SayBox Issues

[Dad2Brooke]

Were the servers down over the last couple of days?

Here was my problem. I have SayBox in my info box at the top of my Proboards page. It works great. But, on Sunday, when I would go onto my site, it would load to the point where SayBox was supposed to be and then stop. I would wait 30 seconds and then the rest of my site would load, but there wouldn't be a SayBox. Everytime I did something which required loading the main page (go to main page, admin, profile etc), the same 30 seconds would elapse prior to the loading of the page, and a nonexistant Saybox. However, when inside my board, on any page not associated with the main page (and thereby not associated with SayBox) the pages loaded quickly.

During this period of time, I tried to access your website, and was unable to go there.

I remarked out your code for the SayBox in my header for the main page and the page would load rapidly. Remove the remark tag and a slow 30 seconds again.

So, I can surmise from all of this that Proboards is trying to find SayBox's server during this 30 seconds. Finally, it times out and loads the rest of the page.

My question: Is there anyway either through your code or Proboards to cut the wait time? Maybe Proboards interrogates your server twice and if not available, it moves on and loads the rest of the page.

Also is there a way to alert your customers when the servers are down ( if that is what the problem was) via email?

Thanks for any light you can shed on this.

BTW, SayBox is once again working, perfectly as of now.

[Renegade]

Hi,

Firstly let me apologise for the recent downtime - this was, however, beyond our control. Hopefully all the server issues at Elixant (who host SayBox) and a BurstNet (the datacentre the Elixant servers are located at) should now be fixed, meaning no more downtime.

The best thing to do in the event of prolonged downtime is to temporarily take the SayBox code off your website or forum.

Regarding the mass emails - this is currently not possible as all the SayBox code, and all the member information, is stored on the same server. If the server is down, the emails are inaccessible, and the Saybox email will also be down. We are currently looking into the possibility of having a small backup server for the purpose of alerting Saybox members when downtime occurs.

[Dad2Brooke]

Thanks Renegade for your prompt reply.

I really appreciate it.

I understnad the problem better now, and why wehn you are having problems with SayBox your site is unavailable as well.

For those using Proboards I commented out the code using the HTML comment tags. I used <!-- at the beginning of the script and --> at the end of the script to comment it out in my header, instead of removing the code.

[Renegade]

That works fine too - basically anything you can do to stop the SayBox trying to load when the server is down will help.

This forum is usually up even in the event of SayBox downtime, as it's hosted by PB, but all our images are hosted on SayBox servers as well, making every page here slow during downtime.