Server Maint. [Complete]

[Eric Lyon]

We will be running some server maintenance for the next few weeks and you may experience some temporary outages or pages loading funny. Please bear with us as we isolate a few areas of our code and make some much needed updates.

Thanks,

Eric Lyon

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Update: We've successfully retired the gerbils running in the server wheel and upgraded to a team of stallions. :P The Primary Maint. of changing servers is now complete. Please report / post any issues you may be experiencing in this thread. It would be extremely helpful if you can include screenshots, browser + version, operating system, and as much detail as possible about the issue / bug you encountered.

Thanks for your patience,

Eric Lyon

 

[kthxbai]

I have been getting the following error while trying to PM a user, thought I would report it here as I was wondering if it has something to do with the ongoing maintenance work. I have tried in both Firefox and Chrome. Please excuse me if this isn't the appropriate section.

Screenshot below :
hxxp://i.imgur.com/teQsGOC.png

 

[Eric Lyon]

I have been getting the following error while trying to PM a user, thought I would report it here as I was wondering if it has something to do with the ongoing maintenance work. I have tried in both Firefox and Chrome. Please excuse me if this isn't the appropriate section.

Screenshot below :
hxxp://i.imgur.com/teQsGOC.png

Correct, we have some ongoing server maint. happening and there may be some short intervals that have errors. After testing a few pm's they seem to be working properly at the moment.

Eric Lyon

 

[Paul]

I have been getting the following error while trying to PM a user, thought I would report it here as I was wondering if it has something to do with the ongoing maintenance work. I have tried in both Firefox and Chrome. Please excuse me if this isn't the appropriate section.

Screenshot below :
hxxp://i.imgur.com/teQsGOC.png

For the time being, it's normal to get an occasional 500 Internal Server error. We're making changes to the live server at the moment as we prepare to copy everything to new servers; until everything is copied over, we won't have any test servers, so our changes sometimes disrupt service temporarily. Refreshing in 5-10 seconds should fix the problem.

However, I don't think anybody was doing the sort of maintenance that causes such disruptions around the time that you posted, and repeat attempts certainly would have been successful. Were you ever able to send the message later?

I'll see if I can find any useful information in the server's error logs.

 

[Eric Lyon]

For similar info., Also see: http://www.namepros.com/namepros-info-and-suggestions/801318-having-trouble-accessing-namepros.html

 

[DU]

The members page links are all messed up

http://www.namepros.com/members/153719.html

Missing the domain so it goes to http:///userpanel.php etc

Make that everywhere you press a button.

Site unusable.

 

[Eric Lyon]

The members page links are all messed up

http://www.namepros.com/members/153719.html

Missing the domain so it goes to http:///userpanel.php etc

Make that everywhere you press a button.

Site unusable.

Which links?

So far I've checked avatars in posts, usernames in forum lists, tabs in members profiles, and avatars in members profile buddy list. Which links to a members profile are messed up? Could you pride more details as to the location of the link you are clicking that renders the error?

Thanks,

Eric Lyon

 

[DU]

Which links?

So far I've checked avatars in posts, usernames in forum lists, tabs in members profiles, and avatars in members profile buddy list. Which links to a members profile are messed up? Could you pride more details as to the location of the link you are clicking that renders the error?

Thanks,

Eric Lyon

I'm using Chrome and have no issue. I provided a link where all the buttons didn't work using IE 8

 

[Eric Lyon]

I'm using Chrome and have no issue. I provided a link where all the buttons didn't work using IE 8

Ahh, thanks for the screenshot. As soon as our tech gets back on I'm sure he'll take a deeper look into this. We do still have a few IE bugs that haven't been resolved yet and our new tech hasn't had time to get to them yet with his large workload (Some of which are of very high priority and take precedence).

Eric Lyon

 

[Paul]

It looks like the problem is likely our XHTML. At the top of the source of each page is this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

That might look confusing, but it's quite an important line. It tells your browser how to interpret the page. Internet Explorer in particular loves to degrade its featureset and compliance based on this line. That is to say, even though you might have Internet Explorer 8, when it sees that line, it might switch to processing the page as Internet Explorer 7.

And that's exactly what it does. Why? Microsoft seems to think (or used to think) that the entire Internet progresses at the same rate as Internet Explorer. A small minority of web traffic is the result of Internet Explorer; the Web has left IE in the dust. Internet Explorer 8 isn't powerful or compliant enough to process this type of document (XHTML 1.0 Transitional), even though XHTML 1.0 is quite old. However, for some reason, IE thinks that XHTML 1.0 is the non-compliant one in this picture.

I'm going to try switching the document type to XHTML 1.1 Strict. This more accurately reflects the code that we're using, and shouldn't cause Internet Explorer to degrade. However, browsers will expect our web page to be compliant with W3C (World Web Web Consortium) standards--which, it certainly isn't. Hopefully, they'll figure it out, and we won't end up with even more problems.

Unfortunately, I don't have the time right now to give IE support a makeover. It looks like such support is seriously lacking: I can't even log in using IE 10. IE comprises such a minority of the Internet these days that investing the many hours required to "backport" a site for IE simply isn't worth it. I will do my best to restore functionality once we have successfully moved to the new servers. Beyond that, we're probably going to need an additional programmer to dedicate time to web design.

