I am getting very fed up. The whirling blue thing is taking up so much time. Logging out doesn’t always work at the moment. I’ve just been adding an obs - admittedly not a work of art by any means - but the observation failed at the last hurdle, ie the obs lost. What is going on this last couple of days? I don’t want to be reminded about things I should do to remedy this, I want to know that iSpot will work for me the way other sites do - without having to take action to get them to operate as expected. Rant over and stepping away now. Very fed up 
I’ve just now found entering ispot just hangs, but can still get to forum.etc. But I’ve never logged out of forum, or if so whether using the same password as for ispot works
This is slowly killing iSpot.
I’m a bit slow so it took me a couple of reads before I understood what it was, but once my rusty brain had grasped it, no problem at all thanks.
The issue of the site hanging seems to be down to need for more powerful hardware in a particular part of the site which we don’t have money for currently.
Hmmm. If this is the case, why does clearing cookies provide even a temporary cure?
Clearing cookies cures the problem of access to the forum, which was a result of modifications made across the whole of the OU sites. The site hanging (error 500s) has a different cause; I assume that is a result of the database getting too large for the hardware to cope.
Activity is down on past levels. My initial inference was the growth in the size of the database has outweighed the decrease in activity. But the thought has crossed my mind that an increase in bot traffic might be contributing. (I recently saw mention that not only search engines, but also AI companies, are crawling the web, and the latter is recent.)
Possible corrective actions.
- ban certain ip addresses to stop crawling by AI companies.
- refactor SQL queries to improve performance. (I did once revise a colleague’s queries, and I think the result was a several fold speed up.)
- archive parts (older observations) of the database.
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This may have worked on one of my machines but not on the laptop where I’m still locked out of the forum in spite of clearing cookies on multiple occasions.
That might be interference between the two systems. The problem occurs when the main site thinks that you’re logged in and don’t need to accept cookies, and the forum thinks that you need to set cookies. Though I can’t see exactly how that would go wrong.
Have you tried clearing cookies and then logging in on the laptop first?
Yes, I think I’ve tried every possible combination. Interestingly I’m writing this on my phone, which I’ve probably never used for the forum before, and I got straight in without a hitch.
We have thought about all of these many times. Crawlers have definitely caused issues at certain times so various ones have been switched on or off at various times. Queries have been revised on a number of occasions as the original ones were far from the most efficient although there are so many that this can’t be done for all. Archiving has also been considered but older observations are still used as part of the site. The basic issue is likely to be the way the database was structured, apart from the overall structure likely being far from optimum there was an error in the load sharing part which should have allowed easily scalability. It is a very big job to fix that. Can give more detail offline if you are interested.
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My forum is back again this evening.
It logged me out and appeared in read only mode.
When I logged in again the cookie notice was gone and no accept button can be seen on the home page.
I think they were trying to get the system to work better as the programmers realised the initial version was not ideal. They are still dealing with large numbers of websites so it may take a while for all the glitches to be ironed out.
Also some of the changes may take a few days to filter through.
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Another day, another change! I’ve been allowed back into the forum on my laptop. Progress! Many thanks.
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We applied a small update the other week with a cookie banner for the main website, to accept/decline Google Analytics. Due to the forum being separate, we applied a redirect to the site until the user had actioned their cookie preferences.
This was applied with a very tight deadline, resulting in a not-so-great solution. But this allowed us to keep the website online for users rather than taking it offline until we could implement the best solution.
Once we had finished dealing with other projects we were able to come back and review the process, which I will agree was not very user-friendly. So this has been changed.
If you happen to clear your cookies for iSpot at any time you will now be presented a cookies banner on the main iSpot website which you need to action before you can log in or interact with the main site.
For the forum, the redirect has been removed and you can now view the forum as normal.
Sorry for any issues this caused in the brief time it was in place. But this should now all be working as expected.
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It is such a huge database and there must be many users like me who have no idea how to clear my cookies, so goodness knows what rubbish I am trailing with me when I add new observations.
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ispot has a tiny number of cookies and we say what they are for (basically to allow the site to function), other sites can have hundreds of them from a wide variety of companies which can indeed monitor what you do across the web.
I ask the browser to clear cookies each time I close the browser down.
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That sounds a very helpful suggestion, thank you. I’ve found the instructions on how to do this, Firefox says to click on “Clear Data” and it will delete all the cookies stored on my device. Is that ok to do each time I close down or do I need to save any? (Apologies if this sounds stupid, these machines terrify me!)
I find Firefox’s “Clear Data” reliable. But, if in doubt, you could download one of the various free utilities out there (I use “Glary”, but there are others) to routinely clean up your system.
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It has not been a good new year and I also don’t want to share my life with Microsoft - are we becoming THE PRODUCT?
I think I’ve circumvented your problem @mags49 - you won’t lose your work if you hibernate and return later.
However it’s a pity that everything is becoming so time consuming - what are the benefits?
Happy thoughts I am still working on the backlog of my RSA observations. The quality of the images displayed is quite amazing - same cameras and computer - so it must be something else.