Member of LOK are unable to get on

[BlueLight]

So i'm getting reports from about half the people (Understatement) working on Gang n Whores, that they're unable to get to the site. They claim that they're getting a message cloud flare saying the site itself is offline; except for the fact that i'm online and browsing when they say they're getting the message. It's not just limited to our team either; i had a RolePlayer say he was having problems.

edit
it seems that some member have to log in twice

[khaal]

I can log in ok from Australia. But not from France or Eastern US. I imagine the geolocation matters since this site uses CloudFlare and https://www.cloudflare.com/system-status as well as https://twitter.com/CloudFlareSys reported issues from locations I was trying to log in from. Although it does depend how they are utilizing cloudflare.

[Kuragari]

I've been noticing a lot lately that sometimes it will say the site itself is experiencing some error that is taking it offline. It will say things are fine on my end, and on the servers end, but on LOK's end their not. I have however almost no knowledge on computers or internet technical issues, so I can't give much insight.

I can however make sure to screencap an image the next time it happens.

[Bad Idea]

I get a Cloudflare 502 page instead of the webpage about 50% of the time. It seems to be claiming that the bottleneck is the LOK server itself. Could this be that so-called "last-mile" bandwidth throttling you're always hearing about?

Actually, I'm wondering if maybe the swf files are eating up too much bandwidth. Apparently you can get booted from CloudFlare for using up too much bandwidth, if that bandwidth isn't in the form of HTML.

Here's a screenshot of the error message, BTW.

[Renara]

I'm not sure what's going on, as I've not noticed any problems at all myself. I don't think we'd be getting limited for bandwidth use as the site's usage hasn't changed recently or anything, though I have been thinking we should really switch to a click-to-load mechanism for flash files anyway, but I wouldn't want to rush it through unless that's actually the problem; I'm sure I would have got some kind of warning if we were being limited for some reason.

It's weird though, usually gateway issues occur with CloudFlare if they're going to occur at all; anyway, I've sent support requests to my hosting provider and CloudFlare, hopefully one of them can figure out what's going wrong, while I still have some of my hair left

[Bad Idea]

Scratch that, it says I can't send private messages because I still have New Member status. Guess I'll have to say it "in the open."

Did you read my link in the post above? If this person's experience is any indication, Cloudflare's left had does not know what its right hand is doing. A friendly helpful staff member with the best of intentions will tell you one day that you're doing everything fine and they're just happy to have you, and the next day your use of the service will be summarily executed for TOS violations.

I suspect that the reason the site is running slowly is because of all the bandwidth being used to transfer swf files. While it's true that Cloudflare promises "unlimited" bandwidth, there is an obscure clause in their TOS saying that only html content qualifies. This man's image archive got axed for using 100TB per month. I don't know how much bandwidth LOK uses, probably much less than that, but if it's anywhere near that ballpark, now might be a good time to start making other plans.

As a stopgap, you could try adding a forum rule stating that all SWF attachments must be placed inside spoiler tags, and have the moderators enforce this in legacy threads. This would prevent the swfs from loading unless someone wanted to actually play the game in question, so at least it would cut down on bandwidth for users who are just reading or posting in threads. I suspect a bigger problem is people linking to the swfs from external sites. I won't name names here, but you can take a look at the number of times popular attachments have been viewed, multiply it by the filesize, and draw your own conclusions.

You have more information than me, so hopefully none of the above applies, but it doesn't hurt to be aware of other users' experiences with the service.

Good luck.

[BlueLight]

I'm not sure what's going on, as I've not noticed any problems at all myself. I don't think we'd be getting limited for bandwidth use as the site's usage hasn't changed recently or anything, though I have been thinking we should really switch to a click-to-load mechanism for flash files anyway, but I wouldn't want to rush it through unless that's actually the problem; I'm sure I would have got some kind of warning if we were being limited for some reason.

It's weird though, usually gateway issues occur with CloudFlare if they're going to occur at all; anyway, I've sent support requests to my hosting provider and CloudFlare, hopefully one of them can figure out what's going wrong, while I still have some of my hair left

I can comfirm the 502. I was getting it for what seems like to nights straight.

[Kuragari]

Same here, the last few days I'd get it for just about every page, and would have to refresh three or four times for it to work.

Screenshot

[Renara]

Did you read my link in the post above?

Yep, and thanks for linking it! We barely reach 1.9tb a month though; still more than many sites, but less than a fiftieth of the one who had their service axed
It sounds like if we were being limited by CloudFlare that we'd be seeing other issues, such as images/SWFs failing to load (i.e - requests being rejected), I do know that CloudFlare's data centres will limit sites that generate more than a few thousand requests per second, but again we're well below that as well.

I'm going to disable some of the other CloudFlare features that we currently have enabled, to see if it could be one of them. One of the features we have been using is an extra caching system for the non-static content of the site called Railgun, which operates between the site proper and CloudFlare, so could be a possible culprit; while all the forum pages are dynamic, Railgun probably doesn't speed things up all that much so it shouldn't be any big loss, and if it is the cause of the issues then good riddance

If you know people who have been having trouble then please let me know if it makes any difference!

[BlueLight]

It seens to be happening to our members all around the world but not at the same time.
I'm seeing different regiens get affected at different times.

[arinatos]

I had been having severe issues connecting, with the same error as above, but since your change it has been smooth again.

I was only able to browse the site easily while there was a ?cache=1 at the end of urls, if that helps at all.

[Bad Idea]

Wow! I just clicked through a bunch of topics in General, and not once did I get 502'd! Looks like Railgun may indeed have been the culprit!

Seriously, it's like night and day. Instead of waiting 120 seconds for it to fail, then refreshing several times hoping for a different result, I can just, you know, use it like a regular forum.

Thanks very much! I'll let you know if it comes back.

[Soru]

I just managed to get back on today. Seems it does only affect certain areas at a time.

[Bad Idea]

Well, two days later, and I haven't had a single 502. Tentatively declaring this fixed forever!

[Zeus Kabob]

Well, two days later, and I haven't had a single 502. Tentatively declaring this fixed forever!

Don't jinx it! XD

It seems the issue was a CloudFlare service called "Railgun". It's been disabled for now, so we hope the issues are all solved by this change.

[daxtinator396]

I haven't had any since then and I was getting it pretty much all the time. Thanks guys!

[BlueLight]

So I and one other member are having trouble getting on to the site.
This is the first time in about a week that i've had trouble.

[VintageBass]

Last night I had this new and weird error message: a 523 it was. I didn't exactly screen-capped it like the others did for theirs, but yeah that happened to me. Otherwise I haven't gotten any other messages, mostly the 502 message, for about a week now. I guess that means the problem is settling down... but nope! And this 523 only occured late at night, around midnight it started for me and that was the only time I got it. Not sure if it was recent or not.

[Renara]

Last night I had this new and weird error message: a 523 it was. I didn't exactly screen-capped it like the others did for theirs, but yeah that happened to me. Otherwise I haven't gotten any other messages, mostly the 502 message, for about a week now. I guess that means the problem is settling down... but nope! And this 523 only occured late at night, around midnight it started for me and that was the only time I got it. Not sure if it was recent or not.

Weird, a 523 error is to do with DNS updates, it should be a one-off as I haven't done anything that would change DNS settings, but if the server IP has changed or Dreamhost needed to do something then the DNS may have updated as a result.

So I and one other member are having trouble getting on to the site.
This is the first time in about a week that i've had trouble.

Did you get the same error as VintageBass?

[BlueLight]

I don't know the number