French Car Forum

This forum was down for about 5 hours this morning (1/10/2018).

The exact cause of the failure is not clear yet, but while attempting to resolve a server performance issue, it was found that the forum database was corrupted and has been subsequently restored from backup. This process took rather longer than normal.

Fortunately the failure...

The forum has been intermittently a bit slow for the part couple of days, but tonight it is at times unusable.

As far as I can tell at present, this is due to an abnormally high number of hits on the forum (maybe 200x our usual load).

I am monitoring the situation, and will update this when more is known.

Having just posted that, the server...

I have updated the Post Like extension on this forum. There are a few background changes, but you will notice that the Like button has moved up to the row of buttons at the top of each post.

Let me know if this causes any problems.

You can do me a favour, and click the Like button for this post, just to test what it looks like when the number...

The FCF Forum will be off-line for about 2 hours on Tuesday morning for a software upgrade and database maintenance.

I don't have firm start or finish times, but it should begin some time between 5am and 7am UK time.

I have adjusted the server software to improve the efficiency of processing image links. There is a chance (I hope small) that some links may not be handled correcctly.

If you see any browser warnings for insecure content, or if any images seem to have suddenly disappeared, please let me know here.

After some consideration and some external queries, the Team have decided to add a DS Automobiles technical sub-forum to the site.

DS Automobiles Sub-Forum

Although many of the engines and systems are identical to the Citroen and Peugeot marques, we felt it was about time there was a dedicated section.

The eagle-eyed among you may notice a few minor changes to the FCF forum. I have been making a few changes, partly addressing some issues that had previously had short-term patches applied, and partly in preparation for a forum software upgrade that I expect to happen in the next month or two.

The changes are:

The Google site-search facility...

I have had a couple of reports recently of emails from the forum going into spam or junk folders. We have gone to some trouble to ensure that our email server has a good reputation, and implements currently recommended security measures, but some email providers have strange algorithms for determining what is spam.

It probably only affects one or...

I have enabled a software extension on this forum that allow easier use of mathematical and other symbols in posts.

You will see a group of tabs above the block of smilies in the editor window.

These select sets of symbols, which are inserted when the corresponding button in the table is clicked.

The feature is experimental, and I may...

We seem to be having some performance issues today, I am currently not sure of the cause.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

I have applied an update (slightly experimental) to this site which requires that you refresh your browser cache. On a PC this can be accomplished by pressing ctrl-f5.
On other devices, you may need to manually delete cached data for this site. You do not need to clear cookies.

The changes themselves are fairly minor, with the intention of...

I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that some intermittent speed issues that we have seen for the past few weeks seem to have been solved by a reconfiguration by our hosting provider (subject to some more testing).

The bad news is that an unrelated software change made a couple of weeks ago has had the side effect of...

You will have seen that we have added a GDPR acceptance to the forum, as the GDPR rules become enforceable tomorrow.

In practice there has been no change in our actual policies for data retention, which have always been to keep data only for the originally submitted purpose.

You should only ever see the acceptance box once, unless we...

On Friday morning this site will be off-line for a period of approximately 2 hours for the purpose of moving (again) to a new server. The work will commence after 8:30 am UK time and be completed as quickly as possible.

About 8 months ago we moved to the current hosting company due to the previous (reliable) hosting company not having a suitable...

Recently, and particularly over the last 2 days, this forum has been performing poorly, and has gone off-line a couple of times.

This has been due to an issue at our hosting provider (possibly connected with a DOS attack on another site that they host).

I was in the process of moving to another server anyway, so I have completed that process...

Please note the new ' Diagnostics ' sub forum that has been added to the main page.

Diags-3.png

Link to New Diagnostic Forum

As some of you will be aware, we had merged all the Lexia & Diagbox related threads. This was kept in the Citroen technical forum. However because this topic has grown significantly over the years as the software and...

On Monday morning, shortly after midnight, I will take the forum off-line for a few hours to perform a software update and some minor database maintenance.

It should be back on-line in time for Jim's morning posts :-D

How?
I created one draft and went back to edit it and saved it again.
This created two seperate drafts, the second one of which I have now finalised and posted (which then automatically deletes that draft) but the original one remains and I can see no obvious way to delete it.

There has been an addition to the AUP. Section (A) has a new point (8) added, extract below:

Personal email addresses and other contact details such as private / mobile phone numbers and addresses must not be posted in the public forums. The Private Messaging or Email contact system may be used as an alternative to communicate this type of...

Hi Jim, thought I'd reply here as the PM system is being a bit slow for me anyway. Just to say no problem & no more stickers needed as yet thanks. If I do suddenly find myself unbelievably lucky to be in possession of Sticky's Volcane any time in the future I'll order a set for that (or any other Cit/pug we come to own for that matter, but that's...

I have been informed that our hosting company will be patching and rebooting our server between 9 and 10 pm GMT today.

This is of course as mitigation for the Meltdown CPU bug.

Note that there will potentially be some loss of performance after the patching, but I don't expect the difference to be noticeable for users.

