Forum Maintenance Announcements

[number6]

Work on forums is planned to happen in a window of 12:00pm (noon) until 4:00pm pacific time on September 26, 2024.

If all works well, there may be 4 different 10 second to 5 minutes service interruptions within this window.

Work on the forums is complete. Please let us know if you see new issues.

PHP upgraded.
Forum software upgraded.

New forum features:
* Support for ICS export of forum calendar events.
* Bug fixes
* Back-end stuff not visible to public

[number6]

Work on forums is planned to happen in a window of 12:00pm (noon) until 4:00pm pacific time on September 26, 2024.

If all works well, there may be 4 different 10 second to 5 minutes service interruptions within this window.

[number6]

External reference and allowance for jquery to be allowed to be served by an external domain has been removed. CSP updated to disallow it. (It was enabled as part of the debugging process.) Now the jquery JS libs are served from forums.

[number6]

Forums are back up and reachable. Let us know if you see issues.

[number6]

Problem with hung page load, especially in the forum calendar seems to be resolved thanks to Dark Tangent. Please let us know if you see issues.

Expect service interruption at 6:30pm Pacific time.

[number6]

Another service interruption for forums is planned for 9:00 AM pacific time on Thursday, August 15, 2024. If all goes well, service will return within 3-5 minutes.

[number6]

Service interruption planned to DEF CON forums at ~2am pacific time August 15, 2024. If all goes well, they will be unavailable for 3-5 minutes.

Service restored.

[number6]

Service interruption planned to DEF CON forums at ~2am pacific time August 15, 2024. If all goes well, they will be unavailable for 3-5 minutes.

[number6]

Things are not yet fixed, but tests have shown improvements with changes.
The upgrades had little to no improvement
Changes to configuration have helped to mitigate problems a little.

Forums upgraded.

New features? Not many that we use.
The vendor has altered the calendar system a little.
And then 1 feature we do not used has been altered.

Please let us know if you notice new problems since the upgrades.

Thanks!

(I'll resume work on the slow loading pages, related to the Alax, XHR Loaddata request most pronounced in https://forum.defcon.org/calendar , after I wake up tomorrow. The good news is the work done today ruled out a huge number of possible causes.)

[number6]

Everyone gets a new style. Sorry. The old "dark blue" was from 4 versions back. We kept upgrading it manually kludging things together, but it is no longer supportable.
We'll try to get new theme/styles to look closer to it later.

[number6]

More work to try to identify and fix the forum issue with "loaddata" Ajax/XHR on browsers, leading to 60 second time-out and seemingly frozen browser, which often repeats until browsers decide is it not worth requesting.
Expect a few (hopefully brief) service interruption from ~8pm pacific time until midnight.
These changes are to rule out several causes. There is no expectation for a fix, just reducing the surface for investigation.

[number6]

Ok, so an issue has been reported where access to forums seems slow, but seems to work fine on Windows/Linux Firefox.
A slowness issue was reported with Chome-code based browsers like Linux Chromium, Chrome, MS Windows Edge.

Slowness was most pronounced under the "Con Calendar" https://forum.defcon.org/calendar for affected browser.

As of "now" I have a work-around (I think) for the Windows/Linux chrome-based browsers, but there appears to still be a slow/hung issue when browsing using Sfari from iOS and maybe Firefox on Mac OS X.

Work to identify the cause on Apple device browsers is still ongoing.

[number6]

More forum maintenance expected over the next few hours. Service may be up and down occasionally during this time.
Trying to diagnose a bug presenting on chrome, chromium, edge but not on firefox.

[number6]

Unplanned service interruption Sunday, July 28, 2024 from around 10pm pacific time until around 10:45PM pacific time.
Please let us know if you see issues with the forums.
There was no change to the forums software, just the OS.

Thanks!

[number6]

Maintenance should now be complete. I am going to be testing for a while, but no major problems found so far.
Please let us know if you see new issues. This was an OS/kernel/service upgrade, not a forum software upgrade.

Thanks!