Sciencemadness Discussion Board - Apologies for the downtime

Apologies for the downtime

Polverone - 28-5-2020 at 09:45

I saw in my email today that the site was down. Both the web site and the SSH server were unresponsive. I was able to reboot the instance from my hosting provider's management console. It seems to be working normally now. I'm not sure what caused the site to become unresponsive in the first place.

fusso - 28-5-2020 at 09:49

What was the exact duration (starting -> end in h:m:s d/m/y) the site went down, in UTC?

[Edited on 200528 by fusso]

Polverone - 28-5-2020 at 09:54

It looks like the last successful request before the site went down was at 27/May/2020:04:57:47 +0000, according to web server logs. The first successful request following the restart was at 28/May/2020:17:38:38 +0000.

wg48temp9 - 28-5-2020 at 09:59

Quote: Originally posted by Polverone

I saw in my email today that the site was down. Both the web site and the SSH server were unresponsive. I was able to reboot the instance from my hosting provider's management console. It seems to be working normally now. I'm not sure what caused the site to become unresponsive in the first place.

Thanks for your efforts Polverone. I was expecting to develop withdrawal symptoms had it continued LOL

RedDwarf - 28-5-2020 at 10:07

I couldn't believe how much I was missing being able to read the forum, was starting to go cold turkey!

arkoma - 28-5-2020 at 10:21

i WAS in withdrawal.

Thank You Polverone

Nonexistent - 28-5-2020 at 10:46

Quote: Originally posted by wg48temp9

I was expecting to develop withdrawal symptoms had it continued LOL

Same here, glad I'm not the only one addicted to chemisty and not just certain chemicals.

Ubya - 28-5-2020 at 11:18

"panic attack" solved, thanks polverone!

B(a)P - 28-5-2020 at 11:32

Thanks for bringing it back online and for hosting this amazing community in the first place. I am embarrassed to admit how many times I checked to see if it was back up

woelen - 28-5-2020 at 11:39

Polverone, thanks again!
Also thanks for providing us with this platform having this great forum!

fusso - 28-5-2020 at 11:48

I actually wish you did the forum software switch while the site was down but never mind.

[Edited on 200528 by fusso]

Chemorg42 - 28-5-2020 at 11:59

Oh good!, the site is back up.
For me, it was strange, I could access the home screen (FAQ, Forum (http), Forum (https), etc), but could not move into any of the sections. Did anyone else have this particular behaviour? Any ideas on its possible cause?

Ubya - 28-5-2020 at 12:00

Quote: Originally posted by Chemorg42

Oh good!, the site is back up.
For me, it was strange, I could access the home screen (FAQ, Forum (http), Forum (https), etc), but could not move into any of the sections. Did anyone else have this particular behaviour? Any ideas on its possible cause?

same, but no one knows anything at the moment

Lion850 - 28-5-2020 at 12:05

Great to see it is back up. Thanks a lot.

fusso - 28-5-2020 at 12:33

Quote: Originally posted by Chemorg42

Do you mean when SM was down or after it went back up? I can't even access the homepage when it was down.

Tsjerk - 28-5-2020 at 12:38

Quote: Originally posted by fusso

Quote: Originally posted by Chemorg42

Do you mean when SM was down or after it went back up? I can't even access the homepage when it was down.

I had the same, but not on a different computer, if you visit a stationary site often your browser saves it to reduce traffic, so the front page was loaded from local.

Great it is up again! I had a bit of withdrawal as well.

Draeger - 28-5-2020 at 12:40

I'm glad the forum was back up. I was already getting scared the forum was taken down or something.

Tsjerk - 28-5-2020 at 23:24

What would happen when Polverone would be incapacitated for some reason? Is there a second person with the capacity to keep the forum running? And does anyone here know who that person is?

ELRIC - 29-5-2020 at 08:00

Thanks boss. Hopefully all worries have been abated.
Except for the one above, which I myself have often wondered

[Edited on 29-5-2020 by ELRIC]

[Edited on 29-5-2020 by ELRIC]

zwt2 - 29-5-2020 at 08:25

It might be worth making an official sciencemadness account on one of the major social media platforms, and sharing the login details with all active forum staff, in order to report site outages and similar problems.
This would also allow for a coordinated response if there was a major site issue, and the site had to be restored from backups or something.

karlos³ - 29-5-2020 at 14:28

I third that worry above.
I know of at least two boards which have been lost due to that, because the owner died without sharing the informations with anyone before.
Please Polverone, have a thought about that!
We don't want to loose this forum

Not you either, but please take precautions.

symboom - 29-5-2020 at 15:22

I remember there was this post that had someone making SM clones for back up to a certain date to at least save all of the information and posts on here to a set date.
Mabus was talking about if anyone could post a link to a SM Clones on discord.

Update here it is it was under fourm matters
Site back up
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=12051

[Edited on 29-5-2020 by symboom]

G-Coupled - 30-5-2020 at 07:39

Quote: Originally posted by Chemorg42

That sounds like it's because of your browser caching web pages - hit Cntrl+F5 to do a refresh that doesn't pull from the cache to avoid this.

Polverone - 30-5-2020 at 09:18

There is a forum backup that anyone can download here: https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/viewthread.php?tid=12...

I try to update it a few times a year. Anyone can download it to get archival access to all of the public forums. My fellow moderators have the password so that they can recover the private forums too, along with all the attachments on posts in private forums.

Woelen has the technical skill that I believe he could restart the forum from a backup on a new web host if I were to suddenly vanish. I'm sure there are many members here who could manage the same, even if they had to restart without the private forum contents.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine captures static content like the Library, LANL documents, and wiki entries:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200513132133/http://library.sc...

https://web.archive.org/web/20191016235746/http://library.sc...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170929094239/http://www.sciencemadness.org/smwiki/index.php/Glauber's_hydrochloric_acid_synthesis

It also captures a fair bit of the forum, but you wouldn't want to try to recreate the forum from their data.

arkoma - 30-5-2020 at 11:15

Quote: Originally posted by Polverone

There is a forum backup that anyone can download here: https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/viewthread.php?tid=12...

Woelen has the technical skill that I believe he could restart the forum from a backup on a new web host if I were to suddenly vanish

*panic attack*

symboom - 30-5-2020 at 19:30

I am glad there is a back up ready and plans In case we lose the site it would be terrible to lose all the research, experiments, and everything that has accumulated here from in the field of chemistry. This site is responsible for inspiring future scientists which in general benifits the all of society around the world. To me that sound likes a big deal. It's ironic the stigma of chemistry yet that very field of study creates many of the modern technological advances that people enjoy in the world today.

Sorry if I seem overly excited over SM but I understand it's potential I've been here since 2010 I have seen it inspire many who come across here as they go from hazard to self to international hazard and just keep on learning more.

SM has gotten rid of spam problem once and for all.
That is to much extra work for admins to have to go through and delete pages of spam every day

Thank you admins for all the hard work to keep this going.

[Edited on 31-5-2020 by symboom]