Strange behavior of site

[Jeff Duda]

I've been noticing over the last week or so that the homepage seems outdated in terms of keeping up with thread postings (it says that threads that are now several weeks or months old are actually those most recently posted in when there have been more recent posts in other threads in the weather section of the forum). Also, I use the "What's new?" button a lot to check new posts. It always tells me there are no new posts to view even though when I log on, the link on the right side of my page under my avatar says there are, in fact, new/unread posts. Is anyone else seeing this behavior?

 

[rdale]

The Tapatalk API has expired too...

 

[Bob Schafer]

I tried to edit, then delete, a post yesterday. (The one about the movie "Sharknado", when I figured out that my post was redundant to posts that had already been made) I was unable to get the post altered in any way. It just sort of froze up on me. I clicked "SAVE" and nothing happened.

 

[Shane Adams]

I've been trying to reply to this thread for two days and cannot get the page to load.

EDIT: Obviously it finally did.

 

[Sean Ramsey]

I haven't had any issues, but something weird to me is the list of users currently online...many of the names look like someone just went alsfjdasodfj for their user names. Just looks odd.

 

[Matt Tottle]

I haven't had any issues, but something weird to me is the list of users currently online...many of the names look like someone just went alsfjdasodfj for their user names. Just looks odd.

That would be a spambot or a bunch of chinese child slaves creating fake profiles to spam with.

 

[Mark Blue]

I've been noticing over the last week or so that the homepage seems outdated in terms of keeping up with thread postings (it says that threads that are now several weeks or months old are actually those most recently posted in when there have been more recent posts in other threads in the weather section of the forum). Also, I use the "What's new?" button a lot to check new posts. It always tells me there are no new posts to view even though when I log on, the link on the right side of my page under my avatar says there are, in fact, new/unread posts. Is anyone else seeing this behavior?

The "New Posts" function has been broken for quite some time AFAIK. Maybe I'm not following what you're describing though. Set me straight if I'm in left field. As it pertains to SPAMBOT applications, there are more of those than you can shake a stick at lately. The site seems to be moving okay today from my end. If you're still experiencing issues chime in and we'll get the server rebooted.

 

[Dave Gallaher]

New Posts definitely not working...

 

[Tim Vasquez]

The key thing going on here is that our vBulletin copy is outdated. I've been trying to stall upgrading as long as possible because the costs on vBulletin keep going up and up and up, ($209 per year just for the upgrade.. these guys are making out like bandits) and I really don't want to put us through another fundraiser as I know those are annoying. We are bringing in Google ad money again but that's just enough to cover hosting. If anyone wants to bankroll the vBulletin costs I'd be willing to bring us up to vBulletin 5, but I think the best use of our available money and my own reserve is to migrate us out of the vBulletin treadmill and into SMF or phpBB, or something else as robust if it's out there.

Regarding Post New Message issues, that is definitely important, but I can't seem to duplicate it; I posted to the Weather forum and it worked fine. I went ahead and rebuilt all of the forum indexes in hopes that this is the issue. If that still doesn't fix it I will need some guidance as to what error is coming up, from which button, and in which forums. I also will see what's going on with TapaTalk.

The weird usernames are spammers. They are hitting us hard.. there have been 5160 signups that have never been confirmed, for example, and 2/3rds of that were in the past month. The reason for this is probably because it was suggested we retire the human validation question and reinstate Captchas to try to cut down the spamming, and I figured it was worth a try. Looks like we got the opposite response, so I'll be putting it back. It's possible some of the slowdowns may be due to automated queries from them; I'll check the logs and if necessary we can start blocking China in the htaccess files. In any case, our mods are on the ball to make sure that those who do confirm their e-mail and have questionable new user essays don't get any posting privileges. We periodically flush out the unconfirmed accounts, and I've done this right now, getting rid of 4300 junk accounts.

Tim

 

[Marcus Diaz]

Is phpBB3 any cheaper? Maybe look into that as a different option instead of vBulletin? I'm an active user at a phpBB forum with about 1,000 members registered and much more posts per day than here that runs very smoothly.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

PhpBB3 is free, and it was in fact our very first forum before we transitioned in 2005 or 2006. I don't remember any real issues with it... it had to be hardened more carefully against spammers, but the only issues I remember with serious problems (injection exploits, etc) were caused by the phpNuke add-on that we were using for the top level URL CMS. This would be the main issue with going to phpBB: I don't trust phpNuke (fool me once, won't get fooled again) and I'm not sure any other CMS add-ons can be trusted, so the front page would probably have to go to a static one for awhile.

It's possible I may go ahead and bite the bullet on vBulletin and get it since it's proven to be secure and we can still continue running past the 1-year point without updates and get some mileage out of it, like we're doing now.

Interestingly doing some research tonight I've found that most of the Captcha methods have been broken in the past couple of years, so perhaps we were funneling a lot of unwanted traffic over the past month by using it for registrations. That's been fixed and we're back on Q&A captcha's.

 

[rdale]

Any cost in updating Tapatalk?

 

[Jason Russell]

Any cost in updating Tapatalk?

I'm using Tapatalk 2 without any issues. If you have 1.0 which is not supported any more that could be the problem.

 

[Mark Blue]

I'm using Tapatalk 2 without any issues. If you have 1.0 which is not supported any more that could be the problem.

I could be wrong, but I think the question pertains to the forum plugin versus the end user application.

 

[rdale]

Picture of the error.