Bitcoin Forum

Sometimes bitcointalk.org takes too much time to load and conditionally times out. After checking the internet connection and other local issues, I assume it could be a DDoS or other server issue given the previous cases. It will be good to have like a status page like https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/ which shows if the site is working and it could be connection problems on the user end. The current solution is someone opening a thread in Meta to inform others. A status page could be really handy.

I usually just use either https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ or https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/.

You can also try to ping the site, to see if it responds to ping or not; if it responds, you can also see the latency: Start - Run - cmd - Enter; ping www.bitcointalk.org.

These pages are updated manually by who is typically an engineer.

I believe theymos is the only one who handles these types of issues and if he isn’t around to deal with any problems causing downtime, he won’t be around to update any status website. Theymos also has created threads in meta advising of any downtime.

If the forum were to use one of these downtime notification websites, I would suggest statuspage.io, but the forum is really not complex enough to warrant using one IMO.

I'm not sure of the architecture of bitcointalk but I think there might only be one virtual server for the entire site (my laptop has only one connection to an ec2 server that is established and running - one is waiting but it may be closed and hasn't sent a termination request).

Therefore this would be a job for someone like loyceV or Vod potentially. They could probably just check for an error "502" but it's difficult to parse errors for smf and for a lot of servers because no one would state the problem with the server becasue the current task can be exploited (potentially by the DDoSer if they're clever enough). So there could be a script error and the forum will seem down.

Do you have to pay for cloudflare for it to show an archive of the site or does theymos just not want to to do it?

I have my unedited posts (http://loyce.club/archive/posts/?MD) already: if the forum doesn't work and the directory on the top hasn't been updated in the last minute, chances are the problem is not just with your own internet connection.

A status page would be good IMO because currently there aren't any official channels to know if the forum is facing issues other that bitcointalk itself. There is a twitter account but it's very sparsely updated. It wouldn't matter if it's manually updated, so long as it's accessible and functional when other components of the site aren't.

It can also have some functions updated programmatically that would turn red if for example the DNS was unaccesible, or clouldflare was slow etc...