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Yeah I'm guilty of not doing tags. Problem is every project I've done involving tagging and indexing has been a disaster unless there is a very unified effort to have the same tags used in consistent ways... I talked to a couple of old master indexers when we were doing a CDROM encyclopedia project in the early computer days. about who/how this should be done. 1000 articles to index/search. Word search was useless as too many unrelated articles turned up for general first line use. Turned out that in the end the best approach was creating a unique word list from the 1000000 words and paring that down to the relevant words for the content, then generating a list of the articles each word was in and paring that down to the articles that really had something useful in them related to that word. Turned out a very useful index. Everyone thought we were doing some fancy search code!

 

Having a good list is helpful, but like ken said if its not right there while you enter the tags it probably won't get used...

 

Ill start trying to do tags on threads I start. Always a problem on forums though in that info gets buried slowly.

 

Jeff

Edited by cteno4
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I started using tags now too. I think that some google-ish list should pop up when typing the tags.

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I have DSL and traditionally about 50% of my posts failed on the first attempt, so I started typing long posts in Word, pre-loading any photos, and inserting the link where I wanted it in the text.  Even on short messages, I would usually try to copy the text before hitting Post so I wouldn't need to re-key it if it didn't make it.

 

However - for some unknown reason, some 95% + of my posts have made it on the first try over the past three weeks or so.

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I have connection problems for the last two weeks I get a '500 Internal Server Error' message.I don't know if it is a bug (all I know about websites is to 'click here').

 

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, [no address given] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

 

I don't know if this is the website the internet, but I didn't had this problem before. Help please!!!

 

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As it can be usually solved by a reload, i assume the reason is task timeout during page generation. This is usually caused by an overloaded server.

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The server has been overloaded some. Martjin is looking into the issue of upgrading the server and/or the forum software but both are a lot of work which he has not had time for lately. Usually a reload gets the page loaded, but at times it can be like this for a couple of hours unfortunately.

 

Jeff

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"anything you might have done that may have caused the error". Are we falling back here on User Error?

Thanks for the info.I was thinking that it might be my laptop, but i couldn't access the forum from from my phone also, so it must be the server overload thingy.

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Happens all the time.  I get it at least every second day.  As kvp posted, normally a refresh will bring things back into line.  But sometimes it is up to 60 minutes.  Guessing the hosting server for this website is a cheap and nasty one.

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Well it's not a cheap and nasty one,mbut seeing if there is a solution that may work with the forum software better. It's now on its own server with a few other things on it as well, so not on a shared server hosting account. Unfortunately our tech team is really down to jsut one at the current time (Martijn) and he has been swamped with work lately. Most of the time it's just a bit slow with non cashed pages like the new content page (that must be created by the cb every time you click on that button. So if you use the back button you can avoid this as it will show the cashed version in your browser (the threads you have read using the back button just won't be shown as read until you click in the new content button again). Threads load faster as those are cashed on the server. Usually a reload works go get past a failed timeout,mbut at times it can go out for an hour or more. Martjin is not sure if it's something with the forum software, server load/balancing, or server itself, but will keep looking into it.

 

Unfortunately, this is a total volunteer effort and free and no advertising so we can't throw lots at this currently.

 

Cheers

 

Jeff

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Martijn Meerts

The hosting server is actually a very good one, and located very close to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange. However, it is a VPS, so it's sharing hardware with several other VPSs. It might be that 1 of the VPSs on the physical hardware is pulling a lot of traffic or has bugs in it which is causing slowdowns. For reference, the current VPS is something similar to a dual core 3.2Ghz CPU and 2GB RAM (80GB HDD, 500GB traffic per month), which should really be plenty to host our fairly small/low traffic forum.

 

I'm looking at possibly moving the server to a server at Amazon which will give me some more control over things, and which would make it easier to upgrade things if needed. I'll need to discuss it a bit with the admins though.

 

An obvious issue is of course the cost of it all. Right now some of the admin team is picking up most of the cost of both the server and the forum licensing. We have done donation requests in the past to help with the bills, but we haven't done any in quite a while. Personally I don't like asking for donations, so we've been thinking of maybe offering something like a JNSForum custom container as a thank you for donating, but that in itself is rather time consuming (and costly). Another option would be to place advertising on the site, but I'd really rather not go that route.

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Thanks again for the explanation.I wouldn't mind donating. After all I saved money trough this forum, and had other great help for free, so I don't mind giving something back. And if the advertising would be Train related, I think it wouldn't be to bad. But I guess you can't chose what company will be advertising on the forum.

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bikkuri bahn

I wouldn't mind a voluntary donation period, say either at the end of the year or midyear, right around the time of my work bonus :)

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Martijn Meerts

Donations are of course always voluntary.. We're really not looking into locking (certain parts of) the forum down behind a subscription or anything. I'd rather take the financial burden myself than start forcing people to pay.

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Nothing wrong with asking for voluntary donations once a year.  Sure it wont cover the cost, but does take some of the financial burden off yourself.  Member can donation all year round.  But I found in other communities, it works to do a once-a-year reminder.

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I don't know how much are we talking about but if each active member donates 12 usd/euro (1 for each month) that might cover the server costs. Just make sure paypal is ok.

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Everybody here has a platform to ask and receive information, clean from adverts and keep up by voluntary work. So i don't see as problem to provide  help to have the site running and server running.

Te best is probably a paypal account where on voluntary base can be paid in.

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I don't know how much are we talking about but if each active member donates 12 usd/euro (1 for each month) that might cover the server costs. Just make sure paypal is ok.

 

I think it was $5 per person per year among te active members (though it could have been $10), Don was started the drives once Darren left.

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Martijn Meerts

We've talked about another donation run amongst the admins a while ago, and considering people don't seem to mind donating much I guess we'll look into it. I'll have to check with Don to make sure the paypal stuff is still correct and in working order.

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I think it's nice to chip in to help maintain the servers, since this is such a good forum for information. I think paypal will be the favourite mode of payments since it's widely recognised.

 

I recall we used to have donation drives and a cute little 'Donor' badge below our names in the previous forum ~~  :)

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PayPal has a neat little donation page. There's a YouTube channel called "Real Russia" and that's how they finance their videos.

But, if you want to avoid all that. That's understandable.

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