Board display wonky

[shapeshifter]

Board display is wonky on Macbook in Chrome and iPhone in Safari, like:

[GHScorpiosRule]

The site is all wonky so I don’t know if this will show up properly.

[Spartan Girl]

Hey so the forums look screwed up since this morning.  Is this a problem on your end?

[Ceindreadh]

The forum is looking completly different. 

Every page I click into now has a big 'C' at the beginning. 

Emojis are larger than text.  Every post has the posters avatar filling the whole screen which I have to scroll past to get to see what they actually say.

It's happening on both Firefox and Chrome on a laptop, and Safari on a tablet 

It's basically going to be impossible to actually read this site anymore. 

 

 

 

[Salacious Kitty]

It's messed up. 

[CM-BlueButterfly]

Everything is fine on my end at the moment. Are the problems persisting? 

[Salacious Kitty]

Yes. Still wonky. 

Android 15/Chrome 

[GHScorpiosRule]

It is still messed up on my end. It’s difficult to find how to respond!

[SoMuchTV]

33 minutes ago, CM-BlueButterfly said:

Everything is fine on my end at the moment. Are the problems persisting? 

Same issues for me, all day, on multiple devices and browsers. Let me see if I can paste in a sample...

Wow!  It worked! Now if I can find the "post" button...

[Raja]

Traveling and using a Brave broswer. No it's not fixed. The reply box is the only thing working 

[CM-BlueButterfly]

How about now? 

[Salacious Kitty]

It's back to normal! Thanks!

[GHScorpiosRule]

6 minutes ago, CM-BlueButterfly said:

How about now? 

HALLELUJAH!!!!!!

[tearknee]

I right clicked during these issues and the Yahoo ads were giving a 400 error.

[Ceindreadh]

It's working now for me.  Thank you to the tech people and whatever large hammer they used!

[shapeshifter]

All better! 

Thank you!
Oops. Spoke too soon.
Now getting this when I got to my stream at https://forums.primetimer.com/discover/760/ : 

 

And then when I click "Advanced"…:

But, at least when I then click on "Proceed to forums.primetimer.com (unsafe)," it works.

 

Edited Yest. at 02:47 AM by shapeshifter
not working correctly

[GHScorpiosRule]

Any explanation as to what caused the nearly whole day kablooie? @AllAstronauts, idea?

[Gemma Violet]

Back to normal for me, too--yay!  I was using the Edge browser on my laptop.

[Salacious Kitty]

I got this warning the other day, then again just now. It's a full page warning that PT isn't a secure(private website. 

Anyone else? 

Android 15, Chrome 

Edited Yest. at 12:44 AM by Salacious Kitty

[Salacious Kitty]

It's happening on my tablet as well. Silk browser 

It says: 

You cannot use forums.primetimer.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later. 

Edited Yest. at 02:40 AM by Salacious Kitty

[peeayebee]

It looks fine to me now, but it was wonky earlier in the day. However now when I try to go to the forums, I get "This connection is not private." I went ahead and came here anyway, assuming that that message is related to the previous wonkiness. Still, I'm a little nervous.

[SoMuchTV]

Taking a risk & bypassing the ominous warnings to come here and post this. On at least 3 different browsers, I’m getting warnings when trying to access the site. “Invalid certificate”, “site may be unsafe”, that kind of thing. This is about 10:30pm et Saturday. I was on the site maybe 4 hours ago and it was back from the earlier formatting issues. Are you okay?

[AstridM]

I have vision problems and am no longer able to change the font size on this site. iPhone/safari. 

[CM-BlueButterfly]

First of all, I'm sorry for the issues.

A certificate/license was up for renewal this past week. It was renewed but, apparently, it wasn't imported to the server (per AllAstronauts).

We're working on it and hope to have it resolved as soon as possible.

[AllAstronauts]

Certificate is valid again, if you accepted the not-secure stuff to browse it will take a bit before your browser validates (whatever) the new cert but if you open the site in another browser or an incognito mode it will be secure. You can check the cert status by clicking that little box next to the start of the site url up top. It will say secure now and if you click that to view the details you'll see a LetsEncrypt cert that will "expire" in March and subsequently be automatically renewed at that date and we'll never speak of this again.

