"Unavailable" ?

[StevieG]

Richard,
By no means a complaint, just an observation in case of interest.
For the first time(s) ever, yesterday evening and through today, when routinely changing pagers/topics/forums herein, I have experienced a return message of something like 'This board is temporarily unavailable. Please try again in a few minutes'.
Sure enough, after a few minutes (seconds sometimes), all is well.

[Mickey]

Yes i'll second that as well Richard the same 'intermittent problem' that Stevie has referred to i believe i first noticed it last Thursday 19th Jan.

[60800]

It's happened to me about 30 times since the 'compression' was put on.

[AndyG]

Been happening several times for me this morning as well.

Andy

[60800]

For those who have not experienced it:

[Blink Bonny]

Ay up!

I'm getting this as well. Can something be done? I'd hate this little group to go the way of the LMS forum.....

Mind you it was the scamming spammers who killed that one, come to think of it!

[60800]

I just hope it isn't a concentrated DOS (denial of service) attack

[richard]

It isn't the compression, but a few other adjustments I did at the same time.
Basically if things get too busy it gives you that message. I'll back the settings off a bit, although it might take some trial and error to find the best settings. The settings should be on, but they shouldn't be too sensitive.

Note that in the past when it seemed to take a few seconds to respond, the server was probably getting overloaded - now you get a message instead.

Richard

[jwealleans]

Happens to me when I use the 'Board Index' link top left of the page. If I use my Firebox bookmark it's fine.

[strang steel]

Maybe some of us more frequent posters should stump a couple of quid each in order for Richard to pay for the web hosting and bandwidth charges?

After all, the site is a mine of valuable information and most of us have a Paypal account. All we would need is an email address registered for Paypal and either Richard or this website, and we could transfer to that.

[Blink Bonny]

Ay up!

I must admit I'd not thought of that, SS. Couple of quid a month?

[richard]

First, I did back off the limit that is causing the error. Actually I backed it off a lot. The fact it is still appearing indicates the server is very busy. It is a shared server - not only does lner.info have to share a PC with my other sites, but also other people's sites. Changes are a foot and my entire account will be migrated to a virtual system in the next few weeks (possibly this weekend) - I'll post an announcement when I have a time & date (the site may be down for a day or so, also it will break some links and bookmarks). This change will make the limit meaningless (in which case I switch it off) or it will change the baseline for the better.

Adding compression to the forums has made a huge difference to the bulk bandwidth statistics for my entire account. After the server move, I shall be switching compression on for my other sites. It is also likely that two of my commercial sites will not survive the move. So (and this is not a reason to go wild!) bandwidth should not be an issue for the next year or two. Disk capacity will also increase with the move. The growth in attachments during December was pretty big so I'm not going to increase individual image attachment sizes, but I might relax some of the other limits (eg. number of PMs in a mailbox, size of non-image attachments, attachments-per person).

re. donations: I did have a donation link back in the very early days - never got a single dollar! Those links were replaced with the Goodle AdSense adverts on the static site. It might be an interesting experiment to put the ads back on the forums now the traffic is so much higher, but I'm inclined not to. Income was low per page view (the page views are generally the same people who have seen the ads before) and the annoyance factor was high. As a general yardstick (and this varies month to month), AdSense income across all my sites currently pays for my combined Pair+Amazon web hosting costs, but would not pay for a dedicated server.

[StevieG]

" Happens to me when I use the 'Board Index' link top left of the page. .... "

(Still for info. only) Now I think about it, I reckon that's when I have been occasionally experiencing it as well.

[Blink Bonny]

Ay up!

The LMS have an ad at the top. My only complaint is that recently its been for "Mature Dating" using some real horrors! I'd run a mile from any of 'em, and I'm not exactly in the first flush of youth meself!

I wouldn't mind ads if it helps pay for the site. I always ignore 'em anayway! Adman's nightmare, that's me.

[richard]

Well that is it - the forum traffic is so high primarily because it is viewed by a group of people who are checking it regularly (unlike other pages where there's a lot of turnover). So more people ignore it - 99.8% say rather than 98.5% (those are rough ball park figures). It might not seem much but in terms of clicks/view, and $/view it is huge.

What might make a difference is if the advertising can be better targeted. Google have some tools to help with this but it is very broad (eg. I've switched dating off for the main site, but I can't switch everything off). One option would be for a rail-specific vendor to pay for a static advert (but they would have to pay at least as much as Google currently pay), or the vendor could open a Google advertising account and specifically target my site (ie. so a proportion of their adverts appear on my site). This should be a win-win as their adverts would appear in a relevant place, and I would get relevant adverts.