Pretty much none of the stuff on bf is copyrighted, so some ai scraper is going to take all of our collective writings and re-package it as "information". The joke is on them.

bumped it back to tech, thanks for everyone's patience.

Hey, my posts are quite valuable and I want some royalty action.

The site is becoming almost unusable. I'd estimate I get "Database Error" at least half the times I open the page or reload. I spent time writing a post on a ride yesterday, and when I went to upload a pic, "Database Error". And it didn't go away with waiting 10 seconds.

Agree.

It's not you, it's them. My hope is they can fix it soon. Or they will risk losing even more users, most of whom have already voted with their feet.

Can we go to logged-in users only? Obviously you'd lose some looky-loos, but everyone who's bothered to register will probably approve the change, since it should improve uptime/reliability.
Just a suggestion. I know this isn't a democracy, and I support whatever the admins decide on.

Still unresolved.

Just resolved here at 8:25 PM West Coast.

+1, gave you a thumbs up. Plus, registration on this site is easy and not draconian. The site might also need to include a proviso that any org that registers in order for their bots to crawl for indexing or to scrape data, is a violation of terms of use (if not already), unless there is a way to enforce "politeness" in the above.

So far so good today for me. But the day is young.

Was back again

I'm sitting around wasting time while my wife finds a car she wants to buy, and I have gotten database errors a couple of times already today, Friday 24.

Bike shopping >> car shopping

She found a car she wants and we are going to go get it, so no more database errors for me today. But I might get lost on the way home and stop at the woodworking store for directions.

For the past few days, I've been seeing a lot of "Database error" failure messages when connecting to BF or navigating the fora. Sometimes they resolve quickly; other times not so quickly. Anybody else seeing this? If so, what's up?

We ran a forum on similar software and it was usually caused by running out of resources on the server and we ended up with a big hardware upgrade

but it can have many causes.

There's already a thread doing around that started when the Errors first showed up. THe Mods are quite aware. Apparently it is due to info-sucking web crawlers.

i had to weed an info "crawler" out of my comfuser two days ago... the sites kept freezing while it tracked every little keystroke, and hijacked info by the bucketloads...
BF was "data error" for most of a day recently, Monday or Tuesday?... i thought maybe their server was in Castaic, Ca.

my first sign in attempt today went "data Error" on me... the second try a while later went through ok.

Please familiarize yourself with all the subforums here. There is already a long thread about this in suggestions & user assistance:

Merged duplicate threads.

Just experienced my first db error today, which lasted 10 minutes. I hear everyone, and I'm consistently speaking with tech about this, but no big changes will be made today since it is Friday. They have tried 2 things, but they havent slowed down the web crawlers, so they are figuring out what to do next. Thanks for everyone's patience.

I am guessing it may be digital whack-a-mole. Thanks for the update.

I just encountered for a few minutes on several diff page refreshses and menu selection clicks:
platform latest MacOS and new MacAir using Chrome Version 131.0.6778.205 (Official Build) (arm64)
Suspect bug with javascript for control panel of bulletin board

So it's "confuser" with an "s". My nephew who grew up in a family immersed in computers called them "confuters" with a "t" his first 8 years or so.

I think the system may be working better. Was up, I went to post, was down, but back up in about 5 minutes or less, HUGE improvement over 5 hours. Before coming back up so fast, I was planning to suggest the following, but this may have already been done:

During the Apollo 11 landing descent from lunar orbit to the surface, the crew had made an error in leaving one of the antennas still receiving, and the landing guidance computer memory filled up, and they'd get this alarm, *** but then the computer rebooted or reset state and continued ***. Several times this happened and in each case, no need to abort landing. This was due to *** fault-tolerant programming ***, a real innovation. The woman (IIRC) who wrote that code for the landing guidance computer was highlighted in a video I saw years ago.

Judging from this most recent DB error and time to correct, the techs may have implemented this solution; Sense overload or too much comm from one source, terminate process, reboot. If so, or other solution, kudos.

Note: During the Blue Screen Of Death era, that was a notable example of NOT having fault-tolerant programming.