EpicureanFriends Site Glitches

At 9:00 AM Tuesday we had an aborted upgrade which required a site restoral.

It appears that if you posted in the last 24 hours that your post may have been lost. I apologize to anyone whose post was lost. The only post I am aware of that may have been lost was a new thread I believe I started that mentioned Ayn Rand, so maybe losing that was for the best.

We'll take steps to be sure that this does not happen again, and I want to apologize to anyone who was affected.

OH no did we lose the Michele Updates too!?? GRRRRR. I will reconstruct what I can - I think I have most all of what Michele posted, and I think I can find Hiram's link too.

We have this morning had a period of three our four hours where the site went offline for reasons that are currently unknown to me. However in this case the forum software was clearly not at fault, as the related sites of NewEpicurean.com and ElementalEpicureanism.com were also down. All indications is that this was purely a hosting provider issue. I see no indication that any data or postings on the site were lost or compromised.

(1) I will investigate to determine whether we need to consider switching hosting providers.

(2) In the future we will need a backup communication system, such as Telegram, which I will also investigate. I have a Twitter account but probably a dedicated channel on something like Telegram (which Michele uses, in Italian) would be a good idea. We an also currently send private messages via Facebook, but I don't want to encourage anyone not using Facebook to start. My perception is that Telegram is the up-an-coming service and has eclipsed Whatsapp. If anyone wants to nominate another alternative, please do. Of course there is always old fashioned email, and we could set up a dedicated email list also. Right now I would not be able to email everyone who is a member here if the site were down, so we would need another email-list source in order to make that work.

Explanation from host provider:

Quote

Hello,

This morning we encountered a weird issue with LiteSpeed on server XXXXXXXX where it stopped and would not restart properly and continued to failed immediately after restart.

After much diagnosing, we have resolved the issue and LiteSpeed is now operating normally.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.

If you have any additional issues or questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Is your issue not resolved? Simply reply to this ticket at any time to reopen it.

Thank you,

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I am learning that the forum software we use is very complicated. If it appears to get confused, the best way to try to reset things is to clear your browser cache for the page and log in again. Unfortunately this process varies by browser so it's probably not much you use try to detail the process, but if you get strange responses or unexpected logouts, try the cache-clearing method. I have found it helps me.

Once again this morning, for the second time in four weeks, we have had a couple of hours of offline time. This is purely attributable to the hosting provider, and if it keeps recurring we will switch hosts. Both times they have blamed their "Litespeed" service, which I read is an alternative to Apache. Not sure what is going on but we'll just have to move if this keeps happening. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I don't think anything was lost, because I presume when the error happened and the system crashed, everything went down, so there was no need for a restore. If anyone observes otherwise please let me know.

Elayne is reporting that the site may have been down this afternoon (Friday the 18th). If anyone is seeing glitches, please let me know -- I was away and did not observe any personally this afternoon.

Sounds like the same glitch as before just much shorter-lived. Definitely not user error on our part. Hopefully the host is getting on top of this as i hate the thought of changing providers.