The forum went down. Database error. Why? Is there a backup forum or blog for disseminating information when things go wrong? If not, notnot606.lefora.com might suffice.
It was my fault. I made a bad code change which caused pages to load extremely slow and I had to block everyone from the firewall to give me a chance to fix it without my pages going horrendously slow.
Why not just close the site with a small message, then once done and it works, open it again (it wont be closed for you or the mods, but everyone else will get the message) at least them ppl will know whats going on, and you shouldnt really piss about with code on a live site anyway (I do it all the time but you shouldnt really lol)
The problem was I made a change to a configuration which was stored in a database. It sent the code into an infinite loop, and 1200 people hitting infinite loops at once causes the web server to collapse and the CPU to max out at 100% preventing me from fixing the mistake in the web interface. So I have to either block everyone from the firewall to stop them hogging all the resources or stop Apache and manually modify the database table in question. Considering I wasn't sure which table it was I just blocked everyone but me via Firewall then made the change via the web admin. Another problem is Firewall changes take 10 minutes. So it was 10 minutes blocking everyone, 10 minutes fixing it, 10 minutes unblocking everyone.
Or, why not have a very useful message like 606 had. Oh, how that made me feel at ease when I knew it was only that their servers were busy.
Yeah - it wasn't anything, really, but at the time we weren't know that, and then it went down again, briefly. While we're here, though, can the maximum character limit in groups be increased, please? This isn't the dark ages.
