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cbwx34 I’m going to temporarily disable something in 1 minute, if you’re available, to see if that allows the page to load for you. Please let me know if that timing works for you.

For everyone who reads this, it’ll temporarily make some things look funky.

This is a symptom of the performance problems we’ve been seeing, unfortunately. So, it’s hit-or-miss that we’ll sometimes run into page load errors; at times, the servers are too bogged down to respond fast enough, leading to that error page.

Apologies for the problems, and it’s why I have a sense of urgency about making a couple of changes that…[Read more]

It’s looking like our best option is to move to a different PM service within WordPress.

• IF… we can’t import your history of PMs into the new service, how much of a problem is this?
  • Please note that you may have some or all of your previous PMs as email notifications.
• Why do this?
  • To achieve faster page loads, by ditching the…

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For a bit more background on the maintenance changes: We’ve continued to see slow performance / slow page loads on the forum. And it’s looking like one of the plugins we’ve used heavily is the culprit (UserPRO), as well as being the culprit for sub-par Private Messaging.

What does this mean?…

• In the near-term (next several days) we’ll be…

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There are some remaining tweaks we’ll make to some appearance items, but the maintenance and upgrades are now complete.

I’ll investigate, and see exactly how it works; then I’ll post an explanation. I don’t like it when things are inconsistent, as this seems to be, so far…

I received an email – that’s a cool feature.

Thanks Marc, I think we’ll need to ask Eric F if he’s publicly posted that reply yet.

Marc, because you’re a moderator, you may have received a notification about a draft post that hasn’t yet been published. If it’s not that, as the cause, I’ll keep looking. But I checked to make sure it’s not in spam, and we’re good there.

Graphite – sorry about that, I found that your original post was wrongly moved into spam by our akismet anti-spam filter, which I have now fired with no severance payment.

I’ve disabled akismet, and I want to see if that removes some of the issues we’ve noticed.

I checked the spam folder this morning and there was a legitimate reply from last night that had been flagged as spam. We just can’t continue to have that happen. And, I think our other anti-spam measures are proving (mostly) effective.

Akismet is basically a big dictionary of words and phrases that have been reported as spam. For each new topic and reply, the text is actually routed through Akismet, where it’s checked for indications of spam. If it’s flagged as spam, Akismet automatically moves it into the spam folder in wordpress.

As for our forum, Akismet has been a…[Read more]

I have one quick answer, at least, to the issue with tcmeyer’s disappearing post. That one got snagged by aksimet’s spam filtering, which like many helpful anti-spam features is causing more headaches than it solves. So, I’m going to remove that one from the spam folder, and it will show up.

I’m still looking into other issues, as well.

I’m looking into this, sorry for the frustrations.

While I’m on the topic of forum improvements, it’s driving me crazy how the Reply button slides over to the left after you click Thanks (it changes to ‘Remove Thanks’ and so I’ve accidentally clicked that a couple of times).

Private Messages (PMs) should be working now, apologies for the problems there. Somehow the URL for PMs wasn’t being redirected to https properly, but now it is.

Thanks for the heads up on Private Message problems! One aspect of it should be a quick fix – making sure it’s always on https. You’ll notice now that if you manually change the URL to https (from http) it works, and all the PMs are there. But it should happen automatically.

Same here! My daughters have wised-up to my trick, but I would ask them if they would like a slice of chicken fresh off the grill, and they would say yes of course. Then with my super sharp knife I would cut them a paper-thin translucent slice and tell them to enjoy.

My first guess is that this is a consequence of an anti-spam setting we use. It prevents spammers from rapid-fire pasting the same comment in multiple topics or replies. So, I think there’s a “cooling off” period that requires a couple minute wait (I’ll look it up, for the exact time) before you’re allowed to post the same reply, even if it’s a…[Read more]