Forum Downtime on 10/21/22

    For reasons yet unknown we had a couple of hours of downtime this morning, with the forum reporting 404 errors. If anyone was affected by this and/or notices anything strange on the forum, please report in this thread. Thank you!

    I hope you didn't lose anything; I know you tend to write in the mornings first thing. I doubt that any loss of data happened because I don't think the database in which messages are stored was affected. But if anyone notices anything please let me know.

    Last "tech support" post: I just identified the problem which i know affected at least two separate accounts. if you were logged in this morning when the site went off line, your browser may have continued to attempt to connect and thereby triggered the hosting provider to think that you were a hacker, which automatically added your IP address to a ban list. Therefore if you have any trouble logging in from any device, let us know and we can arrange to remove you from that list, and that should fix any problem anyone has. End of tech report!

    Quote from Cassius

    Therefore if you have any trouble logging in from any device, let us know and we can arrange to remove you from that list, and that should fix any problem anyone has.

    Logistical question: If we get a 404 Error and can't access the site, how do we contact you to tell you we can't access the site?

    Quote from Don

    Logistical question: If we get a 404 Error and can't access the site, how do we contact you to tell you we can't access the site?

    Great question and this is a great time to update the home page with this information, mentioned in the past here: Backup Communications for EpicureanFriends.com

    We'll add a box to the right sidebar that highlights this URL - CassiusAmicus.com. That URL was chosen as a name that's hopefully easy to remember in the event of an emergency. It's nothing but a "link tree" of other places where we should be able to communicate in the event of extended downtime, such as Facebook, Twitter, and other established accounts that should not be affected in the event of a problem with our main host.

    As a practical matter it's likely that the best place to report outages and communicate when the forum is down will be the newly-established Telegram group which can be found by clicking here.

    Most of us don't monitor Facebook regularly, but it's also likely that if something were to happen to the main site it would be discussed at the Facebook group here.

Finding Things At EpicureanFriends.com

Here is a list of suggested search strategies:

  • Website Overview page - clickable links arrranged by cards.
  • Forum Main Page - list of forums and subforums arranged by topic. Threads are posted according to relevant topics. The "Uncategorized subforum" contains threads which do not fall into any existing topic (also contains older "unfiled" threads which will soon be moved).
  • Search Tool - icon is located on the top right of every page. Note that the search box asks you what section of the forum you'd like to search. If you don't know, select "Everywhere."
  • Search By Key Tags - curated to show frequently-searched topics.
  • Full Tag List - an alphabetical list of all tags.