Trouble Accessing Forum

I tried to view the forum earlier today at about 12:15 pm PST and received a "Page not found" error.  I kept trying to access it again and finally did manage to get through (around 1:00 pm PST) when I encountered some really weird things.  First of all, the layout of the first page was completely different: instead of seeing the various boards displayed (Calendar, Member's Mausoleum, etc.) I only saw the names of the boards in outline format (like on the old Vantagenet board) and the name of the most recent topic in each board on the far right of the screen.  Also, the size of the print on the screen was huge.  I thought the board had undergone some kind of radical makeover!

As I tried to read various posts, they took a really long time to load.  When I tried to view the topic for "That Darn Cat on DVD" on the Calendar/Announcements board, the whole screen except for the avatars and the titles of the posts was black.  I had to run my cursor down the board to highlight the text in order to read it, and as I did that, I received a message that I was trying to enter the board illegally!  I logged in again, and this time everything looked and behaved normally.  When I logged onto the board again tonight, everything was again normal.  Now I know we've been warned not to be surprised by anything that happens, but I am curious to know whether anybody else has experienced this or what may have caused what I saw.  Was there any type of  upgrading going on?

ProfStokes 

hey prof, i didn't log on until about eight o'clock tonight and everything was fine.but on several occasions i have gotten the "page not found" error.a few times it even says that the site "may have moved or no longer exists"(yikes!).while my easily jangled composure usually tempts me to e-mail one of the mods to report the problem i have found that the situation is temporary and brief.the longest i ever got this message was a couple of hours(if that) before everthing was normal.but the other problems you report are strange indeed.

Was there any type of  upgrading going on?

I didn't experience anything as bad as you did, but the forum was VERY slow for me from around 3:45pm/ET until just about 4:20. During that same time I also couldn't get through to our host's site. So, something was definitely going on with the forum's host, but thankfully whatever it was lasted for only about 30 minutes. It's certainly a pain when something like this happens, but we have to expect it to happen from time to time. 

As for the "Page not found" error, I've never experienced that. But once our host provides today's server errors I'll check to see if anything for the forum comes up...

I haven't had a chance to access the forum for a couple of days, so was very disappointed tonight when I tried shortly after 9 p.m. (Central Time) and got the "This page cannot be located" (or whatever) message from IE.  But seems to be fine now.

I'm going to let everyone in on a little secret    - not every error that your browser reports actually means exactly what it says. OK, so it's no surprise that your software doesn't always tell you exactly what it should. But in certain cases IE loves to bring up the page cannot be located error, but that isn't quite what's happening - partricularly on a Web site that uses PHP to create its content.

Anyone who has created their own Web site is familiar with uploading an HTML file to their host's server to display text and images and possibly run some sort of Jave script. In that case there's an actual file on the server that never changes unless you modify/reupload it. But when a Web site uses PHP scripts to create its content, the pages that appear in your browser don't actually exist on the server - each time you access them, PHP creates a brand new and completely unique copy in your browser (that's why you'll notice that at the bottom of every page on the forum it says "Page created in (whatever) seconds with (however many) queries"). If for some reason there's a problem with the connection from your computer and the server and back again, you can get the page cannot be located error - but what that actually means is that the page couldn't be created before your browser gave up trying. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a problem with the forum itself or that the forum doesn't exist. The problem could be as simple as a bottleneck somewhere along the path between your computer and our host's server.

The ONLY time that you can actually trust that something you've tried to access on the forum couldn't be located on the server is when your browser dispalys a page entitled "404 Not Found" that says:

Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server.

Apache Server at dsboards.com

because that's our host's server actually reporting back to you that what you tried to access at dsboards doesn't exist.