Forum Maintenance Announcements

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[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]

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]

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]

Assuming things work as planned, expect a 3-5 minute service interruption to forums and most DEF CON network services for network equipment maintenance:
Expected to happen some time between 8:00pm and 9:00pm pacific time, Wednesday, October 2, 2024.

[number6]

Forums suffered a DB issue today (October 27, 2027) leading to loss of access to forums for around 4 hours starting 6:14am pacific time. We understand the cause, and are working to verify the DB recovery did not result in loss of posts.

[number6]

Forum Maintenance is planned for Saturday, March 15, 2025 from Noon until around 8pm, pacific time. We expect several interruptions to service and one long interruption that may last an hour.
Thanks!

[number6]

We have upgraded kernel, OS, PHP and forum software to newer versions.
Please let us know if you see issues.
Thanks!

[number6]

We have a planned service interruption for the DEF CON forums today starting at 5:00pm.
If all works well, interruption should last less than 1 hour.
Thanks!