Did BF just change all of the Web URLs for the Forums?
 

Looks like numbers were added back to the forums. Eg. Roadcycling has the -41 added to it again?
This broke a number of bookmarks, and the top of page links to go back to the forum main thread listing page don't work, eg.
h t tp s://ww w.bikeforums.net/forumdisplay.php?f=41 doesn't always redirect correctly, getting page not found errors.

I noticed that... refreshing pages... and everything exploded.

I assume it will settle down eventually once the new links are memorized, but it was an odd mid-day change.

I was just having some issues when trying to take the link at the top of the page to get out of a thread. I was just getting a blank white page. However I cleared my browser cache and everything is well again.

When strange things start happening, then somewhat less than half the time, clearing the browser cache fixes it.

It is more than clearing a browser cache.
Refresh any thread that was open at the time of the change and one gets "Page Not Found". Likewise, the links at the top of those pages... again "Page Not Found".

I use the address bar a lot. So if I type "Mec" into the address bar, it takes me to "https://www.bikeforums.net/bicycle-mechanics/"... again "Page Not Found".

So far, any newly opened page seems to be fine, but it will just take a while to clear out all of the now dead links and shortcuts.

The permalinks for the URLs were changed, breaking every reference.

Every forum now has its associated number tied to it - e.g., https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-vintage/... has now become https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-vintage-181/...

This is going to wreak havoc with existing links w/o some sort of redirects to fix it, plus it's going to hurt Google SEO beyond belief.

-Kurt

Oof.. right. E-Mail references generally don't use the subforum link, so they should be OK.

But, I've frequently referred back to Bike Forum threads. All of those references are now broken.

And, it will take Google a month or so to figure it out.

Better yet, one of the admins can go into the permalinks settings and simply flip it back. I wouldn't be surprised if this was done entirely in error.

-Kurt

This has to have been done in error. The breadcrumb link back to C&V links to https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-vintage/, which then redirects to the old https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-vintage/ link and "Page Not Found."

Admins, please take note (and do let us know if you're aware of the edit, so we can stop panicking ;) )

-Kurt

Nature is healing. The Road Cycling forum is "41" again. :love:

Not for me.

Case in point, this is the current BF URL for the Wahoo/Garmin discussion vs. Google's archived URL:

bikeforums.net/road-cycling-41/wahoo-bolt-garmin-530-a-1233896/
bikeforums.net/road-cycling/1202615-wahoo-roam-garmin-edge-530-830-a.html

Both the forum permalink and the sequence of the URLs have changed.

-Kurt

Holiday weekend.. but you can hope

None of my shortcuts to any BF threads work anymore, since Friday afternoon. When I google, for example: show us your vintage touring bikes, the results don't work either. Neither does a bike forums search. Is there a solution to this?

Ok folks, rest assured you're not the only victims in this situation, this is affecting many many users. If you haven't read the opening post of this thread please do so, it explains the reason for the problem.

The solution to the problem is tenuous: *I* found that simply typing in the name "bikeforums.net" successfully got me in . . . but only temporarily and only sometimes. Using any of my former links or bookmarks will not work. Others have reported the same.

We do NOT believe this is the result of an intentional change by the tech team because not only were we, the Admins, not notified in advance, but such a change before a holiday weekend would be totally irresponsible, yet that is not characteristic of them. So we can rule that out.

We've reached out to our tech contact but have yet to get a response. Seeing as it's a holiday weekend we're hoping for the best.

All I can suggest is to keep trying. As I've mentioned, my experiences have been mixed but temporary at best. Good luck! If someone finds a long-term, stable solution we'll spread the word.



PS: By the way, Admins and Mods are not Techs so we don't fool around with Tech things on this website. :)

Billy, thanks for chiming in - it's reassuring to hear from the mods.

That said, as someone who has fooled around a bit with CPanel and PHP-based servers, I'd say that it's a fairly good guess that the downtime (I've been getting the Cloudflare CDN server errors too, at times) is not the same as the change in forum permalinks. Most likely, the downtime might be the tech team trying to find out why the permalinks got changed in the first place.

They may not have replied yet to your ticket, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're tinkering with it.

-Kurt

I got some gateway errors this morning which likely were unrelated...

Either that or a company like Google discovered 1,000,000 links that they had never followed, and then slammed the website with a 100% full bandwidth pounding.

Not everybody uses the "Nice" function.

Does it seem at all odd that 24 hrs later, BF is still trying to get in touch with their tech contact?

No. Do you work weekends and holidays ?

Well, if'n you were to ask me, yeah, I'm on call weekends and holidays, as the business I'm in is 24x7 (similar to the internet). But it would depend on the level of service agreement BF has.

I've never seen our corporate IT admins work on the weekends or holidays.

It did start at about 4pm EDT on Friday. Not sure geographically where the tech folks are though.

Have patience. This tool shall pass.

I've been waiting over a month for a Wordpress plugin developer (free + paid plugin) to fix a lax part of their code that makes said plugin incompatible with 3rd party lightboxes. A PITA, but I can't do diddly about it.

-Kurt

Anyone give any thought to a possible hack into the underlying software, or some bad actors messing with the entire site to cause confusion and chaos, just because they can, or because of other malicious intent? Are redirects possibly grabbing data or passwords?

not a bad time to attack internet sites when IT is gone for holiday weekends.

imagine if this was your energy, water, gas, internet, etc. sites.

just a thought.

Depends on what business you're in. Semiconductor manufacturing operations are 24x7, IT support switches from US to India depending on time. I can get IT support on Christmas Day. I'm in engineering, and have been in jobs where I'm on call even on weekends. I manage a group of technicians that support our work 12x7, and sometimes get calls on the weekends.

Of course, this kind of support costs money. I'm pretty dang sure it would make sense for BF to have that kind of support level.

Google cached pages for bike forums still work. I've been researching older threads to resolve some bike tech issues at home, and Google cached pages of older threads still work fine.

• Do a Google search, using "site:bikeforums.net" to narrow it down if you prefer.
• Look for the three vertically oriented dots next to the URL.
• Left click on the three vertical dots. A box will pop open with an option to open the cached page.

That'll work until the problem is sorted out.

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...543782f91c.png

Possibly, but it sounds more like an update that hit just before everyone went off on vacation. As far as I can tell, the subforum codes were always there, just hidden.

All the data seems to still be here. And the BikeForums site seems to be functioning reasonably well. Just any external links through either browser shortcuts, browser history, or Google searches are all broken.

Most of the external shortcuts will eventually recover. However, some users also do internal links between topics or subforums. So all those internal links will now be broken. One could design a web crawler to fix any internal links. However, if anybody ever posted BikeForum links to other websites, those will also be broken, and much harder to recover.

Unfortunately, the longer this isn't resolved, the more the new links will be used, and one could eventually get new unfunctional links if one changes back to the old system... but that will only be a few days vs decades of data.