It has been noted by some users that this forum did not allow the creation of tables in posts. Unfortunately, the phpBB software does not have a wysiwyg editor which would make tables easy to add, but it is now possible (if you have a little patience) to create a table using BBCode.

Here is an example of a small table,

col a col b col c col...

We apologise for the unscheduled downtime.

The issue was (from our perspective) caused by a lock-up in the hypervisor system which manages this server. This piece of software is run by the hosting company and is outside of our control.

Unfortunately the lock-up occurred while a database write operation was being processed on our server and after...

I find that my blog post thread now cannot be edited

I wish to update it with improved images but find this is now not possible. This will result in images having to be place out of context which seems a little retrograde to me.

What is the reason for this limitation ?

Is the donor trophy time-limited? :-D

I've noticed quite a few posts have got missing photos these days. At first I thought it was due to a very enthusiastic and to-the-letter application of the 'photo uploading rules', but even ones I've uploaded attributed to 'Own Work' have gone. Other member's posts are also affected. Clicking on the (dead) photo link only goes to a page with :...

Has the ability to edit the Topic Title by amending the First Post Header of a thread you have started recently disappeared?

27th October 2017 I amended the P.E. thread title to introduce a new theme as I often do, but now the edit icon isn't available.

Happy to amend my activity, and start new threads if required, but it is all the same...

Following our recent technical issues, the forum is moving to a new VPS server. The software has been installed and (subject to a little more testing) is ready to go.

To move the site it needs to be taken off-line for a period of 1 - 2 hours, to allow a backup and restore cycle and to allow the updated DNS record to propagate.

I intend to do...

You may have noticed the forum behaving a little strangely this morning. I have been investigating a couple of small issues and have changed the configuration a couple of times. It should settle down again now.

On Sunday evening this site was moved to a new hardware node to fix some long term and short term performance problems.
On Monday night the server suffered a major disk corruption which (as far as we know) was due to some problem introduced when the server was moved (this was done by the hosting company, not me).

After spending some hours trying...

Our server hardware is due to be reconfigured in an attempt to fix some occasional performance issues.
There will be an hour or two of downtime.
The date is not yet fixed, but it will probably be in the early morning UK.

Update
This has been pushed back by a week so that the service provider can do some more testing before switching us to the...

Got this this morning.....

Your connection is not secure

The owner of frenchcarforum.co.uk has configured their web site improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this web site.

Learn more…

Report errors like this to help Mozilla identify and block malicious sites

frenchcarforum.co.uk uses an...

Please move this if it is in the wrong place.
[-o<
When I am trying to solve an issue I look at various posts, as quite often a little snippet in one conversation makes sense with a snippet in another conversation, with the outcome of working out the solution without having to create yet another new post.

However, the above is fine but I would...

The forum has recently changed slightly so that the longer signatures scroll rather than taking up lots of screen space.
This is a welcome change but I cannot scroll the pages anymore with my touchpad or mouse wheel.
The page will scroll down until I get to the first long signature, it will then scroll to the bottom of the signature and stop...

It disappeared from my pages last night sometime.

Screenshot 2017-09-20 08.28.52.png

The 'French Car Chat' Forum has now been renamed to ' The Off Topic Chat Lounge'.

There have been no changes to the existing topics or posts. It was just felt that there needed to be a place for posts that did not fit into any of the other categories and to encourage posts of a more general nature to be posted here instead of in the technical...

Please note that the FCF Admin Team have amended the FCF Acceptable Usage Policy to clarify the rules concerning Profile Signatures and Commercial Posts as of September 2017.

An extract from the AUP concerning the changes is listed below, however all members are kindly asked to visit the following link and familiarise themselves with the updated...

I get a error with using tapatalk when out and about with my smart phone on this forum?

But it works fine on my laptop no problems just seeing if anybody else gets the same problem using Tapatalk.

I have now completed this update ahead of schedule.

You should notice a couple of user-facing improvements:
The post-love summaries at the top of forum pages are now better formatted and a more readable on small screens (I have also changed the settings a little)
The broken smileys are fixed =D>

I am looking into ways of improving the usability of the forum for members who are using small-screen devices such as phones.

I have made one change already, and that is to add some navigation buttons back into the small screen version of the site header. (you won't see any difference unless you are viewing on a phone or similar).

Let me know if...

A couple of minor issues I thought I better report, one with emoticons that seems to have broken some time in the last few months, and a long standing issue with notifications.

There seem to be a couple of emoticons that aren't working, (text isn't substituted for the correct icon) below I've clicked on all the standard set of icons in order so...

This forum's software will shortly be upgraded to a new version of phpBB (v3.2.0). This will ensure the long term stability and support of the forum. However, as one of the measures to improve the ongoing security of the site, the Tapatalk interface will be permanently disabled.

We realise that this will cause some upset to the few users who...

Since moving to the new server we are having difficulty with a few email service providers not accepting our notification emails.
We are raising support tickets with the administrators, but in some cases it may take some time to get action. If you are a customer of one of the following email providers, you might like to raise your own support...