So, we had some kind of technical problem.

[Scarecrow71]

6 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

As the parent company is effectively defunct, said contact is probably a now-former employee doing this in their spare time and quite likely with their spare budget as well. I think perhaps the forum has devolved to some rough equivalent of highly-limited low-propriety “free trial.” So basically, we are lucky to have this forum at all and it may or may not wink out of existence at literally any moment not unlike the universe itself. 

Then let us eat, Kerbal, and be merry, for tomorrow we may diet. 
 

502 error incoming in 3… 2…

Except that we were told that the forums were paid for and contracted for another 6 months.  With a contract in place, there should have been some level of SLO agreed to that, quite frankly, hasn't been kept up.

[Superfluous J]

11 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

Except that we were told that the forums were paid for and contracted for another 6 months.  With a contract in place, there should have been some level of SLO agreed to that, quite frankly, hasn't been kept up.

Do you recall where you read that? I can't find the original post but I thought it was someone here who found that out via some sort of web snooping, maybe on the dns record or something.

[Lisias]

18 minutes ago, Superfluous J said:

Do you recall where you read that? I can't find the original post but I thought it was someone here who found that out via some sort of web snooping, maybe on the dns record or something.

The link is on the Forum's front page!

 

[Vanamonde]

Yes, that one's reliable news. 

[AVaughan]

On 12/10/2024 at 12:57 AM, Scarecrow71 said:

there should have been some level of SLO agreed to that, quite frankly, hasn't been kept up.

Maybe TT went with the cheapest option they could, which might mean that the forum is running on hardware that isn't really upto the job.  (That might also mean that we are way down the priority ladder when there are problems, especially if those problems are caused by TT choosing to use a hosting plan that the hosting company told them was inadequate for this forum).

Have the moderators heard anything from the new owners of TT (or KSP, since I guess it is a possible that the new owners will sell off some pieces piecemeal). 
Or is there any reliable information about who are the new owners?
 

[Manny73211]

On 10/28/2024 at 3:21 PM, Gameslinx said:

My bad guys I left bloons td6 running on the forum servers

thought there were spiders in the server room so yall were scared to fix it. roblox did that again.

[The Aziz]

Maybe change the thread name to  "we're having some kind of technical problem"

[PDCWolf]

Just toss me the DB, not even the invision license, and I'll pay for the hosting, jesus christ, the absolute state of this forum is shameful and unacceptable, was barely even able to read today let alone post.

[Lisias]

8 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Just toss me the DB, not even the invision license, and I'll pay for the hosting, jesus christ, the absolute state of this forum is shameful and unacceptable, was barely even able to read today let alone post.

I know you are just venting, but yet... Let's toy with the concept.

I initially thought if wold be some bottleneck between the frontend and the database, an idea that my analysis of the material I'm collecting kinda supported: one very bad implementation decision took by Invision is the way they do the <time/> tags, totally screwing any chance of caching content. This, obviously, overloads the database unless a more complicated (and prone to failures) cache is built between the frontend and the database.

TLDR;

Spoiler

This is how a <time/> tag looks, I copied it from your post:

<time datetime="2024-12-16T01:32:07Z" title="12/15/2024 10:32  PM" data-short="3 hr">3 hours ago</time>

The major screw up if the data-short and the text "3 hours ago" not being generated on the client side, but on server side. Had they used a javascript to generate this data from the "time" tag instead of hardcoding it, you could cache the whole page essentially forever, or if the content changes by adding/removing/deleting a post.

This way, you need to generate the same page again and again - it's lovely for recent post where the relative time is measured in seconds or minutes...

However...

Recently I had an insight and analyzed the problem from a different perspective, and on the process I realized that the problem is between the frontend and the CloudFlare, one level above from what I was thinking. Essentially, I built a simple site monitor in two different servers in two different continents, and discovered that Forum doesn't borks consistently - different continents are served by different CF subnets, and one CF subnets may be borking while other is working on a given instant.

I strongly believe this is an infra problem, above Forum's frontend. My working theories are disclosed on the link above.

Additionally, if you are not aware yet, you may like to know about this. Interesting enough (or not!), I found a bug on Forum.

