SAAFE forum
General Category => Questions and Answers => Topic started by: xw5 on 19 December 2017, 11:10:40 pm
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At the moment, it looks like no-one's getting email notifications. They will be back at some point, just not necessarily quickly.
This means that the mod service may be a bit slower than usual, sorry.
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We're in the middle of moving SAAFE from one server to another.
I hope that it all goes without a hitch, but things may not work properly in the meantime.
We know :)
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For a variety of reasons, we have moved the forum to a new server. This has not been as easy as the authors of the software claim it should be - I can give some of the techy details if you like, but it's been :FF time.
Fortunately, this was not a surprise, so the 'old' board was kept going on the old server. When it needed to be frozen, so that no new posts would be made there, it was put into maintenance mode
Once it was clear that the move was more or less successful on the second attempt today (and the third overall) the maintenance message was switched to say 'go to https://saafe.info/main' (note the https rather than http and no .www) i.e. here and the new one went live.
Once it was clear that it was working almost entirely to plan, the URL of the old server - www.saafe.info - was pointed at the new one and this will doubtless propagate around the Internet as such things do. A redirect is in place when they get here in case anyone uses the www.
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I've merged this with the news thread so hopefully more people will spot it. It can come down once we're all sorted :).
For a variety of reasons, we have moved the forum to a new server.
Where Ian says 'we', I should point out that the full extent of my participation was sitting on my arse eating bombay mix watching tthe Sopranos and occasionally clicking on a link when asked ;D
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Where Ian says 'we', I should point out that the full extent of my participation was sitting on my arse eating bombay mix watching tthe Sopranos and occasionally clicking on a link when asked ;D
Plus demanding various things that meant it had to be moved in the first place! ;D
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You might find that recent email notifications have ended up being treated as spam by Gmail etc.
The address they're 'from' was changed and has just been changed again to something that various email services will (should!) be less fussy about.
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We've had some problems with GoDaddy changing where saafe.info points to and taking far too long to point it back to the right place.
They still haven't told us that they have done so and it's only through looking at the server directly that I see it's back now. Depending on just what tries to save a few milliseconds by remembering where things were earlier, it may still be unavailable via some networks for a while.
Don't use GoDaddy. As soon as we can stop doing so for the last bits that give them the power to do this, we will.
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They'll be some 'scheduled downtime' later today to implement something.
It didn't take very long when tested elsewhere, but here has rather more posts...
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.. done!
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Two more bits of downtime - a couple of minutes each - recently thanks to a couple of security updates that needed a server reboot and annoyingly weren't released at the same time...
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You may or may not have noticed a large number of 'guests' viewing the board: they topped out at 3,622 in fifteen minutes.
As a consequence everything was running very slowly today.
Looking, it appears that most of them were bots using Chinese-related software and servers. They've been blocked and while they're still trying, everything should go back to normal... until the next swarm, anyway.
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It turns out that the SMF software that runs the message board is clever enough to stop doing some things that are quite intensive to do when lots of people are using the board.
If the 'load' it measures is above 2.5, the search is temporarily disabled in order to keep general viewing reasonably quick.
As I type now, the load is 0.26, so search, 'show me unread messages', and various maintenance tasks can all run. When the bots were busy, the load was showing as being over 25...
You can easily search the public sections by adding
site:saafe.info
to your search on Google.
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There will be some downtime this afternoon while the operating system that runs the SAAFE server is updated.
Back soon :)
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.. and back again.
Slightly longer down than I expected, but that's copying old database configuration instructions to the newer version does for you, ahem.
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Hmm, some more downtime this evening as it turns out that the message board software can't cope with the current version of the language it's written in (!?!)
I've downgraded that bit, and it - crossed fingers - looks like it's working again.
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The main SAAFE site had an issue - now fixed, and I just need to find out why one bit that's worked fine ever since we moved to the current server stopped working.
Especially if you are away from home, it's possible to end up with an IP address that's on the naughty list, but using one of the various 'is the site down or is it just me' services will give you a clue.
The main work is, as ever, dealing with the users rather than the server and its software...
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When I sort out why something isn't working on another computer, there will be a short period of 'down time' here as it's a good time to do a particular upgrade.
