Hey everyone!
Over the past few weeks, I've been making a number of behind-the-scenes changes and adjustments to BigCloset, trying to improve performance, reliability, and generally make things run a little more smoothly.
I recently asked a few people over on our Discord server how things have been running for them. The feedback was encouraging! Nobody I spoke with had encountered a 500 or 503 error in days, and everyone reported that things seemed to be working normally.
That's great news, but I'd really like to hear from a much broader group of BigCloset readers and authors.
My monitoring dashboards are looking good, but monitoring systems don't always catch everything. Sometimes the best way to find a problem is simply to ask the people actually using the site.
So, how has BigCloset been behaving for you lately?
- Have you encountered any 500, 503, or other error messages?
- Have pages been loading quickly and reliably?
- Have you experienced any unexpected logouts or issues staying logged in?
- Have you had any trouble posting stories, blogs, or comments?
- Have you noticed anything else that seems broken, unusually slow, or just plain weird?
And if everything has been working perfectly, I'd love to hear that too! Knowing what's working is just as important as knowing what isn't.
If you have encountered a problem, please let me know roughly when it happened, what you were trying to do, and what happened instead. Those details can help me track down issues that aren't showing up in the monitoring systems.
I'm particularly interested in any persistent or intermittent problems that might have slipped under the radar.
Feel free to leave a comment below, even if it's just to say everything has been fine.
Thanks, everyone, for helping keep BigCloset running smoothly. I appreciate your patience while I continue working on things behind the scenes.
-Kirstyn, Erin, Melanie, Cat and the fam :)
P.S. And speaking of things happening behind the scenes... not all of my recent work has been about fixing things! I've also been quietly experimenting with a new visual design for BigCloset. There's even a new theme being tested on our development site, complete with light and dark modes (yes, dark mode!).
It's still very much a work in progress, and I'm not quite ready to pull back the curtain just yet, but I thought I'd give everyone a little hint that some potentially exciting changes are in the works. Stay tuned!
Comments
Lookin’ Good!
The past few days, in particular, everything seems to be going well when I log in. And, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the really small change you made, deleting the extra text on each story’s line in the “My Stories” screen! But, my friend Andrea Lena is having trouble logging in, and we miss her.
— Emma
Should I create a feature request thread?
It was asked for in another thread, and I had the moment to fix it, so I did it. It was actually a weird error where it was set to display "read only, number" or something like that, which we assumed would be what you want on a read-only tally form... But instead we needed to set it to "normal", oops.
But on that note, maybe it's time to use this, or create a new dedicated request thread.
-Piper
The site's good
I think I had 1 503 about 5 or 6 days ago but other than that the site has been running smoothly.
The same here
Loading nicely most of the time and no 503 pages
Did get a very few BC in Attack Mode pages but after the system automatically confirmed I was harmless it let me in with minimal delay
John in Wauwatosa
Site status
As of today the site seems fairly "normal" much as it used to do.
I should point out that we still have the Cloudflare bot trap in operation, I suspect that with that turned off things might become less "normal".
Penny
Dogs have owners; cats have staff. Grand-daughters have minions.
Most Definitely.
Yes, plus specific mitigations on the search path as well, both at Cloudflare, and at varnish. We had to do severe rate limiting. But finding where the problems lie outside the AI scrapers and misc bots makes the whole site more resilient.
not had
any issues this last week
Madeline Anafrid
Madeline Anafrid Bell
I just had trouble
I had trouble getting in about 20 minutes ago. Got the Cloudfare checking browser screen, and then it went to a Backend Failed, I think it was a 503 error. I didn't know I was supposed to be paying attention :)
I'm not sure how often it happens as I don't pay that much attention. Just try again later.
I appreciate your hard work!
*hugs*
The Logs! The Logs!
I will search the logs for your login and see what died in the process. Thanks for the heads-up!
-Kirstyn
The Interesting One...
...is that when I've left the site up and been gone for a while, I get the Cloudflare screen the first time I try to move to a new page after I come back. It's also happened when I'm trying to add a comment or kudos to a story I read earlier that day, or when I've been sitting on a PM before previewing it. (With the kudos it makes me enter it again; the comment or PM is usually still there, though not previewed or posted.
I think I've gotten one or two 503s entering the site in the past week, though not in the last few days. I don't think I've had any hesitations from the site when bringing up a new page -- certainly no more than usual. Site searches are taking appreciable time, but I don't know whether that has changed any. Searching my old PMs by participant (I've been doing that a lot lately) seems immediate.
Best, Eric
We're Under Attack!
That's kind of to be expected when UnderAttack mode is on. It challenges every new "session" with session defined as active usage that times out after a period of inactivity. I just turned off UnderAttack mode for the time being, we will see how long we can last without it for the moment. This doesn't completely turn off our firewall, it just makes it a bit more forgiving.
-Kirstyn
Searching...
Also funny that you mentioned search, as I developed a new search feature recently at the request of a user, and I was going to install it on the live site for testing... But I'll take a look at search performance over the next couple days. Search used to be one of our strong-points.
-Kirstyn
503 error
I get Backend 503 a lot, but that may be the problem with logging in from Australia. If I try to log in from the side bar, it sometimes gives me the 503 and if I refresh it remains at 503. However, I can go to the log in on the top banner and try. If I get a 503, refresh often takes me to the home page and online. Recently, there were problems adding a posting, with 503 coming up after the post. Resubmitting from the pop up ended up with two postings when the home page came up.
Marianne
Sorry for the late reply,
Sorry for the late reply, I swear I replied to this last night. Can you tell me how recently your posting issues were? I'm trying to rule out basically this weekend or was it older. I want to try and track down the issue, and weather it was during the week of the billion 503's or after.
-Piper
No problems the past week
I had a continual 503 errors when posting stories a few weeks ago but nothing in the past week. The site seems more responsive too but that might be my imagination.
Working much better now
I have never really been bothered by slow loading (personality trait) but I can't remember experiencing any recently.
503 errors used to be a pain (you ktnow where). I still get them regularly when I log in but now it's normally only once and I don't have to slug my way in.
I have not posted much recently but I can't remember any problem with that for a while now.
Logouts was only for a brief time and connected with login (logout directly after I had had a confirmation that I was logged in).