Expecting Rain

My most used page on this board is this one:
search.php?search_id=newposts
It's much easier to see what's going on this way compared to checking a bunch of individual subforums.
Today it hasn't been working properly for me most of the time.
Instead, I mostly get this message:Is it just me or does this problem happen to everyone else, too?

I've been having that problem since yesterday morning too. I also get that when clicking the Search button, View My Posts, and View Unanswered Posts

Same problem here for the last 24 hours or so.

I always use the View active topics button and it has been saying Sorry but you cannot use search at this time. Please try again in a few minutes since sometime yesterday.

Basically the problem seems to all stem from that the search function itself is not working. I thought maybe it was just me.... But no, I am not alone (in this)...

Me too.

Same here, it is also affecting Tapatalk, for when I want to browse on my iphone.

Same here - no 'View active topics' all day.
On the other hand - we're still extremely lucky to have this site at all and I thank Karl and all of his helpers and mods and I'm always happy when he puts the paypal up so that I can show my appreciation - I hope everyone else does, too. Be sure to check out the main page

It seems to be fixed now - thank you!

Hmm, it still isn't working for me

It seems to come and go.

This problem occured to me only from time to time, very occasionally. But in the last two days I had this difficulties permanently, apparently like everybody else did.
I hope it can be fixed.

Still out of action here.

VNP is still dead; it is pushin' up the daisies; it has gorn to meet its maker; it is singing with the celestial choir; it is no more; it is an ex-function.

Same problem here for the last couple of day's. I can't utilize any of the 'view' functions.

Is it possible that the search index is corrupted and needs to be rebuilt?

It's usually to do with server problems. Has anyone contacted mad cow or KE?

I am aware of the problem, but am unable to solve it.
This has happened before, and as far as I know, it went away after a while then.
I have tried to tweak settings to ease the load, but I see no improvement.
The next action might be to restart the forums, but i am reluctant to do it.

Thank you for reminding me.

Thank you!
I hope there are other ways than restarting the whole forum.

Other message boards I visit also ran into performance issues because of a high server load. While some of them restarted (often on a different server or with a different software), others seem to have managed while keeping most of the old board intact (at least one of them also using the phpBB software). There are two things I remember as an answer to these server problems:
- Archiving old threads. Some boards have simply closed all threads beyond a cut-off point (several years in the past) and moved them to a read-only subforum. Others have also hidden them in a moderators-only section and still others have deleted them entirely (after saving them offline, I presume).
- Closing big threads and having a manually controlled thread size limit. This means that threads are only allowed to get to, for example, 100 pages and everytime this limit is hit, the thread gets closed and a successor is opened (e.g. "Thread for Funny Pictures 2"->"Thread for Funny Pictures 3")

However, I don't know if the performance issues these other boards ran into were of the same nature. The search function wasn't the only thing having problems but the boards themselves - they became slow and often didn't load at all. Meanwhile ER is still loading very fast for me and downtimes are almost non-existant.
I don't have a technical background myself, this is just how I remember it from the point of view as a regular member. I hope some of it is relevant. Maybe a user with a greater knowledge of these things can give his input.

This talks about a setting that can be changed to disable the antiflooding system. It may help indicate if the issue is due to high server load?

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=1334915

Here's another setting that might be causing this issue:

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=2220251

Big thumbs up to our administrators for getting the search functions back up!!! Thank you guys for your time and efforts!!!

It's back - yippee

Thanks for getting this fixed!!

Still not quite how it should be in Tapatalk but much better this morning