Hey folks, as many of you saw, the message boards were down for most of yesterday, manifesting as database errors. Even today, while the site was back up, old URLs like cboard.cprogramming.com/c-programming/ weren't working.
tl;dr: Both problems should now be fixed. If you see any issues, please post 'em here.
Longer form: yesterday, due to old backup files being left around, the server ran out of disk space. (Yeah, I know, not exactly the hardest failure mode to predict or prevent.) After clearing out the extra space and rebooting, the forums were still not fixed.
While I don't understand exactly why the forums stopped working, what I do know is that the problem was due to the software (vbseo) that generates nice looking URLs for all pages. Unfortunately, vbseo is no longer maintained, but I was able to determine that when it was enabled, it held open persistent database connections that eventually led to hitting the MySQL connection limit. That's why the database errors were happening.
Unfortunately, since vbseo isn't maintained, I had to disable it. This meant that all the nice URLs got broken - sorry!
Today, I upgraded to software (DragonByte SEO - dbseo) that's meant to be a drop-in replacement for vbseo.
So far, it appears to be working - and the site also appears to be snappier, to boot.
If you run into any issues like old links that don't work, database connection issues, etc, please post them here!
Originally Posted by webmaster
