info Autoshite technical help. Ask questions about how the site works here.

[EyesWeldedShut]

3 hours ago, SiC said:

This has been on my radar to reply, but I haven't had a chance the last week to reply properly.

Could you see if you can access this:

https://autoshite.com/can_you_see_us.txt

If you can, then its probably on our side. If not, then for whatever reason 3 isn't allowing traffic to route to autoshite and not a whole lot I can do. 

Is there anyone else using 3 and having issues or does it work?

I'm on a Smarty SIM based 4G router - they use the 3 network - never had a problem with Autoshite (and, yes, I can see your txt file)
I do have problems on some sites as Smarty does not allocate a public IP to users so everything goes out from a common IP range for a gazillion folks and some sites have blocked it (French Car Forum or similar is one)

[SiC]

Just had a thought. I bet three are using IPv6 (new style of IP address) where they can but a lot of the world is using IPv4 still. A quick check of a DNS lookup (system that finds the IP address) of the IPv6 address brings back an IP address that isn't our server...

I don't have login access to the DNS provider, so I can't do much right now. I've given the person who has current access another prod...

[beko1987]

I'm on 3 4g and can use the forum and see that test page fine

[MikeR]

I can see u ..

 

BT fibre , win10 ..

[SiC]

I suspect it will also be phone/device and network specific issue. As many devices probably will still lump themselves into IPv4. Also might even be some base stations are set to route IPv6 traffic and others not (possibly 5G specific?). 

I'm not 100% this is the issue but certainly the IPv6 being wrong will be an issue. 

[AndyW201]

10 hours ago, SiC said:

This has been on my radar to reply, but I haven't had a chance the last week to reply properly.

Could you see if you can access this:

https://autoshite.com/can_you_see_us.txt

If you can, then its probably on our side. If not, then for whatever reason 3 isn't allowing traffic to route to autoshite and not a whole lot I can do. 

Is there anyone else using 3 and having issues or does it work?

Thanks for getting back to me. I've been up in Scotland with the truck for two days, and for reasons above, I've not been able to access the site.

Yes, I've tried the link above and could read the text.

[SiC]

7 minutes ago, AndyW201 said:

Yes, I've tried the link above and could read the text.

Is that when using your mobile data? Presumably the site doesn't work when on that same mobile data and reading that text?

[AndyW201]

2 minutes ago, SiC said:

Is that when using your mobile data? Presumably the site doesn't work when on that same mobile data and reading that text?

Yes, I can currently only access the site on wi-fi, but I came out of wi-fi and pasted that link into my browser and it came up fine, if that makes sense.

FWIW, All our phones are on 3 mobile data, I can access the site on my wife's and daughter's phones no problem on the data. My own phone's only a couple of months old, but I had no problem getting on the site on data, up until last Thursday. It came on  briefly today, but I could only get the homepage, I wasn't signed in and could not access the sign-in page.

[SiC]

Let me get this IPv6 address issue fixed first to rule that out. I'm only about 60% sure it'll fix your problem, but I need to rule it out first.

 

[SiC]

2 hours ago, AndyW201 said:

Yes, I can currently only access the site on wi-fi, but I came out of wi-fi and pasted that link into my browser and it came up fine, if that makes sense.

FWIW, All our phones are on 3 mobile data, I can access the site on my wife's and daughter's phones no problem on the data. My own phone's only a couple of months old, but I had no problem getting on the site on data, up until last Thursday. It came on  briefly today, but I could only get the homepage, I wasn't signed in and could not access the sign-in page.

I've deleted the offending IP address. If you could try again when get a chance and see if it fixes it at all. 

[AndyW201]

8 hours ago, SiC said:

I've deleted the offending IP address. If you could try again when get a chance and see if it fixes it at all. 

Yes, that appears to have fixed it! (fingers crossed.) I can get on the forum now on data.

Many, many thanks for sorting  that Si, you're a legend. 👍

[LightBulbFun]

@SiC I found an interesting way to break the forum, if you use the forum search function and search for anything with a - in the middle of it, after a bit of churning ya get chucked a 502 bad gateway, 

for example Peugeot-205

and this was the original search term/URL that brought it to my attention for me

https://autoshite.com/search/?&q=L-92Y&quick=1&search_and_or=and&sortby=relevancy

breaking the internet with Invacars since 2018!  

 

its not the end of the world but just thought I'd make ya aware of it just incase  

[Aston Martin]

Am I on heroin, or is the search function not really working?

[High Jetter]

39 minutes ago, Aston Martin said:

Am I on heroin, or is the search function not really working?

It is, so you must be. Rich git

[Aston Martin]

36 minutes ago, High Jetter said:

It is, so you must be. Rich git

 

It doesn't search anything before Sept 1st. 🤷‍♂️

[bunglebus]

I can't get it to work either. Thought I was going mad

[brownnova]

Yes unfortunately search function is slightly broken atm and will only search the last week. It’s one of those pesky difficult to diagnose faults. But it is being diagnosed. 

[CreepingJesus]

Just searched for the rugby thread (started 2015, untouched since this March) and it was fine.

[SiC]

Yeah there is an issue with the search. I first discovered it here:

Then LBF discovered it above. I've just unhidden his post as I didn't want others to readily discover it as doing it enough will cause 502 Bad Gateway errors. Originally it would lock it up hard for many minutes until it got back with a result. I've reconfigure the server so it will timeout after 30s.

Yesterday someone else must have discovered it as I had reports of 502 errors again. It sorted itself as the 30s timeout kicked in.

To stop it happening completely I reduced the search period to 1 day. Then I increased it to 365 days this morning as that seems a happy medium. 

Basically it appears the forum software isn't really happy about searching the (literally) millions of posts on here. Normal text searches are fine but stick a non alphanumeric character in there and it'll spend absolutely ages (tens of minutes) going through every post. A bit crap imo. A simple text search is very quick.

I plan to use a different search indexing backend (elasticsearch) that is better suited to performing searches. However it's quite resource heavy (runs on Java *shudder*) and I need to figure the best way for it to coexist. I might have to spin another small (cheap) instance up to run it on a separate server. Also depends how much people really use the search. Going by the notice on here, it does get used frequently.  

Problem is I've simply not had the time recently. This doesn't help either at home...

So for now the search period will have to stay relatively short. Otherwise someone will break the server for everyone else!

[High Jetter]

Should this be our/your problem, or the sites hosts? 

[Dave_Q]

Came to tell you about the search, I normally find my own thread by typing "shonkers" in the search bar but it's not coming up.

Looks like it's a known issue though.

[flat4alfa]

Only happened in recent days though and I probably use search history a few times a week

Searching the forum for specific I know exist, nothing returned as older than March this year.  Adjust the time line, still nothing earlier March this year.

[bunglebus]

Hope this can get fixed as AS actually had one of the most user friendly search functions I've found on a forum. It's a bit of a PITA as I often search for threads I regularly post in and now have to scroll through several pages to find what I want - if it's been updated fairly recently 

[SiC]

It's definitely something I want to get fixed. I've upped the search period to 365 days and it seems that the non alphanumeric searches aren't cripplingly slow at that. Basically if you use any non alphanumeric characters in the search (e.g. -+,!;:/. etc) it causes it to take ages. If you repeat that enough times, it will cause the server to run out of connections to process. Then everyone gets 502 errors until those searches finish.

My plan is to move to Elasticsearch. This should make searches a lot more accurate and hopefully quicker. But it's not trivial to setup and secure. I've spent a brief bit of time already but need a bit longer. It's also a big resource hog which complicates thing and may need additional compute resources added. I may put out a call out on here or ask some colleagues at work to double check the config is right.