The Energon Pub

[Seibertron]

I've made a variety of behind the scenes changes to the Seibertron website and server during the past couple of weeks, thanks to finally having some time to look into a few lingering issues courtesy of life slowing down a little bit during the Pandemic (I always have something to do!!!). How has Seibertron.com been running for you? Specifically today, but in general. Have you noticed speed increases? Has it been loading OK for you?

One of the biggest changes I made was getting rid of Google Ad Manager to manage our homegrown ads for sponsors like ToyHax.com. I wrote my own custom code to display those ads, most of it was back-end stuff that even most of the staff doesn't see in our admin section, but it's a fully functional ad management system. Those ads should just appear just like any other regular content on Seibertron.com.

A lot of these changes are changes that I need to implement prior to the launch of the Seibertron.com redesign. Heading in the right direction for the site's 20th anniversary!

[Tyrannacon]

Nevermind, somehow leak protection on my end got turned on. Figured out what was going on.

Noticed that some of the images I had linked to in the past aren't up when the host/domain I use for them is still active. Was remote linking disabled? I know my stuff works on other sites. Figured I'd ask and see what was up.

Case-in-point:

[Munkky]

Hi,

I've been talking via private messaging with another user about some figures I'm selling him, but for the last few days every message I've sent has got stuck in my Outbox and have not been sent to the other user. I have now tried three times to send messages, and each time the message does not leave the Outbox. How do I fix this?

[Burn]

That's not an issue. It sits in the Outbox until the recipient reads the PM, after which it moves to the Sent box.

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

"Display This Post" still refuses to work.

[Sabrblade]

I haven't been receiving any email notifications lately despite several posts being made in threads I'm subscribed to. I haven't changed any of my notifications settings and I keep making posts in said threads, but no email alerts are coming through. Not in my inbox, spam, or any other folders.

[Seibertron]

Test message ...

[Seibertron]

test message #2 ...

[Sabrblade]

Getting in here from the email notification works. But clicking from the General Discussion forum takes me to a Kremzeek page.

[Sabrblade]

Double posting to say that after making the above post, it did go through, but brought me back to a Kremzeek page too. Clicking the back button to before I made that post took me to Kremzeek as well.

[Seibertron]

The 503 error has been fixed. I was able to isolate the issue in the code. It was a problem with the topic view counter in the database. The field has now been modified, and this topic (and presumably all other topics with high topic view counts) has been resolved.

[Seibertron]

Double posting to say that after making the above post, it did go through, but brought me back to a Kremzeek page too. Clicking the back button to before I made that post took me to Kremzeek as well.

Thanks for bringing this problem to my attention. I wasn't aware that it was happening. I appreciate you taking the time to let me know. Have a great night Sabrblade!

[Sabrblade]

The 503 error has been fixed. I was able to isolate the issue in the code. It was a problem with the topic view counter in the database. The field has now been modified, and this topic (and presumably all other topics with high topic view counts) has been resolved.

Hooray!

Double posting to say that after making the above post, it did go through, but brought me back to a Kremzeek page too. Clicking the back button to before I made that post took me to Kremzeek as well.

Thanks for bringing this problem to my attention. I wasn't aware that it was happening. I appreciate you taking the time to let me know. Have a great night Sabrblade!

[Seibertron]

Just an update on Seibertron.com ... our database server has been problematic for the past few months. I had been putting off fixing it until after the new year due to how busy our store has been. That server was behaving very much like Seibertron.com's old servers back in the day when the hard drives would go bad, but I've been on cloud servers with SSD for past 8 years and haven't had a problem with these servers since then.

2 days ago, the database server had other things in mind and ended up corrupting the OS and much of the main Seibertron.com database which made fixing the server a top priority. Fortunately, I was able to restore the database from a day old backup of the server so not much data was lost (if you posted on the forums 2 days ago, I apologize that your posts for that one day were lost).

Anyway, after spending time with tech support yesterday and not getting anything resolved plus spending another day working on the database server trying to fix it myself, I decided it was best to move the database server to a new server in hopes that I am right that the old server is corrupted somewhere. I don't have the luxury of waiting for tech support to help me resolve this problem eventually nor do I have the time or patience right now with New Years weekend. So hopefully I'm making the right decision here.

