the browser status "Done." This should affect a vanishingly small portion of browsers, so compression will continue to be enabled.
Steve

[milesburton]

Hi everyone,
It would see, we've been delighted with a visual upgrade to these boards. I just thought I'd say, "Good work Steve aka Builder".

-Miles

[builder]

We just got our power back up. I noticed the board was down for the first time in weeks. I found the same condition in the sesssions as before I started deleting that table on a daily basis. I thought I could rely on this. I am checking to see if the cron job was running.

Steve