I'm posting here on Drevid's behalf, and his forum problems. He wanted me to include this screenshot to show the error he's receiving:

http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d120/Kapy01/Untitled.jpg

He was saying that the error only occurs when he's logged in, and he's tried several different web browsers as well as different computers and receives the same error.

One way to avoid this is to not use the "Show New Messages, All Categories and Topics" link. Navigating through messages by category should eliminate this from happening.

Solomon

<<You're right, but some forum-readers who tend to read everything and anything (cough) end up having to do a lot more "work" to read threads. One click vs three, five, a dozen... etc. It adds up!>>

A little more "work" for a lot more success seems like a good trade-off to me. For the record, there's not a TON we can do about those delays, to my knowledge. It's simply a limitation of the cloud and the technology vs being able to have forums we can update and improve upon.

Solomon

<<That's a horrible solution. Why have the link if it's broken or not working properly? This started two days ago so I am not sure what changed since then.>>

It's not a horrible solution if it works. The link is there because it doesn't always timeout, but depending on how many topics, categories, and messages it's trying to load, along with the time of day, there's always a chance that it gets bogged down. Even on the old forums it would take a while, it just didn't do the "dot thing". Nothing has changed over the last two days, at least as far as the forum software though.

<< I am just not going to click on hundreds or however many folders and threads there are. >>

You don't have to do that at all. Once you start reading, there are navigation links at the top of the page to move to the next topic/category, etc.


Solomon

>>A little more "work" for a lot more success seems like a good trade-off to me.

I feel like most of my issue with the suggestion (although a valid one that does work!) is that I feel like the boards take a step backward with it. The older version of the boards had the "show everything please" link function without fail, as far as I recall. If the new boards don't have it work anymore, then to me it's a step backward in terms of board usability/friendliness/accessibility/etc.

I know part of the frustration comes from the fact that most boards run some iteration of phpbb, making "see everything new please" rather normal/expected. And I understand that the phpbb setup just doesn't play nicely with the general account setup for Simu as a whole, but it is a bit frustrating on the player-side to now have to keep clicking new categories/topics/threads/etc in order to read things, when in the past we never had to do that.

>Navigating through messages by category should eliminate this from happening.

You'd think, but this doesn't generally work any better than the New Messages at the top of the tree. At least from what I've found. Yesterday I had the same issue when trying to read the Abilities and Magic category. I click Dragonrealms, I click Abilities and Magic, I see there are two subfolders with new messages, one message in each folder. Shouldn't be a problem to load two messages, but I hit New Messages and come back five minutes later to a screen filled with periods.

I tried off an on for an hour and gave up.

>>Pretty much this. I'm used to navigating the forums now minus the "show everything please" button, it's just unfortunate that this upgrade to the forums killed it.

I agree. I also like to use the "show all" button, and the change has been very frustrating.

It is really nice to be able to just click once and get a page that you can scroll through at leisure. I realize I can click the "next category" buttons but I agree that it's slightly annoying and not ideal.


-- Player of Eyuve

I use standard (non-threaded) view, new topics only, and use the 'next topic' button to navigate. Exclusively. And about 1/3-1/5 of the time, I get a timeout/error/etc.

So if I'm understanding the proposed solution, it's more of a 'maybe it'll work a little better' than flat out 100% sure fire fix.

---

Let's save us all some time: I'm a troll who rarely has anything helpful. There.

The number of messages that need to be loaded, unfortunately, does not necessarily mean a great deal since it still must be handled as a background task. I can't fetch how many messages are going to be fetched with actually doing the fetching, which can't be done inline with the request.

That being said, while we did not change the code ourselves, at some point over the weekend the application or the database restarted. While this doesn't affect the application's state, it does (sometimes) change the default sorting that the database does. Because of how the "Show All New" query works, it gets attached to the "first" post (according to the database) which is then copied into another section of the database. Unfortunately, when it restarted, the database chose a post with a huge log in it, so it was doing a massive write whenever someone clicked "Show All New".

This is when I smacked myself in the head.

I fixed it on Monday afternoon to instead choose a specific post which has a very tiny footprint and have not seen any issues since. If you do notice anything in regards to consistent slowness, please post here and I'll look into it.

-Michael

I still tend to lock up. I appreciate you looking into what caused it, though! Those fun little system errors make the world go round.