Is it just me, or what, re the forum

I use four computers to access the forum now and then. Two at job and two at home. All show these two problems:

Seemingly randomly

1. I have to re-login. Not every time.

2. about 30% of the time, the forum’s server does not respond to my URL to view. But the main Sparkfun.com home page never seems to fail.

Perhaps (1) is because they reboot/restart the process on the server?

Don’t know about (2).

I mention it because it happens on all PCs and has for quite a while. No such problem on the other web sites and forums that I frequent.

I never have to relogin and I use my desktop and laptop to login in here. Both with FireFox. The forum software is ancient, though. You would think being able to give away $100k in product they could spend $85 on vBulletin.

I do get bad requests every once in a while. The server and/or connection is not that good and the forum is generally slow overall. I get some lost requests with the main site as well, but it’s not like I visit that site all that often.

I’ve never had any issues using this website with IE, using 4 or 5 different computers. It seems to be a compatibility issue with Firefox, as I’ve heard exactly the same comments a few times.

Not trying to start a browser war here - I use Firefox myself for some websites that don’t work with IE.

I just tried IE 6.0 SP3.

Every attempt has seconds or tens of seconds of delay in response, with lots of timeouts. Same in Firefox.

5 in a row failed.

Same on several different PCs.

It’s like their server is overwhelmed. I wonder if it’s their own server or in a hosting center.

No problems here on other forums/web sites.

Needs attention.

It does grind to a halt quite often, I’ve found. It usually seems to be in the late afternoon, here in the UK. I don’t have any problems with other forums.

Leon

IE 6.0!!! I highly recommend you upgrade to at least version 7…

Maybe I’m just lucky - I’ve never had a single problem with the forum here in Australia.

It often grinds to a halt for me too. 5 minutes later it works like nothing was ever wrong.

-Bill

i get the weird relogin thing every few days, too. i think it’s been that way for a year or so, just started one day. no big deal though

MichaelN:
IE 6.0!!! I highly recommend you upgrade to at least version 7…

Anyway, this problem perplexes… same thing on different PCs, different Internet connections. Maybe a time-zone issue? At work, I’m on only at noon-ish Pacific time. A busy hour?

phalanx:
It often grinds to a halt for me too. 5 minutes later it works like nothing was ever wrong.

-Bill

SFE webmaster - did you notice this thread?

I’m seeing the same problems - it suddenly starts timing out, and comes back in a few minutes. It just happened a few minutes ago.

/mike