I've had a couple of complaints that readers haven't been receiving their email newsletters. Wondered how widespread this issue was. I was missing my emails for a couple of days, but that turned-out to be to do with my email system, not OLO's.

Thanks for the personal email Graham regarding this problem.

----
My email alerts are not working. As one of the posters who notified Graham of this problem, I'm keen to get them operational again.

I turn the email alerts on for every thread that I contribute to, but they just stopped arriving last Monday and have been missing all week.

So it is email alerts from discussion threads that are the problem. I thought you were talking about the newsletters. Well I'm answering your comment now because I got my email alert. If you've set email alerts I wonder whether you will see my response.

Graham, I had set the email alert for this thread but no alert has come through.

FWIW I have never used the email alert feature, but I have noticed that I have erratically been logged-out of the Forum despite the fact that the 'set a cookie' option has been left selected just lately.

This did not happen in the past. Then, any time I went on the Forum after a period of inactivity, my userID would come up on the 'users currently online' display and remain showing until the time for invisibility came around. Then, although perhaps still viewing pages at intervals after some inactivity, my userID would not be displaying despite the fact I was still on the Forum. I could still post without having to log in afresh with my email address and password at these times.

The change is not a problem to me, but I just note the seeming change in the way the site performs on occasions these days. Perhaps it may be in some way connected to the email alerts issue.

Hi Graham - I don't appear to have received the newsletter on Thursday or Friday.

Also, I don't know if you're aware that the server is very slow tonight, with numerous of those "Server Error" messages.

Cheers.

I have had no problems with news letter or e mail alerts

Yes OLO is very slow this morning, with server error messages all over the place. Second attempts seem to bypass the server errors.

I couldn't access it after several attempts and only managed to get it up via an old email alert.

Now it is a mixture of normal fast pages changes and tediously slow ones, most being slow.

Just corroborating CJMorgan's observation regarding the server errors.

I got this message at approximately the time shown at the top right of my screen:

http://twitpic.com/2461ys

I also got a subsequent one for the Articles index page shortly after, but I am encountering problems uploading to twitpic since the one and only twitpic linked to above was posted. Interestingly, my first failure to upload to twitpic resulted in the message "Connection interrupted. The connection to the [twitpic] server was reset while the page was loading.".

Subsequent attempts to upload to twitpic did not even draw that message. All I got was a blank screen, the address "http://twitpic.com/upload/process" displaying in the address bar, and 'done' displaying in the status bar at the bottom of my screen. Nothing had been 'done', however, for on checking my own tweets on my twitter home page only the screenshot linked to above was showing up.

Perhaps OLO IT staff may be able to draw some conclusions as to what, if anything, these internet symptoms may indicate is, or is not, going on, as the case may be. I am lost in the internet landscape as to where we may be at. Are we by any chance somewhere near Conroy's Gap?



What is this OLO email newsletter, and where on the site does one sign up for it? I have never seen it in the now nearly four years I have been a registered user on the site.



PS Ditto Ludwig's general experiences as at around 8:00 AM.

Even more interesting!

Upon clicking 'Post revision' after copying my post, that now shows in the thread as having been made on Sunday, 11 July 2010 at 8:17:33 AM, into the posting pane on the 'add new comment' page, and then revising it therein, I got the OLO message 'comment added'. Then nothing happened for quite a while, so I took a screenshot: all the while the status bar on my screen was showing 'waiting for onlineopinion'.

Then the OLO page in the new tab that opens in Firefox when one makes a new post to OLO showed as loading in the progress bar at bottom right of my screen. Bingo! Another 'server error' message! (Of which I took another screenshot.)



Had my new post gone up, or not?



I immediately closed the 'new post' tab, and refreshed the page displaying this thread upon which I had clicked the 'new post' button. Voila! My new post had in fact gone up!

All very confusing.



I sometimes think that a person, or persons, unknown sometimes tries to nobble the OLO site. Is that just my suspicious little mind running in overdrive, or do others think so too? I mean, there's hardly anything ever posted on OLO that interests external to OLO would perhaps want to effectively censor, is there? It couldn't be, could it. Not when there is such an enormous range of possibilities for mere technical problems and/or user incompetence to explain everything away.

Nah, gotta be rubbish, that idea. Its Sunday. Back to sleep Skippie.



[Dreams]

"Master, how long must I stay like this?"

"(Hehehe) Grasshopper, make pain your friend." ['Master' sips tea behind translucent shoji screen with grinning satisfaction, indifferent to Grasshopper's discomfort as the candle in the censer between Grasshopper's legs slowly burns down. It would be even stevens whether Grasshopper could master the pain or not before it (the candle, that is) goes out.]



An ad comment, as an alternative to an ad hominem. Like Luna Park: just for fun. Light relief for OLO viewers, in just 350 words.

Hi, yes I've noticed it is running slowly. I've got a call in to one of our tech guys, but thanks for letting me know. It seems to be episodic. One moment there is a problem, and the next not. :(

And I'm keeping tabs on the rest of the conversation too.

