Linda

Unfortunately, yes. We are out of performance mode, but have had to disable search separately.

Search is still disabled due to the issues with performance that is causes. We have turned on the other functions that were disabled before, but the board still cannot handle search.

That's an issue with the board software, I'm afraid.

I've now turned performance mode off to see if we can manage without.

The board was in performance mode due to high traffic, which disables certain cpu-intensive features. I have now turned this off to see if we can manage without.

mcbigski,

We're already running two servers, more wouldn't be feasible on a permanent basis. We've talked about some scaling solutions, but for various reasons could not get that implemented this year. The wiki upgrade left us with some problems that took weeks to troubleshoot and ate up much of the time our host could have spent looking at alternative setups.

Lord Lannister,

We'll probably give it a try tomorrow. Its late enough now that we're soon heading to bed, so that wouldn't be a good time.

Lord Lannister,

I don't believe the board software offers any such settings, unfortunately. Perhaps the next version will, once we are able to upgrade, but I am not sure what the new feature set is like.

It probably won't be back up until a week or two after the show, the traffic is simply too high to leave performance mode right now.

They definitely started up again when we moved the forum to co-exist with the main Westeros site, so I think IPB and EE just don't like living together.

After looking at it, I suspect the PHP errors are a result of moving the forum to the same server as the main site. IPB and ExpressionEngine don't seem to play nice together in certain circumstances, leading to errors when EE outputs the list of news items that we include on the forum. We'll probably have to wait for the forum upgrade to sort that out.

Yes, there are still issues. We moved the forum to the old server as it and the wiki can't coexist, but there are other issues with the wiki as well.

And possibly, there might also be an issue of there sort of being three competing applications, in the sense that MediaWiki's mobile skin may be generating a lot of extra cache rewriting as it competes with the regular skin. In hindsight, it was a huge mistake to update the wiki, but we were getting rather desperate about not having a mobile solution for it and there was no indication that it would go this badly.

We are having more serious issues with the server, I am afraid. The server could handle the load last year and it is not bigger this year (so far), but something is going wrong and we have been unable to diagnose it. The site chokes very quickly as soon as load increases, as it does around an episode.

Hrm, alright, that's a bit of a dilemma that we have to look into. It seems adding any sort of static ad triggers the extra ad.

Getting BIG ads on mobile now. Is this the new normal? It's pretty intrusive, although given the option I prefer it to the ones that stay on the bottom as you scroll.

Edit: They all seem to be for charitable orgs and similar, and seem to go directly to the groups' websites instead of an ad company's tracking redirect, which is nice. I could get behind this.

Are they appearing at the top? We've been trying a couple of different things, but it sounds like we didn't quite get the right format.

I think all we can do is establish that IPB's notification system is totally busted. It also seems to have a large part in causing the remaining downtime/lockup issues.

Yes, highly likely.

Honestly, if a "Hey, forums are down for a bit today while we upgrade," message is that big of an inconvenience for anyone, they should probably take a long look at their priorities.

It isn't just that it might lead to some downtime during the upgrade (for forum, wiki and the main site all at once), it could also lead to more problems in the following days. New software is always a bit of a risk and the next version is only just now out of beta.

Yes, we have to put the board into performance mode more often than not to keep it running, especially now that we have some undiagnosed error that takes us down very easily at high traffic.

That's great to hear. :) We had wanted one for a long while, but creating a responsive/mobile skin is way beyond what we can do ourselves, so we had to wait until we could upgrade and get the one that was available.

I had some issues getting logged back in after the bridge was turned off. I would suggest logging out of both the forum and the wiki, clearing cookies and then logging into the forum first and afterwards trying the wiki. That worked for me, though I don't quite know why. Things are definitely unpredictable without the bridge, unfortunately.

Its the next version of the board software, but its entirely dependant on when they actually get it out. Or rather, they have released 4.0, but we don't think it'd be safe to upgrade before a couple of patches have happened.

Its also possible that the traffic during the show might make an upgrade difficult.

We (or rather, our sysadmin Sparks) have spent a lot of time each year on tweaking the configuration, which has included running some pretty exotic variants. In fact, I don't think we're on Apache now, though I could be wrong. :)

At the moment, Sparks is dealing with a nasty flu (by the sounds of it, similar to what knocked me and Ran out for two weeks), so she hasn't been able to look into some errors that we think started cropping up after we upgraded the wiki.

We're also hoping that the new version of IPB will solve some of the various forum issues that aren't server-related, though I am not sure when we will dare to upgrade.

We managed to fix a few of the issues, but the headlines are still below the coloured bars. Looking at the css, they seem to use a class called mw-headlines which I can't find anywhere in the css...so I am wondering if the issue is that the upgraded skin has removed a standard class that was being used in the custom layout.

As Ran posted, we upgraded to the latest version of MediaWiki, which included having to move to the Vector skin as the previous skin was no longer supported. It seems there are some points of conflict between the way certain elements are setup and the Vector.css. Unfortunately, at the moment we are unable to get any edits we do to Vector.css to be reflected on the page.