So, their problem right now is probably on the hosting service. Something appears to be misconfigured somewhere.

I think that a more effective approach would pay for an audit on their infrastructure, looking for glitches and misconfigurations, by a specialist.

Edited December 16 by Lisias
Of cuorse, tyops!

[Bej Kerman]

This forum has a "new people won't choose this massive loading time over the discord and subreddit" problem. The solution may surprise you.

[AlamoVampire]

Im wondering if these issues the initial vibrations of a death-knell for not only both KSP and KSP2 but the forum as well. Its spending more and more time in bad gateway than operational. Ive been here since august 2013 and the worst thing id seen was the great purge. That is until the flood of bad gateways then the 2 weeks or so when it crashed and burned. Im wondering when it will crash again and if it does will it be salvaged or even possible? Are we on borrowed time?

004612162024

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

This forum has a "new people won't choose this massive loading time over the discord and subreddit" problem. The solution may surprise you.

Are you suggesting (even that indirectly) that Forum may be being intentionally sabotaged?

In a way or another:

• Reddit is not biting.
  • That format is just terrible for challenges and a lot of other content where this Forum used to rule;
• Discord is a mistake.
  • The timeline is a mess and the search is a joke - and the Company is not profitable, expect to have the services charged, reduced in scope or the company getting the receiving end (relatively) soon.
  • As soon some content would be restricted to Nitro customers, expect a mass migration and loss of data.
  • Oh, yes... Just remembered... Users under 13 (but up to 16 on some other countries) that gets permanently banned when reported. Thank COPPA for that.

Edited December 16 by Lisias
(relatively)

[AlamoVampire]

@Lisias ksp2 gets back burnered to the point it likely will never be fully finished, the forum gets into a state of disfunction, its being likely forgotten by those who could salvage it. It may not be sabotage per se but it could be that its being neglected and allowed to atrophy into unrecoverable decay to be quietly killed off on all fronts. This is 100% speculation on my part but it feels like its reasonable to at least suspect it right or wrong. Again speculating only.

054412162024

[Lisias]

On 12/16/2024 at 8:44 AM, AlamoVampire said:

@Lisias ksp2 gets back burnered to the point it likely will never be fully finished, the forum gets into a state of disfunction, its being likely forgotten by those who could salvage it.

The problem is that all of this costs money. The database hosting costs money, the frontend costs money, CloudFlare costs money. The Forum's software costs money (and the license was renewed, besides not being necessary if they would not be willing to use their Support, what would not be the case if Forum would be abandoned in the backseat).

It's Xmas. Lots of people are coming back to KSP for the Seasons, and someone is wasting money with all of this - and, worst, is getting negative value back because this someone is, essentially, paying to be bad mouthed on the hottest months of the year. At least on Steam Charts, KSP¹ is hotter this year than the respective months in the last one.

I will say again: there're more people playing KSP¹ online on Steam on September, October and November this year that on these months from 2023.

So there're more people being let down by Forum right now - with the unavoidable repercussion to whoever is going to announce being the new owner.

Makes no sense paying CloudFlare to serve error messages to the customers for months.

 

On 12/16/2024 at 8:44 AM, AlamoVampire said:

It may not be sabotage per se but it could be that its being neglected and allowed to atrophy into unrecoverable decay to be quietly killed off on all fronts.

Not impossible, indeed, but there're cheaper ways to commit suicide. Someone is going to pay some money on a P/R campaign to rebuilt the Forum's reputation - and Forum is part of the sell, it's an asset that was sold to the new owner and if the new owner would not be interested on Forum, they would had just pulled the plug at the moment of the buy.

 

Edited December 17 by Lisias
tyops. as usulla.

[PDCWolf]

7 hours ago, Lisias said:

different continents are served by different CF subnets, and one CF subnets may be borking while other is working on a given instant.

I strongly believe this is an infra problem, above Forum's frontend. My working theories are disclosed on the link above.

Following the scientific method, I hope you'll be chasing this hypothesis to other websites hosted in the same way. If it really is a cloudflare problem then it should be easy to find other websites under the same system suffering the same issues (maybe even at the same times?).

