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.

Simple explanation in two words: "Administrator Incompetence"

Is anyone experiencing any weird connection issues that the site is working properly on some internet devices but not on others (probably with different internet connections)?

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 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.