You may or may not have noticed that the forums were down this morning. I'm not sure exactly how long they were down, they were down when I got up this morning at 8am CST, and still down when I left for school 20 min later. The problem was on FreeForums' end, was not serious, and is obviously resolved now. (See:
http://support.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=65550)
Regarding the intermittent errors that have been occurring over the past few days, FreeForums admins had this to say:
Over the past few weeks some forums have experienced issues resulting in node or over capacity error messages. We are working on these and will update this thread when we have more information.
I would also like to remind users that we promise 99.9% uptime across the network and this allows for a few hours of downtime every month. Despite the issues we've been having, at no point has our downtime exceeded the 0.1% we allow for.
Update: We were able to able to fix the current issues by disabling the header chat. Unfortunately, this will remain disabled until we release a new chat solution later this week. This new chat will look exactly the same, but have some key optimizations needed to work in a high traffic environment such as ours.
(See:
http://support.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=65640)
So again nothing major. If you get errors like this in the future, try refreshing, or waiting five minutes.
For future reference: Any time there is actual significant downtime, here is where you need to go for information:
FreeForums Support:
http://support.freeforums.org/viewforum.php?f=28 Any info regarding the nature of the problem and it's expected duration will be posted there first.
My deviantART Journal:
http://benrr.deviantart.com/journal/ This is where I will post PDN Fanatics specific information during significant downtime. In the absolute worst case scenario, that being an unrecoverable or deleted forum, I will also contact users via the Official Forums. I'll do this either by PM, or simply opening a topic. In such a case all we can really do is find a new webhost.
Thanks! And Happy PDNing!
Ben_R_R