5 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

This forum has a "new people won't choose this massive loading time over the discord and subreddit" problem. The solution may surprise you.

New people do not have that choice at first, because KSP doesn't have an official discord and the leftover discord is not linked anywhere in an official manner. Even PD's KSP2 website leads you here. Only -here- in this forum, you need to mouse over the community item and then you would find a link to the discord (which needs to be deleted given the circumstances that it is both not official and the fact that intercept apparently no longer has anything to do with the game)

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

Are you suggesting (even that indirectly) that Forum may be being intentionally sabotaged?

In a way or another:

• Reddit is not biting.
  • That format is just terrible for challenges and a lot of other content where this Forum used to rule;
• Discord is a mistake.
  • The timeline is a mess and the search is a joke - and the Company is not profitable, expect to have the services charged, reduced in scope or the company getting the receiving end (relatively) soon.
  • As soon some content would be restricted to Nitro customers, expect a mass migration and loss of data.
  • Oh, yes... Just remembered... Users under 13 (but up to 16 on some other countries) that gets permanently banned when reported. Thank COPPA for that.

You're not supposed to host minors under 13 anywhere, and the forums are under T2's legal terms, which do not have provisions for minors (forum guidelines do not cite any age), and every legal bind is aimed at the parents instead, and their use of any service related to T2 for a minor needs to be done under parents' supervision.

Reddit hosted challenges for more than a year successfully, you can do anything you can do in this forum, and if mods allow, even hotlink (or upload!) images to individual comments. As for other content... yeah I can see how reddit's format isn't great, specially for mods.

[Lisias]

23 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Following the scientific method, I hope you'll be chasing this hypothesis to other websites hosted in the same way. If it really is a cloudflare problem then it should be easy to find other websites under the same system suffering the same issues (maybe even at the same times?).

It's not a CF problem. It's a problem that involves CF - CF is the messenger of the problem, not the problem.

 

23 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

You're not supposed to host minors under 13 anywhere, and the forums are under T2's legal terms, which do not have provisions for minors (forum guidelines do not cite any age), and every legal bind is aimed at the parents instead, and their use of any service related to T2 for a minor needs to be done under parents' supervision.

What's more amicable than Discord, that plain ban permanently any account suspected to be owned by an underage. I had read hilarious reports from people sending them regularly photos from passports to unblock their account just to have the account blocked again after a while.

It worth to note that if you get a ban, you lose access to your own content on all the channels you had posted. You just can't login anymore, this is a GDPR nightmare and a ticking bomb. I would not want my name involved on a problem created by 3rd parties just to save some pennies on hosting my own solution (where I can control what is being done with the customers).

 

23 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Reddit hosted challenges for more than a year successfully, you can do anything you can do in this forum, and if mods allow, even hotlink (or upload!) images to individual comments.

That's exactly the problem: they are not allowing it, only the OP can have images and videos embedded.

The threads for the challenges are terribly boring, you need to click on links to open the images on another browser tab or window. Not to mention some challenges being systematically being down-voted by reasons I don't understand.

Additionally, after 48 hours posts are removed from the limelight and they became somewhat inconvenient to be found, and so any challenge that would not be ran on the same day is doomed to be buried and forgotten. There's not a SubForum for Challenges, everything is on the same bag, it's a hell to filter out what you want. So if there's a challenge that you plane to pursue on the weekend, you need to post a "ward" in order to have it on your history, making less worse to find it later.

Reddit's format just doesn't works for this type of content.

Edited December 16 by Lisias
Hit "Save" too soon

[PDCWolf]

36 minutes ago, Lisias said:

It's not a CF problem. It's a problem that involves CF - CF is the messenger of the problem, not the problem.

I fail to see how this isn't a roundabout way to say there's something wrong with the forum. Again, other sites should show the same problem, otherwise it's the forum (be it the forum itself or how it respond to cloudflare's requests).

38 minutes ago, Lisias said:

What's more amicable than Discord, that plain ban permanently any account suspected to be owned by an underage. I had read hilarious reports from people sending them regularly photos from passports to unblock their account just to have the account blocked again after a while.

