The Pitters' Place

If anyone was trying to log in recently and couldn't, sorry about that. I apparently couldn't log in myself! It was still fine from the computer which actually already had me logged in; but I couldn't log in from a new device/browser. I'm not even sure exactly what was going on, but I think that it has to do with Cron. I don't really know what Cron is, but it looks like ever since upgrading the board a couple weeks ago; Cron hasn't been running like it's supposed to. I think I fixed the issue so that Cron is now working properly; which also seems to make logging in work properly again.

I think Cron also has something to do with getting old YouTube links to start working right again, so I'm hopeful that those will get back to normal. That's not related to getting it to work with multiple formats of the links; I'm still working on that separately.

I wasn't able to log in for the past day or two, and I know Jimbo told me he wasn't able to log in either.

If this ever happens again, is there an e-mail address we can contact you at in the future?

Sent a PM; just in case bots crawl around and spam emails or something like that.

Yeah I didn't even notice there was a problem because I was still logged in on my main computer.

So I also spent the last hour fixing up places where special characters in old posts had gotten all screwed up. You may have noticed a bunch of posts were showing things like ’ instead of ", for example. There's still a handful of bad symbols/posts, but most of them should be fixed now.

So, for those interested in this sort of thing.... here's what happened.

After upgrading a couple of weeks ago, there was a setting that was set incorrectly; which caused the board to think that it was running under pittersplace.com instead of pittersplace.com/forum.

There's a thing called cron which runs in the background whenever people are using the site. It's responsible for various maintenance tasks that keep things running. One of these tasks is removing expired sessions from the database.

Web crawlers / bots create sessions when they crawl through the website. Normally, these sessions are removed by cron after an hour or so. But because cron wasn't running, I had 2 weeks worth of old sessions from bots in the database... over 100,000 rows.

Either my hosting or the phpbb software was unable to handle that volume of session records. It has to query that table whenever you try to log in to see if you already have a session to use or not. So because of the constant bot activity, combined with the setting that prevented the maintenance tasks from running; the login system was overwhelmed and unable to function.

I also was logged out, and when I tried to log in, I received a message that this account is not known.
Then I tried to click the "I forgot my password" link and got a 404 message.
But it seems to work now.

Yeah the 404 on forgot password was related to the same setting that caused the cron task to not run.

Gendo wrote: ↑Tue Mar 09, 2021 7:35 pmI had 2 weeks worth of old sessions from bots in the database... over 100,000 rows.

So in other words, Pitters' Place was in fact haunted by ghosts. I knew I was right!