French Car Forum

I have been advised that our hosting company will be taking our server off-line to replace the CPU cooler and some SSD drives. The shut-down should start about 10:45 and last about 90 minutes.

I need to perform a database engine upgrade on the server. I will do this one morning this week, probably Tuesday.
I am not sure how long the process will take, but it should not be more than an hour or two.

Due some issues which I have just been made aware of, I will postpone this upgrade for a couple of weeks!

I am trialling some minor changes to the forum layout.

Today's change should only affect the layout of the forum header bar. The buttons have moved back inside the image (where they were until I moved them outside of the image last year).

You may need to clear your browser cache (ctrl-f5 on a PC) to actually see any change.

On some phones,...

The forum was off-line for several hours this evening due to a database corruption on the server.

Despite repeated attempts, I was unable to recover the posts made today and it has been necessary to revert to the backup made early on the morning of 26/05/2019.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this data loss.

It is likely that a...

Our hosting provider is installing some security updates, and will be taking our server off-line for a short period some time on Tuesday.

They are not giving a scheduled time, so it will happen when it happens...

This site should restart itself cleanly after the reboot.

Over the next week or so I will be making some adjustments to the configuration of this server, and installing some application software updates.

There will be some brief disruptions to normal operation, but these should only last a few minutes. I will be carrying out this work between 7am and 4pm UK time.

As there are several different tasks...

The forum was unexpectedly off-line for about 90 minutes today.

The logs show that the server was manually shut-down, but it was not by any of our admins. I am seeking more information from the hosting company.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

For those of you who use Photobucket as an image hosting provider, you may be aware that as of 28th June 2017, Photobucket changed their TOS (Terms of Service).

As a result, they have now locked all hosted images unless you upgrade to a paid account. This means that for users who have previously added image links from Photobucket from basic /...

Not an everyday sight

Did a general search and got over 100 pages in the result, skimmed over titles on first page to the bottom, hit next page, and it just reloaded the first. Can't seem to view any other pages, it just reloads the same first page regardless which page I click. Anyone else have this problem?

One way or another I can usually frame a search query to get what I want but have to admit I'm stuck.

I have started a new thread with the view of occasionally digging up the posts made on a particular date, selecting one, and bringing it forward into the thread......yes complete madness. When you do look back though there has been some...

I'd just like to take this opportunity to wish all my French Car Forum Colleagues and Members a Peaceful and Happy Christmas. :Santa:

If you don't celebrate Christmas, have a great holiday period, and if you're not having a holiday, keep calm and carry on. :-D

Best wishes

Marc

Anyone having issues with image uploads?

Today I've uploaded a couple and they're showing as in the below screenshot - if it works...

Screenshot_20181120-191548.jpg

Is this just a local issue here or is there something odd going on?

I think my PM's stopped working.

I was in the middle of a conversation awaiting a response to my last sent on 1st Nov.

Just now, I'd thought I'd check my Outbox to see if it might not have been read yet but there was nothing showing.
I then checked my Sent Messages and my reply was not there either.

Ok, perhaps I messed up, better re-reply to...

About a week ago, I made and saved a draft post, which I later edited and posted, I started getting the error message The submitted form was invalid. Try submitting again. . Clicking Submit again is always successful but this error pops up with every message I now make.

Whether the cause was due to the draft creation, I don't know but thought I'd...

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...