It worth to note that if you get a ban, you lose access to your own content on all the channels you had posted. You just can't login anymore, this is a GDPR nightmare and a ticking bomb. I would not want my name involved on a problem created by 3rd parties just to save some pennies on hosting my own solution (where I can control what is being done with the customers).

That's technically the blanket method to not get in trouble, since you can't feasibly prove there's a supervised minor posting. Since the T2 acquisition technically the forum has been one report away from having to act exactly the same way, with every minor having to prove they're participating under their parents' supervision, not that I think any minor comes here anyways. As for the discord, I love how we have entirely different reasons for not wanting to use it, and both groups of reasons are completely complementary. It's an organization mess, it gives moderators way too much power, it makes conversation ephemeral, it impedes content indexation for search engines, it's trigger happy with its own enforcing of arbitrary rules, and so on.

43 minutes ago, Lisias said:

The threads for the challenges are terribly boring, you need to click on links to open the images on another browser tab or window. Not to mention some challenges being systematically being down-voted by reasons I don't understand.

Additionally, after 48 hours posts are removed from the limelight and they became somewhat inconvenient to be found, and so any challenge that would not be ran on the same day is doomed to be buried and forgotten. There's not a SubForum for Challenges, everything is on the same bag, it's a hell to filter out what you want. So if there's a challenge that you plane to pursue on the weekend, you need to post a "ward" in order to have it on your history, making less worse to find it later.

Reddit's format just doesn't works for this type of content.

The image bit can be solved, however the content staying visible and easily searchable is something only a forum can provide. I personally don't care about challenges past the time you can get a badge for them (which reddit doesn't have either), but mods really need that indexing/search functionality.

[Bej Kerman]

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

Are you suggesting (even that indirectly) that Forum may be being intentionally sabotaged?

lol no, I just want to establish that we're only here because we're already here and that the forums will hemorrhage joining users if this keeps up. Reddit's crap but it's more attractive than constant error messages, at least to new players. Someone would better do something. I don't care if it's you or PDCWolf or one of the moderators (whom seem keen on maintaining moderation as their only duty). 

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

• Reddit is not biting.
  • That format is just terrible for challenges and a lot of other content where this Forum used to rule;
• Discord is a mistake.
  • The timeline is a mess and the search is a joke - and the Company is not profitable, expect to have the services charged, reduced in scope or the company getting the receiving end (relatively) soon.
  • As soon some content would be restricted to Nitro customers, expect a mass migration and loss of data.
  • Oh, yes... Just remembered... Users under 13 (but up to 16 on some other countries) that gets permanently banned when reported. Thank COPPA for that.

Completely agree

Edited December 16 by Bej Kerman

[Scarecrow71]

11 hours ago, Lisias said:

Recently I had an insight and analyzed the problem from a different perspective, and on the process I realized that the problem is between the frontend and the CloudFlare, one level above from what I was thinking. Essentially, I built a simple site monitor in two different servers in two different continents, and discovered that Forum doesn't borks consistently - different continents are served by different CF subnets, and one CF subnets may be borking while other is working on a given instant.

I strongly believe this is an infra problem, above Forum's frontend. My working theories are disclosed on the link above.

Additionally, if you are not aware yet, you may like to know about this. Interesting enough (or not!), I found a bug on Forum.

So, their problem right now is probably on the hosting service. Something appears to be misconfigured somewhere.

I think that a more effective approach would pay for an audit on their infrastructure, looking for glitches and misconfigurations, by a specialist.

The fact that you, an unpaid volunteer, did this in your spare time without being asked to do so further proves my point earlier in this thread that the tech contact and/or the technical team in support of this forum is ill-equipped to be providing support.  They either don't care OR they lack the technical knowledge to track down the issue (which you did) and/or fix it.

10 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Im wondering if these issues the initial vibrations of a death-knell for not only both KSP and KSP2 but the forum as well. Its spending more and more time in bad gateway than operational. Ive been here since august 2013 and the worst thing id seen was the great purge. That is until the flood of bad gateways then the 2 weeks or so when it crashed and burned. Im wondering when it will crash again and if it does will it be salvaged or even possible? Are we on borrowed time?

