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Forum Suggestions/Issues

Redliner said:
Computer. Chrome running on Debian 12.
It was a .jpg
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Interesting. The forums are set to allow maximum upload size of 128MB, no resolution limits. Almost all image/video files are accepted, so not sure why your image would be rejected.
Code: 
m4v, mov, mp4, mp4v, mpeg, mpg, ogv, webm, mp3, opus, ogg, wav, pdf, png, jpg, jpeg, jpe, gif, jif, mkv, hevc, webp, zip, heif, heic, tiff, bmp, psd, raw, eps, ai, indd, dwg
 
I don't know if I'm the only one seeing it but attachments still seem to be causing issues with the site. They're very slow to load and while loading, the site seems unresposive. It's as if the bandwidth is so constrained that it can't even serve the home page while images are loading, one at a time.

Not sure if this affects everyone when one visitor is loading images, but while loading the images on page 21 of The Power Tools Thread I couldn't load the main forum page in another tab. Now the images have loaded, everything seems fine. I checked on Speedtest and there are no obvious issues at my end. :hmm:
 
Matt2000 said:
I don't know if I'm the only one seeing it but attachments still seem to be causing issues with the site. They're very slow to load and while loading, the site seems unresposive. It's as if the bandwidth is so constrained that it can't even serve the home page while images are loading, one at a time.

Not sure if this affects everyone when one visitor is loading images, but while loading the images on page 21 of The Power Tools Thread I couldn't load the main forum page in another tab. Now the images have loaded, everything seems fine. I checked on Speedtest and there are no obvious issues at my end. :hmm:
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What speeds are you able to achieve with this test file? https://forums.finalgear.com/data/1GB.bin ?

Edit: This issue may be related to "Lazy Image Loading" implemented by browsers. https://web.dev/articles/browser-level-image-lazy-loading
I'll look into the server side and see if there are any performance items left on the table, I am getting a small delay (about .5 - 1 second) before each attachment starts loading.



Unrelated to attachments, I went through the database and rebuilt a few indexes and tables that were showing fragmentation, shouldn't really impact speeds but might help with the random page hangs. Still chasing this issue down.
 
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Outage from today: host claims unscheduled maintenance on the VPS, but our assignment wasn't under the affected servers. MySQL was showing timeouts on all legit login attempts-- gave it a few reboots and it took a while for it to recover.

Going to research a new host, hate having to migrate everything but that's probably best due to the continued issues we are seeing on the site.
 
Has there been a change to the forums recently? On mobile I keep getting a popup wanting me to install Tapatalk. I don't recall that happening nearly as much in the past.
 
Blind_Io said:
Has there been a change to the forums recently? On mobile I keep getting a popup wanting me to install Tapatalk. I don't recall that happening nearly as much in the past.
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No updates to Tapatalk in months-- I've been trying to reproduce the issue, but it doesn't show up when I am in a position to trace out where it is coming from so I can resolve it.

Edit: What version of Android/iOS/other are you seeing this on, and do you have the TapaTalk app installed/registered?
 
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Quiky said:
Edit: What version of Android/iOS/other are you seeing this on, and do you have the TapaTalk app installed/registered?
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While it does not happen often and I can’t say the frequency has increased for me (honestly can’t tell, happens too seldomly), I’ve also seen the mentioned overlay a few times.
iOS 17.3.1 (occurrences for me probably earlier versions). never had tapatalk installed on iOS, but may have had it once upon a time, still on an android device, many (!) years ago, though.
 
Quiky said:
No updates to Tapatalk in months-- I've been trying to reproduce the issue, but it doesn't show up when I am in a position to trace out where it is coming from so I can resolve it.

Edit: What version of Android/iOS/other are you seeing this on, and do you have the TapaTalk app installed/registered?
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I don't have Tapatalk installed.

Android 14. Build UQ1A.240205.002

It hasn't done it for the last couple of times I've loaded the forum. I wonder if a cookie expired or was cleared?
 
I edited the smartbanner code to exit out versus generate the banner code-- everything appears to still be working, let me know if it somehow appears again.

We also have a status page, for showing our lovely lack of uptime and random outages;

FinalGear Forums Uptime

status.finalgear.com status.finalgear.com
 
Added two more status monitors to the uptime tracking site- HTTP and SQL. Trying to get to the bottom of the outage issue that's been plaguing the site... host is claiming "you are using too much ram"... which doesn't explain multi-hour outages.
 
And even more ChatGP* clones/ML scrubbers have been added to the blocklist.

Database might be unreachable randomly for the next 12 hours- we are migrating over to new hardware. If this doesn't fix the outages and random performance shitfest, I'll move the site to another vendor and rebuild the infrastructure to make it work. Why keep paying for managed services and for people to fuck it up, when I can fuck it up myself for free?! :censored:
 
Kiki pointed something out to me the other day, the Post Your Car section is crawled by Google and photos there come up on GIS. If I remember right, that section is off-limits to non-members, but having those results crawled by Google is a way around that.

Is there any code snippet that can be added to opt that section of the forum out of indexing by search engines or is this just the way things are with the web now?
 
Blind_Io said:
Kiki pointed something out to me the other day, the Post Your Car section is crawled by Google and photos there come up on GIS. If I remember right, that section is off-limits to non-members, but having those results crawled by Google is a way around that.

Is there any code snippet that can be added to opt that section of the forum out of indexing by search engines or is this just the way things are with the web now?
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The PYC isn't blocked for non-members/guests to read. NSFW certainly is. If there's significant feedback or reason to add the PYC to the non-indexed/members-only, I have no objections to adjusting the permissions.
 
It might be nice, we have a lot of personal information in there including photos of our vehicles, plate numbers, homes and addresses, tools, and other things that might be of interest to thieves or internet stalkers. It might be nice to have some of that be less accessible to the general public.

I admit that much of this is selfish since the nature of my work involves people who don't always exhibit the most sound decision making or are the most emotionally grounded.
 
Fair points. Does bring up several other items for consideration, which would need more community feedback as it pertains to privacy;

Do we keep the forum registration open, or adjust to Invite only?
There have been 6 new registrations in the past 12 months that were not spam bots, and have contributed one or two posts. Only one of those registrations has logged in within the past 60 days.​
417 registrations were banned or rejected within the same time-frame- spam/bots/failure to pass the registration check. Are we obtaining any benefits to leaving registrations open?​

Should some/all non Top/Fifth Gear sections be closed off from non-members/search entirely to reduce unwanted scraping of personal content?
I don't believe that members here, had LLMs been known at the origination of the forums, would have consented to scraping/training/commercialization of their postings. However, this may be akin to putting spilled milk back into the container.​
​
 
All fair points. With the amount of data generated daily by the planet, I think anything of value that's already out there will quickly be lost in the noise and become irrelevant even if found. Maybe the analogy of "the floor may be wet, but we can still turn off the spigot" would also be accurate.
 
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Temporarily shut off all guest access due to yet another bot and scraping influx. Migrating to Cloudflare and adding some mitigation, might take a few days to see any improvements.

Edit: Re-opened guest access. Added more cloud providers to the IP blackhole.
 
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Just something I noticed today, because I was made aware that there still was a NSFW section… and I realized I hadn’t been in any of those topics in forever. Not complaining, just thought this was a bit weird:

I near exclusively use the „what’s new“ section to access the forum, which seems to completely exclude the NSFW subforum. Same with „new posts“.
However, „latest activity“ DOES show activity from there. Is that intended or is there a particular reason for that? 🙈
 
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