I have been unable to get to the forum pages for the last couple of days through the normal browser operations. I use Brave as my browser. I can open finescale.com as normal, although really slow to render, but as soon as I attempt to navigate to the forums, it sits there for a few minutes then gives me a 504 Gateway error.
I switched over to Microsoft Edge but same results. Although in Edge there is the “InPrivate” browsing, which is how I have been able to get on here today. But I have to open everything in a new tab, and even then, I’ve seen the 504 Gateway error a couple of times even in this private browsing environment.
I’m a software engineer by trade, so this is something that I’ve seen before. This could be a DDoS issue (which is Distributed Denial of Service). Not saying that is 100% certain but is a possibility.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this too. While it didn’t keep me from reaqding the forums, it made that reading very slow and uncomfortable. Someimes I have to reload once or twice before I can read what I wanted. Sad thing - I don’t see it fixed before tuesday, and even then I wouldn’t bet a lot of money on it…
The real question is who would bother with a denial of service attack on a low traffic website of a struggling print magazine? It is far more likely one of the many glitches that have plagued this website for years that Kalmbach does not have the people, money, or concern to fix that are responsible, rather than mysterious hackers.
Well, since the staff is all off on the holiday weekend, I doubt any fixes will come in before sometime Tuesday morning at the soonest when they all come back in to the office.
Friday, Saturday, Sunday and today I’ve kept trying. Three hours today trying to figure this out on four different browsers.
Opera finally got through… but took forever.
Sorry, GAF, but what are you talking about? How is the vindictiveness of an ex-forum member related in any way to this issue?
A post-script…
OK, I saw Mike James’ reference to an attack, and I take it you were following that point. I don’t agree with that diagnosis. “Attack” tends to suggest a deliberate action. I don’t think there has been a deliberate action undertaken to interfere with the forum. I think it’s a bug, that is, something is no longer working as intended or designed. If I had to troubleshoot this, I’d ask first if anything had changed recently.
I’ll add, I work in IT, too. I started in application support, including database and platform administration. I moved to quality assurance testing about 20 years ago. So that’s what informs my comment.
Mods,please do something about this,or at least let us know it is being worked on,there are almost no posts today,and no wonder,it takes too long to do anything,if not corrected,this is finally gonna kill off this place [bnghead]
There are almost no posts any day even when the site is working more or less like it’s supposed to be. And this is supposedly the ‘busy’ season for modeling. Been swirling the drain for a while here. Print magazines and dedicated online forums have been dying for a while. I think it’s only a matter of time before the Kalmbach group joins many others.
As soon as it hiccups with the error message (I just got one a moment ago), I usually just move onto another site like any number of the face book modeling groups.
There’s definitely something slowing down performance. Even just the login process is taking minutes to complete (from the time I get the login popup, enter my credentials and submit, to the forum index page loading). Moving from page to page, opening threads and posts, saving replies are all taking 1 to 2 minutes to complete, when just last week, these operations all completed in seconds.
For anyone in support, the console shows error 504 and err_blocked_by_client as I move around through the forum.
I wrote on the Forum Tech. Assistance on December 12th about the problem. Tim asked me to send a screen shot of the error page to him at his e-mail address. I did and I haven’t heard from him since.