Unfortunately, it seems that the amount of time this forum has left is short.  And we already know that TT doesn't give a squirt about the franchise or its community, so my guess is that when the contract ends (six months from September, which would be sometime in March 2025) the forum goes away.

7 hours ago, Lisias said:

In a way or another:

• Reddit is not biting.
  • That format is just terrible for challenges and a lot of other content where this Forum used to rule;
• Discord is a mistake.
  • The timeline is a mess and the search is a joke - and the Company is not profitable, expect to have the services charged, reduced in scope or the company getting the receiving end (relatively) soon.
  • As soon some content would be restricted to Nitro customers, expect a mass migration and loss of data.
  • Oh, yes... Just remembered... Users under 13 (but up to 16 on some other countries) that gets permanently banned when reported. Thank COPPA for that.

If my above statement is true - and man do I hope it isn't - then this is what we are headed towards.  A mess of an unofficial Discord server, coupled with a mess of an unofficial sub-Reddit.

[AlamoVampire]

7 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

six months from September, which would be sometime in March 2025

I cant say who told me, if they wish to come forward they have the option. But ive heard it was renewed not for 6 months but a year. I trust the person who told me, but regardless if 6 months or 12, we may not have the forum by thanksgiving 2025. But given the forum spends more time in bad gateway than functional it may simply crash and burn before then.

112812162024

[Bej Kerman]

3 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

I cant say who told me, if they wish to come forward they have the option. But ive heard it was renewed not for 6 months but a year. I trust the person who told me, but regardless if 6 months or 12, we may not have the forum by thanksgiving 2025. But given the forum spends more time in bad gateway than functional it may simply crash and burn before then.

112812162024

[AlamoVampire]

@Bej Kerman im well aware of that post. My information was given to me after that thread was started and given my sources reputation i trust them implicitly. Also i think their information seeing as it was relayed to me in november of this year its more up to date than that thread. 
152312162024

[Lisias]

On 12/16/2024 at 10:57 AM, PDCWolf said:

I fail to see how this isn't a roundabout way to say there's something wrong with the forum. Again, other sites should show the same problem, otherwise it's the forum (be it the forum itself or how it respond to cloudflare's requests).

CF is not a content generator, it's a content delivery. Someone must provide them with content. In our specific case, if you see a page like this (I had documented the ones I got here):

This is (AFAIK) the only "content" CF generates for us. It means that CF tried to reach forum, but couldn't.

But when CF reaches something, no matter what or who, they send us whatever they get. When we get a page like this:

It means that CF reached something where Forum "lives" (but not necessarily Forum itself).

If whoever is hosting Forum built their infra as most server farms do, this page is being generated by a load balancer or similar service. A load balancer is like a doorman or gatekeeper, that redirects the request to someone inside their premises that would be idle and willing to take the task.

But on this case, apparently the desk chosen by the gatekeeper was found empty - the worker had just left the desk and didn't advised the gatekeeper, and then we have this 502 above because the gatekeeper got fed up while waiting the worker to respond.

Then, eventually, the worker goes back to its chair and then is able to attend some requests for some time, but then it leaves again, and then requests bounce back on 502 because there was no one there to respond again.

Please note that a 503 is a completely different thing. A 503 means that everybody had left their desks, warning the gatekeeper that they are not going to receive requests anymore - so the gatekeeper promptly answer back with "sorry, there's nobody home at this moment".

EDIT: A 503 can also means that everybody is at their desks,  but none were idle in order to take the task. I completely missed this possible interpretation, because on my day job we just don't have this one.

 

On 12/16/2024 at 10:57 AM, PDCWolf said:

As for the discord, I love how we have entirely different reasons for not wanting to use it, and both groups of reasons are completely complementary.

There're so many reasons to hate Discord, and so few to love it. And the later ones are vanishing...

 

On 12/16/2024 at 2:17 PM, Scarecrow71 said:

The fact that you, an unpaid volunteer, did this in your spare time without being asked to do so further proves my point earlier in this thread that the tech contact and/or the technical team in support of this forum is ill-equipped to be providing support.

