Early October Issues with Forum

Is it just me, or have things been acting weird with this forum in the last few days?

Are there server issues? Software glitches? Planet alignment? No new pictures of Shewolf?

Anybody else having troubles here?

I'm unable to view some pictures and avatars on occasion...

I've had that problem with free servers before which is why I won't go thru them again. It's a bit of a trade off. You don't have to pay for the server but you are very limited with what you can/can't do. When the server hiccups, you can lose all your data...has happened... Your own server or paid server you can backup your data in the event something detonates, and be able to restore stuff. Hopefully it will get resolved sooner or later.

So it's not just me?

Today, earlier - not now, pages took minutes to load.

Now things seem to be better again.

Yeah...that's the server being a twat.

motokid wrote:

No new pictures of Shewolf?

Can't blame the servers for that one. "Somebody" has been holding out of us lately!

My understanding is that this forum is built on free hosting platform on a shared server. Considering that it works pretty darn well.

If we came up with a way to raise some funds for proper server housing and some folks volunteered to help out on the site (IT) management side, maybe we could upgrade to some better servers and software. Over on sport-touring.net they use free forum software by http://www.simplemachines.org
It is by far the best forum software I've experienced. But, you would have to host it someplace.

You guys are all right. It's free, I didn't think the website would do this well. The advertisers are put up free because they are small companies that offer products we use. The reason the the pictures have problems are from the photo hosting sites. The forum works pretty good most of the time.
I'm not a computer genius just learning.

I completely understand the free forum situation. I've Admin'd a small handful of free forums in the past. I know the limitations and issues involved.

I was just wondering if others were having the same issues I was having.

I was not complaining about the general forum format, or it's operations.

Every now and then I get this:



Sometimes a screen refresh fixes it...sometimes it doesn't.

Yes I have had that come up in the past week.

Well, hosting is cheap these days.

Cheap enough that if the servers are part of the issue, then Shamwow... errrr... Yamwow is free to get a domain name and load it up into my webhosting account. It doesn't cost me any more, no matter how many domains I host (within reason). I suppose I should check what kind of traffic limits I have, however - I use the domain for business purposes and traffic volume isn't something that would normally be an issue. So you could grab something like WR250Forum.com, .org, or whatever and then move it over.

Something to think about. If traffic does become an issue that leads to costs, then requiring users to come up with a couple of dollars after their first year of membership (or three months, or whatever) shouldn't be too painful for users

I don't have any complaints about this forum software, but I don't do a lot of forum searching or anything like that.

SMF is good software, I agree. I've used it in the past. Places like sportbikes.net have the option to donate which helps pay for the vbulletin software, which is real nice, and covers the server expenses as well. Usually anything free will indeed have annoying hiccups. Paid servers will also have it from time to time, especially when they are updating their software, but not like the free server stuff.