Weird Login Problem Yesterday - Was It Just Me?

[+DrVenkman]

Last evening I opened my iPad to hit the forum and was greeted with nothing but a blank white page. I cleared the Atariage cookies from my browser cache and tried again. This time I got the normal forum display with the big red banner dating back to October telling me I had to login with my email address, not just username. I guess I had not seen that since I stay logged in indefinitely. Anyway, I logged in again and got nothing but the white screen once more. Tried again a couple times and gave up. This morning things seem back to normal after logging in.

 

Did anyone else experience this? 

 

[+SpiceWare]

I got the white page last night as well.  Didn't try clearing out any browser cookies.  Everything's working this morning.

[zzip]

Yesterday afternoon I got a message that the site was being updated.   This lasted 10-15 minutes I think.

 

After the site came back, it seemed like some of the subforums were not showing up in the "recent posts" stream

[Flojomojo]

The forum was down for a while, Albert posted about it on Twitter and Discord. He was waiting for the cloud provider to help him out, and some of the plugins needed to be disabled. 

[roadrunner]

I had problems too, after i sign in i got a error and White screen.

 

[Albert]

The forum was down for about ten hours yesterday evening/morning, resulting in the blank page you and others saw when attempting to visit the forum.  The problem was related to upgrading the forum yesterday (from version 4.7.4 to 4.7.5), which Invision requested I do before they would begin work on two issues I submitted.  The upgrade itself went fine, but after Invision worked on one of the tickets, the ACP (admin control panel) was no longer working.  Invision fixed this by disabling all third-party plugins and applications.

 

Apparently this upgrade broke many apps/plugins that haven't been updated to work in PHP 8, which is now being used on the forum here.  It was my impression that this change took place with 4.7.4 (which I upgraded to several weeks ago), but apparently there must have been more changes with 4.7.5 on this front.  I went into the ACP to re-enable all the plugins and applications that were seemingly working fine after the upgrade completed.  But at one point while doing so, the ACP broke again (showing me a blank page), and then I noticed the forum was now in the same state.  I immediately emailed Invision to let them know, but it was already past normal business hours, and it seems they do not have tech support working for a good block of the evening/morning hours.  Thus, the forum was not fixed until about 4am.

 

Current state is that I have not re-enabled all the plugins/applications, as I'm slightly terrified to do so. I fired off an email to Invision asking the best way to go about doing this without causing the same issue again.  It's important that I be able to do so, as there's important functionality in the forum that's currently missing as as result.  Hopefully I can get all this resolved fairly quickly.

 

 ..Al

[Ecernosoft]

6 hours ago, Albert said:

The forum was down for about ten hours yesterday evening/morning, resulting in the blank page you and others saw when attempting to visit the forum.  The problem was related to upgrading the forum yesterday (from version 4.7.4 to 4.7.5), which Invision requested I do before they would begin work on two issues I submitted.  The upgrade itself went fine, but after Invision worked on one of the tickets, the ACP (admin control panel) was no longer working.  Invision fixed this by disabling all third-party plugins and applications.

 

Apparently this upgrade broke many apps/plugins that haven't been updated to work in PHP 8, which is now being used on the forum here.  It was my impression that this change took place with 4.7.4 (which I upgraded to several weeks ago), but apparently there must have been more changes with 4.7.5 on this front.  I went into the ACP to re-enable all the plugins and applications that were seemingly working fine after the upgrade completed.  But at one point while doing so, the ACP broke again (showing me a blank page), and then I noticed the forum was now in the same state.  I immediately emailed Invision to let them know, but it was already past normal business hours, and it seems they do not have tech support working for a good block of the evening/morning hours.  Thus, the forum was not fixed until about 4am.

 

Current state is that I have not re-enabled all the plugins/applications, as I'm slightly terrified to do so. I fired off an email to Invision asking the best way to go about doing this without causing the same issue again.  It's important that I be able to do so, as there's important functionality in the forum that's currently missing as as result.  Hopefully I can get all this resolved fairly quickly.

 

 ..Al

Ok!

Yeah, it seems you can't edit posts you made before the White-out.

[Albert]

33 minutes ago, Ecernosoft said:

Ok!

Yeah, it seems you can't edit posts you made before the White-out.

Yes, this is one of those important pieces of functionality that's currently disabled.  I should have all of this re-enabled soon, I'm just going to be extremely cautious right now, as I don't want a repeat of what happened yesterday!

 

 ..Al

[+fdr4prez]

Thanks, Al, for all the work.

 

In general, it seems that Invision's software is lacking to some degree, and this is causing you (and probably many others) to use many third-party plugins/apps, no?

 

Why aren't they incorporating some of these into their standard offering?  and it was mentioned that previously standard features were removed in newer versions, which is also frustrating to their users.

 

But, hey, look at all the plugins for the browsers out there and the lack of desire for the browser makers to do it themselves - even the commonly used ones

[Albert]

Just now, fdr4prez said:

In general, it seems that Invision's software is lacking to some degree, and this is causing you (and probably many others) to use many third-party plugins/apps, no?

They have continuously made improvements to the software, and they do often add features that were previously available only as third-party plugins/apps.  The current software is leaps and bounds ahead of where the software was when I started using it over 15 years ago.  But they cannot add everything, and many of the third-party plugins/apps may have limited appeal, not something Invision would necessarily want want to include in the base product.

Just now, fdr4prez said:

Why aren't they incorporating some of these into their standard offering?  and it was mentioned that previously standard features were removed in newer versions, which is also frustrating to their users.

They do, but as I stated above, they cannot add everything.  This is true with all forum products, all ecommerce packages, and so forth.  There's a base version of the product that is updated and improved over time, with new features being added, bug fixes, etc.  But there's generally a large marketplace of additional functionality that can be added via third-party solutions.

 

And, yes, when Invision went from version 3.x to 4.0, they completely rewrote the software from scratch.  This resulted in the loss of some features, most of which were added back over time.  Those that weren't added back were generally addressed by third-parties. 

 

I will say that the forum is an extremely complex piece of software.  There are a ton of unique pages, the database is rather large in terms of tables and interaction between tables, there are many integrations with third-party services (social media, various login methods, built-in Giphy support, many embeds for different types of links, and tons of other stuff), there's an extensive and complex API to enhance and extend the software (rather than just hacking at the code directly, which is generally not allowed these days), and so forth. 

Just now, fdr4prez said:

But, hey, look at all the plugins for the browsers out there and the lack of desire for the browser makers to do it themselves - even the commonly used ones

This is common with software in general. Provide a base product, but make it extensible so third-parties can offer features that either aren't yet available in the base software, or just don't make sense to include as part of the base software.

 

I don't always agree with decisions Invision makes, I'm not going to be shy about that.  And I get quite unhappy if the forum goes down for any reason, but it's even more aggravating when my hands are tied and I have to wait for another party to take action in order to fix it, as with what happened yesterday.

 

 ..Al

[roadrunner]

Good info, Thanks