Some of it will just have the board in maintenance mode, but there may be some minutes where you don't see anything. Don't panic :)
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This was done this afternoon - there were about twenty minutes of downtime, I think.
The board software has been updated and the server has also been changed too, which shouldn't need doing again for several years...
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The one issue I'm aware of as a result of doing this relates to email notifications, specifically to Microsoft email servers such as Hotmail, Outlook, Live etc.
Thanks to a useful feature at the people we rent the imaginary PC that is the server from, the IP address everyone uses to access here has stayed the same - it's why this change could be instant for everyone rather than having to wait for up to a day for everyone to see the new one, as happened with the other server change a couple of years ago.
But the notification emails are coming from a different IP address, the real one of the new server.
Possibly because the people who had the IP address before* were naughty, Microsoft email servers aren't accepting email from it. At all.
You can tell the level of competence involved by the way that the message saying that refers to clearing your IP address with a service that hasn't been called that for twelve years. And, in its new name, thinks we're ok.
Similarly, I've signed up with a Microsoft service to monitor how they see the IP address..
.. but because we send them so little email - about thirty a day at the moment - they don't show any data?!
It'll get sorted eventually, but this is why you've not getting any notifications if the board has an @hotmail, @outlook, @live etc email address recently. When it does get sorted, please read the emails - 'engagement' like this helps our rating with them.
TL;DR: Don't use Hotmail, Outlook or Live for your email address :) Even perennial losers like Yahoo are doing better.
* They've run out of new ones, so any you get are very likely to be second-hand. We'd use IPv6 which has more than enough to have one for every atom on Earth, but 22 years since its introduction, there are still ISPs that don't support it properly. Like mine.
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We have had two threads posted by members who have had difficulty accessing the forum over a few days.
Please either email the SAAFE admin address or send a PM to xw5 about this and not post about it on the forum. The forum is for sex work questions and discussions :)
Technical Problems
If you're having trouble using the forum, see if the help page (http://www.saafe.info/main/index.php?action=help) answers your questions. If that doesn't help, ask an administrator.
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TL;DR: Don't use Hotmail, Outlook or Live for your email address :) Even perennial losers like Yahoo are doing better.
Incredibly annoyingly, it looks very much like the imaginary computer that SAAFE runs on - a 'virtual private server' to use the jargon - is now in a list of "I wouldn't accept email from here if I were you" IP addresses that more than just the Microsoft webmail services use.
It's nothing that we've done - the email we generate is stuff that you've asked for, like notifications of private messages or comments to your posts - but the people we get the server from have not been as strict as they might have been with other people spamming or trying to hack other people, so it's quite possible everyone using them is now treated as, at best, suspicious.
It's also nothing that we can do anything about while we stay with the same provider. I lost count of the number of hoops I jumped through with Microsoft's email services without it ever working. Thanks to the big boys of email like them, Google, Yahoo etc, it has become very difficult to get email through to them without paying someone something somewhere along the line - if anyone here is a lawyer as well as an escort, there has to be a class action waiting to happen.
So we'll be moving where the server is again over the next week. They'll be a bit of downtime - sorry - and it will cost us a bit more, but at the end of it, you might actually get email from here again.
TL;DR: wait a week or so, and things should get better regarding email.
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We're aware that the "Spamming in the lion's den" subsection is currently not showing any content.
If we were to lose any subsection it'd be that one, but we'd rather not lose any.
The 790-odd topics it has are in the forum software's database, and we're investigating why they've suddenly stopped showing to anyone, including us.
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.. and Spamming is back, albeit with a different URL.
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We'd also remind members that they can contact any advertiser directly (if they need to) by using the means they have provided for you to do so* within whatever platform or facility that advertiser is offering.
*which they will definitely have done, since they will be aware that it's not SAAFE's role to provide people who take money from our members with a convenient customer service interface to use at our expense.
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With a little bit of luck (and probably much swearing) SAAFE will attempt to move to a new server on Friday.
There will inevitably be some downtime, but hopefully not too much...
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.. and it's back again.
I'm not totally sure why, when I had fixed various issues caused by the new host setting things up slightly differently to the previous one, it came back not in maintenance mode as I'd set it to that the old server just before copying everything, but it looks like emails are getting through to where they've been sent now.