It's nerve-wracking trying to get a new server up and running with everything else I've got going on ... hopefully I don't forget something and hopefully this all works out! Fingers and eyes crossed!

[Seibertron]

If you're seeing this message, it means Seibertron.com is on the new database server. Fingers crossed. I'll check in on everything in a little bit once there's more traffic on the server.

[Burn]

Still a bit slow and Kremzeeky at times, but it's getting there.

[Seibertron]

Still a bit slow and Kremzeeky at times, but it's getting there.

Thanks for the feedback, Burn.

I received a few other reports of this and saw it myself as well while running my script to update the seibertron store ads in the right column.

I made a few additional changes to the database server and purged the forum cache just now.

Please keep me posted what you guys are experiencing.

Ryan

[Sabrblade]

The verification Captcha on the Submit News page is broken.

[Seibertron]

The verification Captcha on the Submit News page is broken.

Thanks for letting me know, Sabrblade. This has been fixed.

[Seibertron]

Sorry the site was down again for a couple of hours this afternoon. After the news crew ran into some difficulties getting a news post to show up on the homepage, I realized that I hadn't updated the forums database connection to match the new server. The rest of the site was using the new database, but the forums and the staff admin section both use different code to connect. I haven't messed with those settings in at least 6 or 7 years, so I had forgotten that I needed to make the changes there as well. Hopefully that's why we kept getting Kremzeeks on some parts of the site (because some of it was still using the old database).

Long story short. I made the updates to the database configuration in both of those areas of Seibertron.com. However, I didn't want to lose anything that was updated on the forums in the past couple of days, so I had to take the site down again in order to restore the forums on the new database server.

In order to avoid this problem going forward, I renamed the site's database on the old server so that it would be more obvious if there was an error somewhere on the site. If there's anywhere else on Seibertron.com that is connecting to the old server, it'll fail now because the database was renamed.

I also made an update to a very resource heavy database query that was in the forum code. On every page load, the code would check to see how many user sessions there were in past 15 minutes. The table was accessed so much that it would cause a bottleneck on the server at times when there's lots of activity. I modified the site code so that a script that runs in the background once per minute now stores that information in the database and now the forums just call that one field instead of counting the sessions on every forum page load. Hopefully this helps tremendously by putting less demand on the database server.

[Seibertron]

Kremzeek struck last night, but I think it was an issue with the main web server, instead of the database server this time. The error was actually because the database server was overloaded, however, because the site has been running so well this past 5 or 6 days, I've been uncovering some other areas on the server that needed to be addressed.

This time I uncovered that the system that is in place on the web server that automatically prevents brute-force attacks. I feel like this is what was really the cause of the problems. Seibertron.com just kept getting overloaded so quickly, that I feel like it was from bruce-force attacks.

I found some errors that were preventing this system from working, made the necessary fixes, restarted the server and it's back to blocking bad IP addresses and Seibertron.com seems to be doing fine this morning.

[Emerje]

I'm getting 503 errors when I try to disapprove spam posts.

Emerje

[Seibertron]

I'm getting 503 errors when I try to disapprove spam posts.

Emerje

Can you post the link to the page you are on? The URL will require appropriate permissions to access so it's fine if you share the link for the purpose of debugging in this topic.

I'm assuming that 503 is a separate issue or an error in code that is causing the 503 you are getting and is actually unrelated to the others.

[Emerje]

Sure thing:

Post: casino-color-psychology-t120486.php
Error: mcp.php?i=queue&p=2174909&f=4&confirm_key=2ZBH8AEKLI

Looks like the second link is just redirecting back to the mod panel.

Emerje

[Seibertron]

Sure thing:

Post: casino-color-psychology-t120486.php
Error: mcp.php?i=queue&p=2174909&f=4&confirm_key=2ZBH8AEKLI

Looks like the second link is just redirecting back to the mod panel.

Emerje

Interesting. I am able to replicate the problem. I am currently unable to resolve the issue. I'll have to keep working on it over next couple of days. It's a different problem from the typical issue that causes the Kremzeeks. It could be an error in code somewhere or a special character in the user's post or something that is breaking the phpBB code. I'm not certain at the moment but will continue working on it.