Omnimaga

Omnimaga => News => Topic started by: DJ Omnimaga on April 26, 2012, 03:28:25 am

Title: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 26, 2012, 03:28:25 am
For the time being, some site features have been temporarily disabled:

-Spam forum: For some reasons, page #1 of the spam section takes an unusually high amount of time to load and caused the site to hang. Every other page there loaded perfectly. It has now been disabled completely to reduce risks of downtimes while the administrators figure out the issue on that page and improve the server performances.
Spam forum has been re-enabled.

-Search engine: Due to the new database format, the search engine no longer works. It was resource-intensive too, anyway (even on AspirationHosting it took ages to load). If you have a question, just make sure to check the first few pages of threads in the appropriate forum section and if you cannot find your answer, then create a new topic. As always, we got Casio, TI and computer programming and support forums for you.

Search is re-enabled, though it isn't the fastest.

-Board statistics: The weekly/monthly top 10 posters mod installed on that page is very resource intensive, as if the rest of the page itself wasn't enough. For the time being, only the static posting graph, along with download stats will show up there. If you want daily post statistics, use this (http://www.omnimaga.org/statsgraph.php) for now.
Stats are re-enabled.

-OmnomIRC: The shoutbox will remain disabled until server load issues are resolved, as it is one other resource hog. For now, use Mibbit or a real IRC client and connect to EFnet to join #omnimaga. If that doesn't work, you can use OmniNET (irc.omnimaga.org) too.
Thanks to jimbauwens, OmnomIRC is back up.

-IRC post notifier and OmniNet relay: Alberthrocks have setup a temporary bot to replace them for the time being. If that bot fails too, then use this (http://www.omnimaga.org/index.php?action=ezportal;sa=page;p=5) to view the latest posts.
Bots are now functioning properly.

-The Game: Losing is not as common, but is still possible, especially if you notice this bit of text.
The administrators are working hard during every bit of free time they have to get the server issues resolved ASAP, so wish them luck. The good news is that the site loads incredibly fast, now, and lag is much less frequent than it was a few days ago.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Juju on April 26, 2012, 07:45:38 am
Well, I guess it's fine for me. Good luck, our beloved admins.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Scipi on April 26, 2012, 09:12:44 am
First off, I Lost

Secondly, I noticed the search engine was disabled yesterday, lol :P

Is there a timeframe to when we'll start being able to recover these features?
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Jonius7 on April 26, 2012, 09:45:26 am
Yes I noticed the stats bars had been removed with unable to load the 'main' template.
Awww... I checked that page over 9000 times a day!
Yet overall I feel the website has slowed down considerably even with these features off...
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 26, 2012, 09:49:35 am
Strange, for me it loads fine (except at a few occasions of course, which lasts around 5 minutes max) ???
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Jonius7 on April 26, 2012, 09:58:35 am
Well kinda but maybe it's always happened to me just not significantly. Just took a while for buttons like quick modify to pop up. I think it's better now.

Also here's a screenshot of the stats page error:
EDITT: Where's the attachment option?? ???
Oh maybe you can't do it in the news board?
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Sorunome on April 26, 2012, 12:30:40 pm
Omnom is back! *YAY*! :D :D :D
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Scipi on April 26, 2012, 12:59:42 pm
I just logged on and it was the first thing I noticed :D
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 26, 2012, 04:04:35 pm
Nice, thanks jim :D. Hopefully netham45 and the others can figure out a solution for the rest too.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: willrandship on April 27, 2012, 02:29:42 pm
What about doing one of those custom Google search bars? They seem to do well with forums and such, and the resources wouldn't be used on the omni server.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: ZippyDee on April 27, 2012, 05:02:58 pm
Lack of search makes things really difficult when there's a specific thread that you want to find...Is there really no way to implement it back in?
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 27, 2012, 08:58:21 pm
Not until a solution is found to the slowdowns problems. Search was even slow on AspirationHosting (our most performant host in Omni history). For now I think it could possibly be replaced with Google search, because indeed it's hard to find stuff.

Otherwise there's site:www.omnimaga.org <search query> in Google until that's done.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Juju on April 27, 2012, 09:50:15 pm
I'm for Google Search.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Deep Toaster on April 28, 2012, 10:38:25 am
We can have people search site:omnimaga.org on Google themselves, but IIRC we can't use it as our official search engine (it's against their ToS because it could replace their paid Custom Search service).
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 28, 2012, 01:17:57 pm
Custom search is paid??? O.O

EDIT: Also I noticed the IRC online list is not available on OmnomIRC
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: FinaleTI on April 28, 2012, 02:49:25 pm
Why not try using DuckDuckGo for the site search?

It has a site parameter, and protects your privacy more than Google or Bing. They also don't seem to mind it being used for site searches:
https://duckduckgo.com/search_box.html (https://duckduckgo.com/search_box.html)
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on April 29, 2012, 01:52:07 pm
Is it as efficient as Google search, though? I also hope it doesn't clash with the site design.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: shmibs on April 29, 2012, 03:31:39 pm
duck duck go is the best =D
they use google, as well as a bunch of other search engines, to generate their results.

also, although it wouldn't be useful here, if you have it as your default search engine it's really handy because they have special commands for hundreds of sites. if you want to search for something on youtube and ddg is the default search engine in your search bar, all you have to do is type !yt and then what to look for and it automatically takes you to youtube and uses the search function there. !gi is google images, !w is wikipedia, !imdb is imdb (:P) and so on. here's the complete list: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

EDIT: it's also pretty customisable, too. if we used the banner version, it would blend in pretty well.
also, here's (http://withg.us.to/shmibs/ddg.html) an example page that shows how well it works searching omni.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Netham45 on May 01, 2012, 01:21:59 am
Everything should be functional again.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on May 01, 2012, 01:56:27 am
Yay!

Question, though: Will the server now be permanently set on GMT+1? Because it used to be GMT-5 and since April 14th or so, all new posts have been offset by 6 hours compared to the old ones (kinda like on barrett server one day)
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Jonius7 on May 01, 2012, 05:38:32 am
GMT+1 looks like it. Though I would personally prefer it to be set on GMT time to make it a bit easier (since nearly everyone knows their time zone relative to GMT right?)
Hmm there was a topic for this I think: http://ourl.ca/15272

And yay! the all important Stats Bars on action=stats are back!
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on May 01, 2012, 07:45:07 pm
My concern was more that new posts are out of sync with the rest. In fact I'm not even sure if the old posts from the old boards are in sync with the positive ones. If the server was changed to GMT+1, maybe it would be best to edit old post timestamps to be in sync?

Also since both Cemetech and Omnimaga are pretty much the only really active TI forums anymore and they are both very active, people jumping from one site to the other might get confused more with both sites running different time zones.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: Jonius7 on May 02, 2012, 07:23:43 pm
My concern was more that new posts are out of sync with the rest. In fact I'm not even sure if the old posts from the old boards are in sync with the positive ones. If the server was changed to GMT+1, maybe it would be best to edit old post timestamps to be in sync?

Also since both Cemetech and Omnimaga are pretty much the only really active TI forums anymore and they are both very active, people jumping from one site to the other might get confused more with both sites running different time zones.

You can customise the time in personal settings? But I can't remember what is the default time in Cemetech. They have a nice dropdown menu for the timezone.

and yeah about the posts out of sync but can't remember when posts were actually post to compare what the timestamp is now.
Title: Re: Some site features temporarily disabled
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on May 02, 2012, 11:15:27 pm
You can change the time offset directly on the board, but that would cause all old posts to be even more off. Otherwise for the current setting members can just change their own personal settings.