At best. There's also a worst option, see my post above.

You see, this doesn't appears to be some transcendental bug beyound good and evil debugging and visual inspection, it looks like a plain and prosaic infra glitch/misconfiguration/silly-mistake. To this thing be being left happening unchecked since forever, the only options I can think of are (again, I'm pretty sure I had talked about this before):

• There's no one left;
• There's no one left knowing where to look;
  • Or to do something if they managed to look at the problem;
• There's no one left willing to do something;
• There's someone there intentionally screwing up.

Since we are completely in the dark on the matter, Logic suggests that currently there's a 25% chance of Forum being sabotaged internally since all the evidences I was able to collect strongly suggests it's something botched somewhere on the server farm hosting Forum.

Using the same rationale, there's a 75% chance of Forum being in a mess due negligence of someone - be because this one wants to screw things up, be because this one is not being paid for the job and not willing to add unpaid burdens to their life - or not knowing what to do (and, in these two last cases, the negligence is from someone above their pay grade).

The good news of someone being negligent is that there is someone that should be doing things, and so there is someone paying him. And if there's someone paying for something, this something has a chance of being alive for some time.

As I like to say: "Follow the money".

EDIT: There's another possible interpletation for a 503, see above. Under this possible perspective, Forum's budget was just reduced too much, and so there's nothing we can do until someone decide to foot some money more.

 

On 12/16/2024 at 2:28 PM, AlamoVampire said:

But given the forum spends more time in bad gateway than functional it may simply crash and burn before then.

I have a different point of view. Would the new owner had not some plans for this Forum, they would had pulled the plug already.

Forum gone dark for 2 weeks, but then it came back. So they found someone still having a face to be saved.

Forum itself is healthy (this time). Whoever is taking care of the Software and the Database is apparently doing their job (if paid or pro-bono, doesn't matter for our purposes). We are facing a infrastructural problem, something above the pay grade of the dudes that are doing their jobs about Forum.

On a wild guess, looks like something they had done while trying to diagnose the Forum some months ago ended up being forgotten activated/deactivated. It's a pretty common mistake that I did myself more than once.

Edited Sunday at 05:52 AM by Lisias
EDIT: alternative 503 interprestation.

[ColdJ]

The world taught me a long time ago to be a pessimist. So I tend to be surprised on the rare occasion when people do the right thing or care about what happens to others.

I mean I originally joined this forum to ask a simple question about how KSP configured buoyancy and over a year later had to finally work it out for myself because people would rather tell you that you are wrong rather than help you be right.

Even so, this is the only place I hang out because most forums are full of trollers just waiting to vent their frustrations at the world upon some poor new member who just is asking for help.

As such I saw what happened to the development of KSP2 coming years before it ground to a halt. To me it was obvious, simply by the  poor way they communicated to the forum and the way they would rather show some small cinematic rather than simply provide incremental updates on how their programming was going. People actually making progress, want to share what they have achieved. People who have stuffed up but refuse to stop and course correct, want to misdirect. Desperation was charging people for early access of a seriously flawed product rather than offering free Beta testing to those who would put in the effort to find the bugs without charge.

Which brings us to big companies buying up successful indie games in order to make their version of a sequel and use the reputation of the original in order to profit. in my experience the big company sequels are rarely anywhere near the original.

So where am I going with this?

The background was simply to establish: The control of the forum was bought up by a big company. It maintained the forum in order to promote it's sequel. Through poor decisions and  back flipping it stuffed up it's sequel.

It did the bare minimum to keep the forum going in case it proves useful in the future and to try to hold on to the core user base.

It doesn't actually care what is going on here and for all we know asked someone without a good working knowledge to extend it and check it in their spare time. If it did care it would have given the head modderator direct control and given them the right to consult someone with experience in maintaining server infrastructure.

So I put forth that apathy (as with so much in the world) is what is the problem. If they cared at all then they would give access to someone who cares about the forum and has the knowledge to correct the probably simple mistake.

 

[SunlitZelkova]

I’ve been getting so many bad gateway messages I didn’t realize the forum had been up at all since late October.