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message from boards2go
IP: 2.28.9.155
Posted on April 7, 2014 at 06:14:20 PM by georgia
Hi All,
I believe the disappearing pages where probably due to a number of combining factors.
1. We were getting hit pretty heavily by spam bots causing our servers to slow down to a crawl.
2. I believe while we were getting spammed, our server was running out of disk space due to the enormous amount of logs and posts that were being generated.
These two things cause the board application to fail. Here is what we did to remedy the situation (hopefully).
1. We are putting in some checks before we write out the first page. We are making sure that it isn't an empty file. If it is then we bail out early.
2. We expanded our file system by 32GB. This should be enough space.
3. We are going to add some alerting around our system health (load) as well as free disk space.
4. Looking into how we can automatically ban these bots.
I'm hoping the worst of this is over, but if you have any problems please let me know right away.
Once again, my deepest apologies. I know you guys work really hard to put together a thriving community and when content that is produced by the community is lost... it really sucks.
Regards,
Joseph Shin
The customer service we've received from B2G while these problems were going on has not been great, but if these steps have been taken then I'm reasonably confident this shouldn't happen again any time soon.
We will be keeping our BoardHost board as a backup in case B2G boards go down again. I'll add it to the Adventure page in a bit. It will remain as an "anywhere" board, so you can continue to thread there normally. I'd encourage everyone to try it out so that we can discuss whether to stay with B2G or switch permanently to BoardHost on all boards.
It's worth noting the following features of BH:
- As yet I haven't been able to successfully put it on Shaman's layout.
- As yet I haven't found a way to enable HTML in the name/subject line.
- There are a lot more features and options available on BH and a higher character limit (50,000 compared to B2G's 15,000).
Thanks for your patience, guys, and we're sorry for the posting interruption. Hopefully we can get things rolling again now.
As a personal apology for the issue, you may claim +5 points for every post you write over the next 2 weeks (so until midnight BST on Mon 21st). Just claim on updates.
Edit: Also I've just tried to sign into Hostica and it won't let me edit pages because it's lame, so I can't remove the yellow stickers on adventure/reside just yet... but you CAN now use all boards again. Just ignore the yellow.
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