Internal Server Error 500's

[Renara]

Seems we're having some HTTP 500 (internal server error) problems again, you may see this either when accessing the boards themselves or as a database (MySQL) error. I'm getting on at my host to find out what's wrong and get it sorted out, but in the mean time I just wanted to let everyone know that these are temporary; usually coming back in a half or so will do the trick.

Just a reminder, but you may also sometimes receive this error if you double click a button by accident, for example when posting a message, which is normal since the server rejects duplicate requests. If you do get a 500 error and think you may have double clicked then it's usually safe to just go back and try again, but please do have a look to make sure the first request didn't go through, otherwise you can end up double posting

Anyway, thanks for your patience, I'm hoping to get the issue resolved soon!

[Renara]

Okay, so it turns out the issue is a result of the site being so damned popular! Anyway, I've done some tweaks that will hopefully allow the site to run through CloudFlare (which should handle a lot of our file traffic), this means that download statistics for files may be inaccurate in future as download requests are handled away from the site, but otherwise the changeover shouldn't be noticeable.

[edit]
Just to note; one of the measures I've added to enable CloudFlare support and generally improve speed is that file transfers are now direct in (hopefully) all public forums on the board. If you open an attachment that can be viewed in your browser then it should open with a url with the correct file extension (for example, a JPEG now goes to a url that looks like; "/downloads/links/filelink_<some stuff>.jpg").

This is a fairly major change so if you experience any weird new issues viewing attachments then please let me know as soon as possible by replying to this thread (I'll get an e-mail when you do). This should avoid some of the big file transfers via PHP and hopefully keep memory use low and speeds high