UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 6 Version 6 Support the blank page, again

from time to time I open our forums for anonymous users, read only.
shortly after that the server load usually hits the roof and nothing goes, I suspect it´s googlebot or some colleague of his that´s literally raping threaded mode.

I´ve been trying the same yesterday, worked fine since now.
The community is simply blanked out.
Every single page on the server loads perfectly except the UBBT part.

restarted apache, no effect.
restarted mysql, no effect.

either blank pages or no page at all, with unspecified browser errors.
now the server load looks normal again, but the board is simply gone.

any idea what might help?

version would be 6.5.1 beta4

example:
http://www.poisonfree.com/community/messageboard/ubbthreads.php?Cat=

it´s getting scary now, the board is gone for good now for about 14 hours, no sign of life.
it seems it´s not related to server load or access load at all, it´s just dead, no matter how many or few people try to access.

any advice on how to approach this?

whats the php page generation timeout and memory limits? Take a look an this and test bigger values.

I´ve been receiving some mails from users, reporting they sometimes get a blue screen, which is an awful lot of more than I´ve seen in the last fifteen hours.
So I suggested it might be possible to get to the control panel, tried to get the page from several computers simultaneously, with several different browser.
After some time one managed to get the main index, I went straight to the control panel and switched all forums with guest access back to no access.

Now everything´s back to normal, and I have no clue what might have caused this.
Normal server load, no flooding by bots, no worm acivity, the board just went comatose while the rest of the page worked fine.

timeout and memory limits are already set pretty high, because we had to run some extensive jobs from within phpmyadmin in the past.

second thought: wouldn´t other php generated pages with mysql connection also cease to work, or at least slow down?
because everything else, even the gallery, which consumes a lot of mysql queries, worked like thunder.

You have the old style post tracking on. You have your default set to "show all dates." You had guest access allowed to all of your forums. If you have a lot of forums or a lot of posts you've more or less followed the recipe for beating a server to death.

Why?

With guest access, by nature, EVERY post is unread, and all of that has to be counted, for every message, EVERY time a page is loaded.

Turn off the old style psot tracking or do as you did and bar guests.

Ok, I didn´t realize post tracking was also activated for guests.
But why?
Shouldn´t this be a feature reserved for registered members only?
It can´t be that I can´t open forums for guest access without deactivating vital features for registered members.

My dilemma:
1. we get a considerable higher rate of new registrations, when people can actually see what they´re subscribing to.
2. I´m using google adsense, if googlebot can´t reach the pages the banners are invocated on, I only get generic banners about other forum software, which no one is really interested in. I have *lots* of more clicks when google knows the content, because then I get content related banners. This is a vital source of revenue for me, cause we´re somewhat in the range of 100.000-200.000 page / banner impressions / day.

I propose introducing the option to turn off post tracking for guests
no more numbers for guests, if they want post tracking, they have to register.

there is a workaround, teaser forums, a mod by JoshPet, but this doesn´t solve the problem with google revenues.



What exactly do you mean by "old style post tracking", because I think it has been split up into the following config options:
Show total # of unread posts per forum?
and
Show total # of unread replies in topics?

i had those deactivated once, the server was faster, but our members really hated it.

What he means is what was called "full post tracking" in the previous versions. Showing the numbers of new posts (instead of just the light bulbs) is high load.

And setting the default to show all is a load as well. Why do quests have to load EVERY message in EVERY forum? Why not two weeks or a month? They can still get to all of your messages, google can still spider each and every one of them. But why load them EVERY time?

[]And setting the default to show all is a load as well. Why do quests have to load EVERY message in EVERY forum? Why not two weeks or a month? They can still get to all of your messages, google can still spider each and every one of them. But why load them EVERY time? [/]

where have you seen "show all"?
right now I got everything closed again, so I don´t see the state when not logged in, but when logged in, every forum is configured with decent limits, such as 1-3 months, depending on activity of the particular forum. Our most active is even set to 2 weeks.

in case it´s set to "show all" when not logged in, you might have found a bug <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

It is when not logged in. Your issue has been with Anonymous or Guest users, right? So, that's how I'm looking at it. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Rick, Is there a problem with Guest users getting show all regardless of the forum's settings?

I opened a forum for guest access, logged out, cleared the cookies and took a look.
The main forum was displaying the last two weeks for anonymous users.

I´m really wondering where you saw "show all posts".

oh, ok that´s kind of misleading.
This is "the board for the unregistered and not logged in".
It only contains three postings, about what´s inside and some login troubleshooting.
This is read only for everyone, there are never more postings, no movement at all, so I figured out the display limit is kind of unimportant here,

All other forums are configured properly, I take it this forum can´t be responisble for the blank out.