[CM-BlueButterfly]

I cleared the forum's caches, so it should be back to normal. However, for a reason that has not yet been discovered, the site sometimes has the hiccups when rebuilding. If you encounter any further issues, that's likely why. 
It'll possibly get resolved over time or, if not, I'll have to clear the forum's caches again. 

Again, I'm sorry about it. 

[Gemma Violet]

12 minutes ago, CM-BlueButterfly said:

the site sometimes has the hiccups when rebuilding.

The wonkiness is back for me, but it could be a hiccup like you said. 

(It's a different kind of wonkiness--I can access more this time and at least send messages.) 

I'll check back tomorrow.  Thanks for all your help.

[Salacious Kitty]

Just so you know, it's wonky again, as it was earlier. I will clear my cache to see if that changes anything. Thanks again. 

[Salacious Kitty]

I can't seem to edit my previous comment to add, but I wanted to report that clearing both Chrome and PT caches did nothing to alleviate the problem(s).

[CM-BlueButterfly]

I had an issue myself this time around. Cleared the forum caches, now it's back to normal. 

Clearing forum caches is all I can do on my end. The last time we had issues, it took three or four tries until all issues had been resolved. 

[shapeshifter]

FWIW:
I tried clearing cache in more than one browser/device to no avail. 
It is currently Sunday, Dec. 22 5:53am EST

The big, gray, sad emoji I am seeing kind of says it all, but:
🤞🍀⏳

[CM-BlueButterfly]

I tried again.

Does anything change for you @shapeshifter (meaning, do the issues stay the same or does one get resolved and a new one pops up)?

[shapeshifter]

1 hour ago, CM-BlueButterfly said:

I tried again.

Does anything change for you @shapeshifter (meaning, do the issues stay the same or does one get resolved and a new one pops up)?

It's all better again. 
For now?🤞 🤷🏻‍♀️
ETA: 1 hour later and still okay. 🤞

Edited Yest. at 12:52 PM by shapeshifter

[Haleth]

Thank you!  I was wondering what that warning was about.

[peeayebee]

Seems ok to me. I just came directly here with no issues. I assume the right of the site is fine.

Good to hear that it was the certificate issue.

[GHScorpiosRule]

13 hours ago, Salacious Kitty said:

I got this warning the other day, then again just now. It's a full page warning that PT isn't a secure(private website. 

Anyone else? 

Android 15, Chrome 

Me too!

[AnimeMania]

When you use the "Mark Read" button for a thread, the buttons work, but there is no explanation text about which button is which and what they do.

[AstridM]

 

It's happening on my tablet as well. Silk browser 

It says: 

You cannot use forums.primetimer.com right now because the website uses HSTS. Network errors and attacks are usually temporary, so this page will probably work later. 

Same for me and now I am unable to adjust the font size. It’s stuck on “regular” and when I try to change it to “embiggened” nothing happens. 

[DanaK]

3 hours ago, peeayebee said:

Seems ok to me. I just came directly here with no issues. I assume the right of the site is fine.

Good to hear that it was the certificate issue.

Once I saw some warning about a certificate expiration, I knew that was likely the reason

[AllAstronauts]

If y'all need an after-action for this stuff: <I'm, hand-waiving away a lot here, just go with it>

There was HTTP and everyone said this web stuff is fun.

Then someone came along and said "you realize all our comms over the wire are more or less in plain text that anyone can listen in on" so they added an S to the end and came up with HTTPS. When you connect to secure sites your comms are encrypted both ways and no one can snoop <for values of 99.999% excluding NSA and other three-letter and/or international agencies>. They could record all the traffic between you and here, but not much they can do about it.

It took ages for people to get religion and for use to ramp up but then someone said "great, the comms are encrypted, but how the hell do I know you and this site are who you say you are. You could be lying?" so we got security certificates.

We can create these certificates ourselves directly on the server but these are the equivalent of you making your own drivers license as an 18 year old to try to get into a bar. 

