A language learners’ forum

Hi guys,
I'm getting this error often today:

It happened to me once or twice during the weekend but I just reloaded the page again, and then it worked fine.

Yes of course. Yesterday I had 5 minutes where I couldn't log in at all. Now I had it once again but I could login immediately after.
My suggestion is that these kind of issues are not overlooked as they are a turn off and in the extreme case becomes like the old HTLAL.

Tristano wrote:Yes of course. Yesterday I had 5 minutes where I couldn't log in at all. Now I had it once again but I could login immediately after.
My suggestion is that these kind of issues are not overlooked as they are a turn off and in the extreme case becomes like the old HTLAL.

The problem is this is shared hosting and in order to eliminate the problem I would have to get a dedicated server. This would mean I couldn't continue to fund the site out of my own pocket, so then we'd have to have some donation drive, or charging model, or advertising. So it is a bit of a trade off between keeping it free (to you) and getting more robust service. I will chase up the hosting company, and I will start looking again at alternatives for DB hosting. There isn't a quick fix for this, but I take your point.

But the error that OP posted was a "No such file" and not a "Too many connections".

And even with the latter, I've read that sometimes it's actually the result of suboptimal code rather than there being too many visitors.

rdearman wrote:The problem is this is shared hosting and in order to eliminate the problem I would have to get a dedicated server. This would mean I couldn't continue to fund the site out of my own pocket, so then we'd have to have some donation drive, or charging model, or advertising. So it is a bit of a trade off between keeping it free (to you) and getting more robust service. I will chase up the hosting company, and I will start looking again at alternatives for DB hosting. There isn't a quick fix for this, but I take your point.

I also take your point. I'm one of the users who won't mind to pay a subscription fee, but I can imagine that for many users isn't the same and it would result in a loss of users - of course an undesired situation.
For the remark over the poor quality software: probably it's a bug that affects this version where the error message doesn't match the actual event. That can possibly be solved with a new version of the platform. My report is anyway meant to notify an existing issue, as I didn't find other notifications.

I've also experienced several sql and "unable to connect to server" errors over the last few days. The last time I was unable to access the server was about 15 minutes ago (00:10 UTC/GMT, 14:10 my local time).

Do we have a Twitter feed or something similar just in case things go south for longer periods of time? I think it would be useful to have an emergency/downtime link posted somewhere on the forum to keep everyone informed and up to date in case of sudden technical issues or difficulties (apologies if this is already posted somewhere and I simply missed it).

We have a Facebook group and wikia. There's also a twitter and mailing list but I'm less confident about those.

Just an FYI: I'm getting numerous sql errors and timeouts this morning (7a.m. EST). This has been going on for about two hours. And while it is very frustrating, I still want to thank rdearman for hosting this forum.

I couldn't get into it yesterday and only tried again five minutes ago. If I had still not been able to get in, I would have sought a technical solution, like sacrificing a goat.