---------- Post added at 06:08 AM ---------- Previous post was at 05:07 AM ----------

I can't reproduce the issue. You were using IE8, and our page was forcing you into IE7 compatibility mode. I've attached what that looks like. It's possible that there is a proxying firewall or some such mechanism between you and our server that is interfering with the content.

If the problem continues, please use Ctrl + U to view the source of the web page, copy the contents into a text file (should be .txt), and e-mail it to [email protected].

 

[DU]

I can't reproduce the issue. You were using IE8, and our page was forcing you into IE7 compatibility mode. I've attached what that looks like. It's possible that there is a proxying firewall or some such mechanism between you and our server that is interfering with the content.

Ok. Thanks for the detailed response. The issue may very well be a proxy/VPN issue.

I use my phone probably 70 % of the time and my regular laptop 28% of the times so this is not a huge issue for me.

Last time I checked IE still had roughly 30% of the market share for browsing and there were a number of issues earlier with IE so I wanted to report in case it was a simple fix.

IE8 is sitting at 10% still. Mostly at large institutions in the US.

The site on my other laptop was (I haven't checked in a day) made the site unusable (I had to literally correct the address for every button push - including reply) so that might cause what users you have an issue.

If it is just me (and one or two others) I don't and wouldn't expect you to do anything special but make sure you are aware that while IE7 may be left in the dust IE 10/9/8 still are quite heavily used and it would be foolish to drop support for those. (Unless your own server stats support otherwise). IE8 will lose a significant number of users next year as XP will no longer be supported by MS.

To put it into a small development team perspective... that is 2x what Safari has - and we don't tell Mac users to go fly a kite...

Now to be clear - I wouldn't worry about "prettifying" the experience for IE8 etc. as long as the site is "functional". People can put up with awkward usage - but not non-functional.

But thank for the feedback - will let you know if it resolves or doesn't next time I'm on.

---------- Post added at 10:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:50 AM ----------

Namepros is now constantly logging me out ROTFLMAO -- don't you like me anymore?

 

[Eric Lyon]

We are currently working on a server bug that's auto logging some people out in 5 to 10 minute intervals. Please bear with us as we try to isolate this issue and resolve it. Keep in mind that the original NamePros code was very old / outdated / and patched so much it looked like spaghetti. So during our transition for a better / newer / more stable system and code we are going to run into a few conflicts. We'll continue to keep you updated as we work on bettering the stability and security of NamePros

Eric Lyon

 

[Eric Lyon]

Update: the logout issue should now be fixed. It ended up being due to a few cpanel bugs which have now been resolved.

 

[Paul]

While we intend to support Internet Explorer, it isn't as high a priority as other browsers. We also lack full support for IE at present, so proper support will be a new development. This graph demonstrates why, though it inflates Internet Explorer's share by 5-10%:



(The image won't be visible in older versions of Internet Explorer, ironically.)
____________

Our server was previously configured with cPanel. While helpful for inexperienced users, cPanel is far from perfect, and isn't really meant for running a high-traffic site. It was causing a lot of problems, but it was running pretty much everything, so it took some work to remove it. Our old (and live) server should be much more stable now as we finish preparing to transfer servers.

 

[DU]

Yes it's clear that you should give more priority to Firefox, Safari, Opera ?

 

[Eric Lyon]

Update: We are going to be upgrading some of the hardware on the NamePros server tonight and the site may experience some downtime on and off.

 

[Eric Lyon]

Update: We just finished updating the server; Please report any problems

 

[domainpush]

I'm sure it has been mentioned.

1. Avatars are gone.
2. Badges are gone. (In my case the Pro Contest Holder)
3. Some funny text below the user's post profile that repeats a lot.
4. Links on the bottom right of the post are all jumbled up.
5. Go advanced is really messed up.
6. Attachment uploads fail.

Just a couple of things I spotted right off.

 

[Eric Lyon]

I'm sure it has been mentioned.

1. Avatars are gone.
2. Badges are gone. (In my case the Pro Contest Holder)
3. Some funny text below the user's post profile that repeats a lot.
4. Links on the bottom right of the post are all jumbled up.
5. Go advanced is really messed up.
6. Attachment uploads fail.

Just a couple of things I spotted right off.

Thanks, it appears it was the cloudflare / cdn server trying to catch-up and we changed the link structure a bit just now. Try to do a hard refresh and see if you can see all the icons & buttons again

 

[Paul]

I'm sure it has been mentioned.

1. Avatars are gone.
2. Badges are gone. (In my case the Pro Contest Holder)
3. Some funny text below the user's post profile that repeats a lot.
4. Links on the bottom right of the post are all jumbled up.
5. Go advanced is really messed up.
6. Attachment uploads fail.

Just a couple of things I spotted right off.

...

Thanks; some URL rewriting only gets performed on www.namepros.com (not on our test server) because it happens before the requests reach our server. The rewrite rules have been updated; that should fix most of those problems. Uploads will be working shortly.