If It Seems Like The Board Is Broken...

[dlodoski]

It's not.

I've received several report of folks being able to access the board, but not being able to log in. This is similar to a database issue we had about a year ago. But for most folks, the board is operating normally at this time.

The only thing I can think of is that the problems are due to the current Spamhaus (DDOS-like) attack. We'll have to wait and see about that.

[quagmire_uk]

A few weeks ago I had an issue where if I visited quicksandfans.com I got a weird version of the board that was just a white background with very plain looking text for all the forum sections and topics, and clicking on any topic then got an error message. However, when I went to quicksandfans.com/index everything worked OK. (And now quicksandfans.com seems to be working OK again.)

[dlodoski]

A few weeks ago I had an issue where if I visited quicksandfans.com I got a weird version of the board that was just a white background with very plain looking text for all the forum sections and topics, and clicking on any topic then got an error message. However, when I went to quicksandfans.com/index everything worked OK. (And now quicksandfans.com seems to be working OK again.)

I get that sometimes when the connection I'm on is not up to speed. It was happening a lot on this last trip to the Philippines, before I finally got some good internet to the house there.

I think what happens is that the Style Sheet information does not load correctly. There's more to it than that, I'm sure, but it starts with a sketchy connection/session.

[dlodoski]

Ok, this almost certainly seems to be a result of the Spamhaus attack. Here are a couple articles about it -

http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... struction/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... er_dangers

These articles are very techy, and even with my networking background, I found them hard to follow all the way through. But the long and short of it is that they explain the spotty nature of how some folks have been unable to access QSF properly.

The troubling news is that they don't even mention how, or even if, repairs are being made to the currently effected DNS servers.

[auroraman]

Ok, this almost certainly seems to be a result of the Spamhaus attack. Here are a couple articles about it -

http://arstechnica.com/information-tech ... struction/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/ ... er_dangers

These articles are very techy, and even with my networking background, I found them hard to follow all the way through. But the long and short of it is that they explain the spotty nature of how some folks have been unable to access QSF properly.

The troubling news is that they don't even mention how, or even if, repairs are being made to the currently effected DNS servers.

Hi Dave, I was having real problems last wednesday- very slow internet and Skype was logging on and off several times a minute. It seems to be fine now, maybe even a bit better then normal. I get low broadband speeds here due to my remote location and it doesn't take much to kick me offline.

[Magic Engineer]

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[dlodoski]

I get the 'text only' problem every time I use Google Chrome; I clean out the cookies and history, and then it loads fine, until the next day where it shows up again, and then cleaning out the cookies solves it again. So it's a nice way to keep my history fresh and guilt-free, but I can imagine it's annoying for some.

Actually, clearing your browser cache is all that is needed, according to Kookus.

This is less messy than cleaning out cookies, but could be an issue with folks on slow connections (previously visited pages would have to reload from scratch).

Very little has been changed regarding the basic page structures in phpBB for Quicksandfans, so I other forums running this system would probably also exhibit this issue, if visited often enough.

[mudmanic2012]

I'm using Chrome and it is working just fine for me.

[dlodoski]

I'm using Chrome and it is working just fine for me.

Chrome is a good choice, but I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that. I run Firefox, which is also good, but had the same CSS problem when I was on a crappy connection.

Regarding the overall connection problem, that is completely independent of browser choice. The issue there is with whatever DNS service you are using. If you have been able to connect to the board consistently for the last week or so, then the DNS service you use has been configured properly against attack.