So instead, you contract out with other organizations that "verify" you are you and that you control the actual server and control the actual domain and the domain name is kosher and etc. etc. Then you the site owner receive two bits of cryptology which you add to your site's web server so when you, yes you the user, connect to a website that purports to be secure, your browser checks that these bits of cryptology check out and match x, y, z and so on, so forth. All good, connect away. You can trust all this.

Certificates do expire. Sites move servers, things change, etc., so its built into the system to have these time-limited. When a cert expires, you get you a new one, upload the bits, things carry on as normal. 

Note the site and your comms between you and here REMAIN SECURE even when the certificate is self-signed or expired. Always secure. But can you "trust" that nothing bad has happened?  So... When the browser detects that a certificate has expired or is self-signed it now tells you something is up! And for about the last five years or so they really try to stop you from visiting the site at all to "protect you" from yourself.

So, what happened here?

The certificate expired a few days ago.

The certificate was renewed at the external org that does this stuff. Note this is a paid-for certificate and needs to be manually applied to the server.

Nobody told me this was going on.

Your browsers cache tons of stuff, so as your browsers collectively started to detect the expired certificate, and the underlying services (image hosting, etc.) did the same, stuff started to "break". 

And then at 1230am my time I got pinged :)

Short story short, the site owner got texted and I poked around the server to see where the certs were. No txt back but I noticed a free solution was set up but was never configured or used, and just used that to generate the new certificates, then went to bed :)

The free solution, for those that need closure, is that about 10 years ago some people realized that paying for another org to verify you are who you are and so on was just an un-needed tax on the entire web. All that is needed for kosher certificates is for the person controlling the domain (site name) records and the actual server itself to match up <hand-waiving here again>. So something called LetsEncrypt was born, a free service, that automatically renews everything, hands-off excellence. Verifies domain and server and so on are all correctly, truthfully linked together and issues the certificates directly on the server.

As for the janky site-width and font-size stuff chalk that up to a bad site-cache clear internally sometime over the last 24 hours or more and some javascript was skipped and not cached correctly.

These probs go away with the new tech stack in version 5x of this software which the dev site for the new version of this site goes live... uhhh... whenever the site owner makes a tiny change in an account file so the dev site can go live.

You should be nice to @CM-BlueButterfly, some users will get to play early for test purposes.

Everything is working, verified, width-font buttons too. All down to caching and time on your end now.

[GHScorpiosRule]

2 minutes ago, AllAstronauts said:

So, what happened here?

The certificate expired a few days ago.

 

2 minutes ago, AllAstronauts said:

Everything is working, verified, width-font buttons too. All down to caching and time on your end now.

Thanks! Stupid me should have read your earlier comment about the certificate expiring before posting “me too!”

 

[Gemma Violet]

All is working fine now.  Thanks!

[GHScorpiosRule]

This just happened in the last 15 minutes. Everything is smooshed and left justified.

 

[PRgal]

It's been wonky for the past few days, ranging from weird display to security issues (on Chrome, anyway) and now, two avatars.  I have a Macbook. 

[SoMuchTV]

Starting in just the last couple hours (I think) the  formatting on my iPhone (SE 2020, iOS is up to date) has become “wonky”. Turning it sideways just makes it wonky in a different way. Basically the headings are skinny and span many rows, and I have to scroll horizontally to get to the actual posts. Help?!
 

UPDATING TO ADD - also wonky on a desktop (Win11, Firefox) but it's not as extreme.  Still things are crammed into much narrower-than-usual columns.

Edited 21 hours ago by SoMuchTV

[Gemma Violet]

Lol, I spoke too soon.  The display now looks like this, with two user name icons instead of one.  But that's a minor problem.

 

[shapeshifter]

Oh dear.
Now we have double account icons.
Thought you'd want to get pinged about it:

Edited 20 hours ago by shapeshifter

[Salacious Kitty]

People are still complaining of site issues. Should they clear their caches? 

[CM-BlueButterfly]

Cleared forum caches again. 

39 minutes ago, Salacious Kitty said:

People are still complaining of site issues. Should they clear their caches? 

It definitely wouldn't hurt. Thanks!

[paulvdb]

I was just about to complain about the double username icons when the site went down for a minute. That seems to have fixed the problem. Everything looks good now.