v-Bulletin issues of late

mmm4444bot

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Oct 6, 2005
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I don't know why the system has begun moderating some of my posts, but it has. If anyone else thinks that one of their posts is "missing", please contact a moderator by Private Message, so that we can attempt to restore it (if possible).

Also, I have discovered three threads in the past week where I had contributed a reply but now they are gone. Not "missing", but gone (as in vaporized).

Just sayin' ...
 
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Odd. I haven't changed anything. Is somebody deleting threads entirely rather than individual posts, or doing a soft-delete that explains why a thread has been removed?
 
Okay, I just spent 15 minutes typing a detailed response to Ted's post, and lost my typing. So much for the flaky auto-restore feature. :-x

When I clicked Submit, I got that ol' 500 Server Error message. I have to get to work; maybe I'll have time to recreate the detailed information (including the five other issues that I'm described), but I will repeat one thing. All of the flakiness in the system of late reminds me of the last time the system got so bad that many people could not edit or post.
 
Odd. I haven't changed anything. Is somebody deleting threads entirely rather than individual posts...

I doubt it; as moderators, we've been successfully doing our job for some time now.

... or doing a soft-delete that explains why a thread has been removed?
Nope. Soft-deletes are clearly identified as such, on each boards' index page.
 
Other issues that I have experienced, during the past week or so:

Three instances of very sluggish server response; taking up to seven minutes to comply with a page request (I note that other web sites at the same time were loading pages normally)

Edited a member's post for content, but after submitting the changes, the post was seemingly vaporized

Multiple attempts to edit one of my posts; although the page always appeared, the system would not populate the composition field with my post's text.

Tried to move two posts from an existing thread to another location; only one of them reached the target. The other one was seemingly vaporized

A change in the usual issue with Google Chrome, whereby word spaces will not render in the composition field, when they are the last character typed. That issue has now gone from "always" to "intermittent", and it sometimes crops up inthemiddleof a sentence

I am not doing anything differently than in the past.

There has been some other weirdness, but I can't recall the specifics right now.

As I mentioned earlier, this system flakiness is very similar to issues I had experienced the last time the system went haywire (a few months ago). The system eventually became so unstable, that it became generally unusable. Ted fixed the issue. Remember? That was the same time in which the auto-moderation feature broke, resulting in many spam bombs.

I will start documenting specifics, going forward. Please report any system glitches that you experience, by posting in this thread. Thank you. :cool:
 
I am not having any server issues at the moment that would explain the number of 500 errors users are reporting, but I can try a reboot and see if it helps.
 
I remembered another issue that began about 10 days ago. Before I send a Private Message, I click the Advanced View button, in order to proofread my message before sending it.

Google Chrome now tells me that there is some issue with the code, and the page cannot be displayed.

I can still send Private Messages without incident; I just can't see what they'll look like first.
 

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And the band plays on ...

I received a Private Message from new member JohnWaltham.

Yet, when I use the member-search field to locate the profile page, the system tells me there is no such member.

If there is no such registered username, how did they send me a Private Message? :-?

EDIT: When I clicked the Preview Post button, to proofread this post, I got the same browser warning that I posted about earlier. "Unusual code" is preventing the page from being displayed. Yet, it posted okay. This usually happens when I try to proofread a Private Message; this is the first time that it's happened when trying to preview a post.
 

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12,697 users have 0 posts. I do periodically purge users who have 0 posts and haven't logged on in a couple years.
 
The XSS warning is not a hack but rather the latest version of Chrome being overly aggressive and picking up on some normal (but poorly programmed) behavior in the forum software. Allegedly it has been fixed in the absolute latest version of Chrome 58.
 
do we know how many "members" exist
that have never made a "posting"?
Lots (see Ted's reply).

Many people register, and never log in again.

I think they are phishing for an answer, and their search engine brings them to a thread that contains one or more images. They must register to view images. Then, they leave the same day and never come back.
 
The XSS warning is not a hack but rather the latest version of Chrome being overly aggressive and picking up on some normal (but poorly programmed) behavior in the forum software. Allegedly it has been fixed in the absolute latest version of Chrome 58.
This is good to know (not that v-bulletin is somewhat poorly programmed; I already knew that), but that I may expect Google to stop preventing me from viewing some pages.

I just checked, and Chrome says I'm using version 58.0.3029.96 :cool:
 
I do periodically purge users who have 0 posts and haven't logged on in a couple years.
Glad to hear it. That will purge hundreds of users from years past who have spamming URLs and other objectionable material in their profiles. (I've been slowly going back in time, to manually report and ban them, but that's been a low priority for me.)

Removal may be better than banning because the system doesn't delete banned members profiles. How about clearing out the area which stores all of the banned members, too.

The system occasionally shows some banned members as logged in from time to time (if that's what the green "online" status symbol means), even though they were banned one or two years ago!

If there's a way to turn off the ability to place a homepage URL on your profile page, even better!!

When I manually report and ban these users, spammers don't create nearly as many accounts here (roughly 2-3 per day). On two occasions during the past few years that I was not able to use the site for several months, I discovered upon my return that the number of spammers creating solicitations on their profile pages had greatly increased (roughly 12-18 per day). Anything that we can do to discourage them will help. 8-)
 
If there's a way to turn off the ability to place a homepage URL on your profile page, even better!!
Another thought about this, Ted.

If the homepage field cannot be blocked, perhaps there's a way to enable moderators to edit or delete the URL -- something like a super-moderator or higher level of moderation privileges.

The percentage of members posting legit homepages is exceedingly small. :cool:
 
Other than Chrome continuing to occasionally prevent me from previewing, I have not experienced any issues with vBulletin for over two weeks, now.

All that other stuff seems to have been resolved (one way or another).

< knocking on wood >
 
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