Graham

Well, it is running like a pearler this evening (:>)

Erm.... but I'm still not getting email alerts (:>(

Yeah, I haven't been receiving email alerts either for some days now.

What about a forum s/w upgrade?

I Luv the concept, Luv the place, Luv the People, but seriously, the forum s/w seriously sucks and is majorly retarded.

No multimedia, no pics, no sounds, no smilies, no tracking, no filtering, no global search, NO POLLS etc.

I was into cooler forum s/w in the US more than 10 years ago and its only bound to have go better since then.

DreamOn, I'd love to renovate the place, but how much money do you think we could all raise to do it? This software was built by us from scratch, but that was in the days before capital got a bit short.

Graham, OLO has gone into super slow mode.

This page came up quickly, but others are extremely tedious, as from a little while ago.

Still no email alerts coming through.

Come to think of it, was it to be that a person, or persons, unknown wished for whatever reason to suppress the apparent activity of the OLO Forum, interfering with the email automatic notifications might be one way of going about it.

Whilst the Forum is open to any and all who are prepared to abide by the relatively minimal rules applying to registered users, once any given Article comments thread, or General Discussion topic thread, gets under way, there tends to be dialogue between a relatively limited number of posters interested in that thread. Observing, over the years, comments by various users as to the amount of time they make available to reading, and posting, on the Forum, and as to how those distinct activities fit into their overall time managment, I should think that for most users email notifications would be pretty important. Consequently, deliberate interdiction of email notifications could result in a dumbing-down of the Forum's general level of perceivable activity, especially if those users have set and use an audio warning to alert them to activity on threads in which they may be interested.

An interesting pointer to the user demographic, if these features are used by most.

I have posted before as to the possible visual dumbing-down of apparent posting activity on the Forum as shown on the respective index pages by the red-text post-recency flags (which are supposed to stay red for two hours after a post goes up) changing to a black text '2 hours ago' anything up to 50 minutes early in what seems a semi-random fashion. See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=967 This visual dumbing-down seems to me to be particularly noticeable, once a viewer knows it is going on, in the 'last post' order of index display. It is still happening.

All of which GrahamY knows, and may have obliquely referred to in this thread.

Now, FWIW, screenshots relevant to my post of Sunday 11 July at 8:17:33 AM that I was unable to post using twitpic:

http://twitpic.com/24jjma

http://twitpic.com/24jle3

http://twitpic.com/24jmcs

http://twitpic.com/24jnkr

http://twitpic.com/24jp0c

http://twitpic.com/24jq3z

I couldn't access the forum just now.

Again I had to go back to an old email alert to get in!

Man, this really is starting to peeve me.

I've got a day off work, and a whoooole lot of stuff that I'd like to write on OLO. But the site is just barely operational.

I can access the comments for the new article; 'Asylum seeker policy on the run', but I can't access the article!!

Yeah, the articles are still taking forever to load. The Forum's working fine though. Weird.

Hi GY. The same problems as Forrest Ludwig and CJ outlined have occurred with myself for the past couple of months.

I had assumed it was at my end until a few weeks ago logged into the news and other things, realising that there was a server error with the Forum and it was sluggish in addition to not allowing me into certain threads LOL..GY: thought you must be telling me 'No go WAU on this thread' LOL. This week all fantastic! Ludwig's turn now; just joking Ludwig!

For the record, I love the OLO system and layout. Simple and Easy! About 6 years ago a Forum I visited had undertaken an overhaul resulting in utter pandemonium: most complained as it took far too long to post comments and read others' comments. Sometimes basic simple ways are best!

"Allons enfants de la patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrive..."

Bastille Day 2010 is here.

Vive la France! Vive la Linux! Morte a les cheveaux Trojans!



Another indicator of Forum activity is the 'Users currently online' display, viewable here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/

When a user logs in to the Forum their userID appears at top left of this display. As other users log in, or, being a user already logged in but having been inactive on the Forum site for more than the 120 minutes indicated but again becoming active on the site (eg. refreshing a page), their userIDs appear similarly. UserIDs thus transit from left to right much as one would read text, only disappearing if the user shuts down the computer, logs out of the Forum, or if either the OLO time limit for the display of any given userID is reached, or the limit of the display space available on the page is reached (presuming there to be such a limit).

I am not sure what the OLO time and/or space limits for this display may be. I get the impression the time limit may not be as long as 120 minutes. Neither am I sure about any space limit, but I do not recall ever having seen more than five lines of userIDs on display at any one time.

What I am wondering is whether there is a perhaps an unintended interaction of that part of the software coding that determines the 'Users currently online' display with that of the red text post-recency coding. Could it be that flags are coming down prematurely on the index pages because one limit or other is being reached in the 'Users currently online' display?

Then again, if a cracker wanted to dumb down the apparent level of Forum activity, interfering with the 'Users currently online' display (or user logins?) might be a way to go about it.

