Welcome! And thanks for helping us find and fix issues as they pop up.
Rod and I will post things here as they come up and are resolved.
If you have any issues, feel free to post a new topic in Requests Box (https://seaside2.mrah.live/index.php?board=4.0)!
Thanks for helping us test things out as Rod opened this up!
Issue:
Invisible uploads! Attachments and other uploads (images in posts and avatars in profiles) were sometimes not showing up for the person who didn't upload them. This included inline images (using the "insert" button on the attachment), thumbnails of the attachments themselves, and the avatar for the user in the post.
Root Cause:
As far as we can tell from testing, this was likely the caching backend I turned on to help speed up the forum software. It appears it was too aggressive and caching images incorrectly, then taking a long time to expire and regenerate. Any images that were missing would eventually show up.
If we disabled the cache itself, we were no longer able to reproduce this.
Resolution:
We've disabled the cache entirely for now. This should be fine given the current size of the forums, but we can re-enable it and use a better backend down the road as it grows!
Please let us know if the issue still pops up, and thank you :bow:
Whee! We're back up!
Issue:
Unviewable content. Certain topics or pages (or any 'random' part of the forum) became unviewable with an error message ("Call to undefined function idna_maps_not_std3()") being displayed in its place.
Root Cause:
Update to version 2.1.5 of SMF. As discussed on this topic thread (https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=592100.0) and the resulting bug report (https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF/issues/8711), this occurred as part of a refactoring of their Unicode handling code, meaning any page that used certain characters would throw this error.
Resolution:
A full fix has already been applied upstream but has not been released yet. In the meantime I've applied a hotfix/patch to the running code that appears to remove the issue. Some others posting say this causes spurious error log messages, so admins should be prepared to see this until the next release of SMF.
Additional Notes:
I took this chance to make a snapshot of the container running the forum. Currently I can only do this while the container is stopped. I'm hoping to make a better/automated backup strategy but need to consider some things first.
Thanks everyone for your patience!
Hiccups!
Issue:
You may have hit some interrupted connections earlier today.
Root Cause:
IP address changed and DNS entries can be cached, so new value would need to propagate downstream.
Resolution:
Modem/Router work to ensure the DDNS scripts are working.
Additional Notes:
Where I'm hosting the server doesn't let me lease a static IP yet (grumble grumble). So I'm required to use scripts that update the DNS entries whenever the IP address happens to change.
However, a recent rework by me left them in a stale state and they weren't executing when they needed to. This resulted in downtime when I was away at AC a few weeks ago.
I just finished some tweaks and updates to try and debug and fix why they weren't executing properly, which required me actually testing that a change works. The scripts are now autostarting and executing properly.
The forums will be unavailable for a series of undetermined periods of time today.
Impacted times
Today, 7/27/2025. Will either be down for most of the day, or will be down for short periods throughout the day.
Reason
I need to redo the storage backend for the server hosting the server software, which will involve taking the server down, formatting and replacing disks, and copying and syncing files over. This will likely take a handful of hours.
I have also been configuring a redundant server to reduce/eliminate downtime like this. I will attempting to stand this today to allow me to do the above will less interruption, but doing so will involve stopping all the containers to properly synchronize their content to the new server. The downtime from this will be far reduced (assuming I can get it working).
The forums will be unavailable for a series of undetermined periods of time today.
Impacted times
Today, 8/13/2025. Should only be down for a small period of time.
Reason
I am resuming work on migrating to a redundant server to reduce/eliminate downtime like this. I will [again] attempting to stand this today to allow me to do work with less interruption, but doing so will involve stopping all the containers to properly synchronize their content to the new server.
Update:
Forums are transferred and back up! Please let me know if you experience any issues, and thank you for your patience!