Hi everyone - I’m getting logged out like crazy tonight, with some error messages thrown in. If anyone else is experiencing the problem, I’ve written to Support to look into it. I hope it will be resolved soon.
Carolyn
Same here. Thanks for the heads up. I thought it was my ancient iBook G4.
Me three.
Carolyn, you’re a good lady with a tough job. I commend you.
Me too, happens randomly but I can sign back in easily. Just a little annoying when you want to reply to something and realize you’re logged out.
No error messages but the log outs are happening.
Kind of like working on cars; there’s no end… 
This is by far the worst I’ve ever seen it
It’s as if the website doesn’t know which end is up, so to speak
Hopefully somebody didn’t take that expression the wrong way
I used it to make my point
TSM, thanks. It’s a fun change of pace from my day job.
@db4690, I know it’s irritating. Once in a while, the Vanilla servers get overwhelmed and require a reboot to clear out the incessant logouts. In the meantime, I thank you for your patience.
Yup, me too. No error message though just log in log out depending on where I go.
I’m noticing this also. When it happens I can usually just click on the topic-category link (right hand side of screen, under “topics”) and I’m automatically logged back in.
“Once in a while, the Vanilla servers get overwhelmed and require a reboot to clear out the incessant logouts.”
I love this website, but it’s the most unreliable one of all my regular websites . . . by far
Perhaps it’s time to move away from “the Vanilla servers” and move on to something more reliable, if there is such a thing . . . ?
I’m logged out most times I go back to the main topic page this morning.
I m having some of the problems above, and others too. 503 error message I think. I am also , when I return to a discussion, sometimes going to the new comments properly, sometimes to the last comment amnd sometimes to the first comment on the last page and sometimes to the first comment in the thread
There’s no plan to change the forum platform at this time. But when I received an email from support overnight, they said they’re aware of the disruptions and working on them. Additionally, they’re telling me they’re going to do some infrastructure upgrades to prevent some of this in the future. In any case, we’ll stay on top of it.
@db4690 there is such a thing! It’s called phpBB, and it’s 100% free. But the catch is that you have to host it yourself (or pay someone to host it for you) which means the Car Talk IT people would either need to build a server capable of handling the traffic here or rent off-site server space like they’re doing now. The other catch is that you have to do all the under-the-hood work yourself rather than having a company do it for you - not that that’s hard, but they’d probably have to devote someone at least half-time to keeping things running smoothly.
Still, unless Vanilla itself is free and they’re only paying for the server usage, it would probably be economically more viable to run phpBB, and it would certainly be a better forum system.
I do like the way comments are presented in this forum. others are hard to keep track of. a never ending, incoherent series of replies and replies to replies is hard to keep track of. this is more like a conversation. I like being able o start at the beginning of a thread and read to the end before I comment. if you want to reply directly to some one it s easy enough to notify them. I do wish the notification would disappear when I go to the thread tho
The Car Talk website is reasonably reliable. It’s not as reliable as Google of course, which has a huge support staffed 24 hours a day looking after things, but for a specialty site I mean. For the most part it works great. Car Talk is rarely completely down. When on those few occasions it isn’t working correctly, there is usually a work-a-round available, and it presents at most a minor annoyance.
Still, like anything, it isn’t perfect. If I were asked to list complaints about the Car Talk website in order of annoyance, first on the list would be the over-sized advertisement graphics which don’t stay within bounds and cover the text areas I’m trying to read. I notice this most on the page which lists the user’s recent “comments”.
No problem here, firefox 4 me!
As for the outbreak of logouts in question, I got an email earlier that things should be resolved. I haven’t heard much from any of you today about that issue in particular. Phew!
@cdaquila what is your browser of choice?
Yep, all fine again. Thanks.