Forrest Gumpp (who became active on the site around 5:00 AM) disappeared from the display between 6:01 and 6:21 AM, although still active. See:

http://twitpic.com/250rir

http://twitpic.com/250s55

http://twitpic.com/250sor

Gday all, just getting involved in my work again.
I organize see.
GY remember has got this up from scratch he is a conservative but will grow out of that.
Can we help?
Yep some can I soon will hit the kick again put a few shillings in the bowl.
Those of us who can should.
Surely?
can you see the need,I for one am grateful we have the forum.

Correction to my last post. The problem seems to be in loading the front page - once that's loaded the links on it seem to work normally.

Hope this helps :)

Yes, the front page appears to be problematic. I've just managed to pull it up, but wasn't able to earlier and had to access OLO yet again via an old email alert.

Well, the front page did come up, but it was excruciatingly slow.

Accessing the new articles from it is just as... painfully ..... sloooooooooow!

(>( zzzzzzzzzzzz

YES !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !!

YAAAAAARHOOOO !! !! !!

YEEEHAAAAR!! !! !! !!

The email alerts are WORKING again !!

Thanks Graham, or Graham's little helper(s), whichever the case may be.

( :> )

Just as a matter of possible interest, the following twitpics provide a record of an interesting transient event on OLO, which I have not previously remarked upon, based upon the assumption it was something provoked by OLO's own IT staff checking out the functioning of the site.

http://twitpic.com/25d3av

http://twitpic.com/25d49l

On both the Articles index page, and the General Disussion index page, at around midday on Friday 2 July 2010, every single article or topic was showing its last post as having been made 'less than 1 minute ago'. A viewer could scroll as far as they liked, the post-recency flag was the same. The twitpics cover the first 20 or so articles displaying in last post view as at that time.

Did anyone else see this little event, I wonder?

Hi, I think the speed thing has been fixed. A server reboot seems to have got everything in line. Not sure how it got out of line, but more concerned with the future than the past in this instance. We're also upgrading our MYSQL, and something to do with the old MYSQL might have been part of the issue.

One of the side effects was that mail was sitting in a queue. Not all mail, but some of it. The reboot emptied about 10,000 emails out to their correct destinations.

I'm not sure what is going on with your issues Forrest.

<< One of the side effects was that mail was sitting in a queue….The reboot emptied about 10,000 emails out to their correct destinations. >>

Mmm yerss, I received nearly five hundred email alerts in one hit!! ( :>|

But all is good now.

Cheers Graham.

Woah!

There it was Forrest, five minutes ago - that whacky phenomenon where every article and general thread had a red 'less than 1 minute ago' message next to it.

Then it was all back normal very quickly!

Ludwig,

Thanks for reporting that you, too, have seen that crazy phenomenon of the 'less than 1 minute ago' flags. Sometimes I think I must be imagining some of the things I think I have seen on OLO. Which is why I have taken to more frequent screenshotting, just to be able to prove that I'm not going round the twist.

Its occurrence does not seem to have resulted in the re-opening of closed threads. When I took the screenshots I posted as twitpics I didn't think to make sure I got a shot of a part of the index with closed threads. The flags were only like that for at most 15 minutes, maybe even much less than that.

I gather that it has been news to GrahamY, judging from his comment above.

Odd that it occurred again after being mentioned for the first time in this thread. Then again, perhaps it happens much more frequently than we might imagine. I've no idea of the traffic density to the OLO site: maybe the odds of anyone seeing this seeming glitch are relatively long.

I wonder what it all means?

This morning I am having difficulty getting the articles index to load.

Here is a twitpic of my screen: http://twitpic.com/273qyd

Strangely, after I hit the stop button, I encountered no difficulty getting the General Discussions index up.

I am a little surprised that the connection did not time out and a 404 notice come up during the attempt to access the Articles index. I wonder what determines how long it will be before any connection times out, because when attempting, over the years, to access other sites, connections seem to have timed out much sooner. I wonder whether this is something that is 'tweakable' from site to site, by 'Big Bruvver', or an even bigger bruvver.

Nothing is as paralysing of Forum traffic, I should imagine, than sheer apparent inactivity of the site.

I am pleased to report that it has all been working perfectly for the past week.

Yay!

A funny thing happened today on the Forum.

At risk of being a little bit off-topic, but not at any risk of derailing a currently spirited discussion, I am curious as to why the OLO posting pane does not seem to want to accept the deliberate use of the space-bar as a means to the manual introduction of a limited degree of text formatting.

Here I was posting the score on another thread, see: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3834#94229 , and, like any good scoreboard poster would, I used the space-bar to align the 'Nil' vertically under the '1'. Upon refreshing the thread, I noticed that the spaces were no longer there.

A week or so ago I posted a quotation from the Constitution, and in doing so similarly attempted to format the quotation manually to replicate its precise appearance in the printed document itself. I have a recollection that when first posted the formatting was actually present in the post as it appeared, but on a subsequent visit to the thread I found that the formatting had disappeared. Now I can't be sure if I only imagined it.




Does the use of the space-bar pose an issue for the Forum?




Has any other OLO user experienced this behaviour of the software?

I can't say it is a huge issue for me, but I am curious as to just why it might matter. I strive to make the most of the 350 word limitation by making posts as readable as possible, and sometimes a little bit of formatting or use of blank space helps, IMO.