Did the Website go Down?

I have been having similar issues, so I suspect the problem is on the ZooChat end.

 

Yup - the servers were taken offline at different times over the past few days by our hosting provider because they had to apply a critical security patch.

Unfortunately, they couldn't do them all at the same time - and the website utilises multiple servers (web server + database server), so there were multiple outages.

I believe the maintenance has now been completed, so hopefully no more outages.

 

is anyone else getting frequent "502 Bad Gateway" messages in the last couple of days when opening a page, followed by not being able to open the site at all for five or ten minutes? (Also just slow opening times, and posts sometimes being doubled because they are sitting there for too long deciding if they want to post themselves or not).

 

Yes, I get alerted every time the gateway crashes - have had to reboot the server a couple of times recently.

Not sure what's causing it - but I do note that the server seems to be getting hammered of late - huge spike in traffic recently, but I'm not entirely sure from where. In my experience, the gateway starts crashing when it's under too much load - so I think it's the traffic which is causing the problems.

Anyway, just FYI - I've made some significant progress in the past couple of months in upgrading my old sites to the new software platform I'm now using and I finally managed to launch a new version of one of my oldest sites last week - which means that ZooChat is next in the queue.

I've still got a bit of cleanup work to do on the new site over the next few days, but then I'm going to start doing some test migrations to start testing what we might be able to do for a new version of ZooChat.

There are some concerns (from the developers of the software we are going to use) that the huge number of forums / photo galleries we have may cause significant performance problems for the site - but we won't really know until we try it.

My goal would be to have the new version of ZooChat launched by the end of the year - but that will be dependent on how busy I am with my other projects.

 

would there be content lost or abandoned in transferring to new software? Or will you not know until it happens?

 

Nope - my intention is that all photos and threads will move across to the new platform.

The webcams and maps may have to go in the short term - but they aren't an integral part of the site and I'll keep the data so that we can bring that back in later if there's enough interest in doing so.

 

excellent.

The webcams are kind of pointless though. They were all (almost all?) added at around the same time, many years ago, and all the ones I had a look at a while ago no longer worked. I only checked some of them though (because someone commented on a few to say they weren't working).

 

Yes, it would only make sense keeping the webcams if they could be easily updated with new information.

 

No, that's more likely related to the performance of your own computer.