Site Outage 19th - 22nd September

[Gloria]

Just realised that was misleading my response to Tizer.
I meant to say we could see it.

[Gloria]

I may be wrong Ian but I think Gloria was agreeing with Stanley's comment, that's how I read it anyway.

think we are getting tied in knots a bit here. Wendy is right.

[PanBiker]

I reckon Peter is zoomed in too far and he has shoved the donate button off the side.

[chinatyke]

1. I can see the donate button as described by Ian. It isn't visible if your page view is zoomed as Ian says.
2. I've donated but there is a problem if you use payment by card. When entering my address details, as soon as I entered China (from the drop down list of countries) the process goes back to the beginning and the transaction does not go through. Luckily I have another bank account with an address in Kent.
3. Everything else seems to be OK at this end now the infrastructure has caught up with the updates or whatever they do!
4. Well done Ian.

[Big Kev]

I tried to bypass Paypal to avoid the commission, but the card payment system seems to be in American (State and Zip Code ) so I did Paypal -it's much simpler.

There's a drop down box to change your location from US to UK. Gives you county and postcode option then

[Tripps]

Thanks for that - I'll know for next time.

[PanBiker]

3. Everything else seems to be OK at this end now the infrastructure as caught up with the updates or whatever they do!

I thought that would be the case China, took a little while longer to breach The Great Chinese Firewall.

[Pluggy]

Thanks for that - I'll know for next time.

It makes no odds,its still goes through paypal and is still subject to the fees. IIt just removes the need for an actual Paypal account.

[Tizer]

Just done a bit of testing with Firefox browser zoom settings. Any level above 110% will expand the banner wider than the actual page width. This forces the search box to the right. I reckon that is your problem Peter. Just Try holding down CTRL and hit the minus key a couple of times and see what happens.

Thanks, Ian, that is the reason I hadn't seen it, although my zoom setting is at 110%, not above it. Perhaps it's also due to my screen size - I'm using my trusty LG 19" monitor. I now see that in OG I've got a scroll bar at the bottom of the page. Never noticed it before because everything else I see on OG fits perfectly and I don't need to use scroll sideways. I don't have the problem with most other web sites, they usually fill the screen and I'm always using 110%. With less than 110% the text is too small for my eyes in OG. The strange thing is that everything else on the OG pages looks like it's scaled to fit my page perfectly - the banner is the only bit that doesn't fit. It seems to be an extension added to the right of the rest of the page (see below showing when I scroll right).
But it's no problem, now I know where it's hidden!

[Stanley]

Whatever the problem is that Peter has, He will hunt it down and sort it out!

[Tizer]

It's not a problem for me at all Stanley, just something strange!

And by the way, Mrs Tiz has now donated!

[Stanley]

As if we expected anything else...

[PanBiker]

The reason the site banner doesn't rescale is that it is a fixed size and it is not dynamic like the rest of the page. Cant remember if this one is one of Docs panoramas or is it one that BigKev did? I think it is one of Docs and those with long memories will remember we used to have a scrolling banner with multiple images when the site first went live on this platform. It used an animation extension that we decided we could do without when we slimmed down the site. If we still had all the extensions (over 50 of them) we would probably have filled the database a long time ago and may not have had the same opportunities for update or recovery.

[Stanley]

Didn't we have an annoying walking figure at one time? Happy days! Remember the adverts? We've come a long way.

[Cathy]

We used to have Birdsong, that was lovely.

[PanBiker]

Cathy, have look in Practice Posting at my link. A proper songbird there.

I contacted Mark again yesterday as I came across a glitch. I went into the ACP to have a poke rouund and the admin log alerted me to a string of entries to say the auto backup routine had failed. I went into it's setup and it reported that there was a fault with the time statement in the PHP.ini file which, without getting too technical is one of the building block files for the server instance. It didn't know the time so could not action the backups. I had a poke around the back end of the side up on the server instance but I couldn't find where the file lived so I emailed Mark. He sorted it in a few minutes and before he mailed me back I saw the entry in the admin log that Tripps has just completed the backup. So all sorted, auto backup is doing what it says on the tin.

Before anyone asks, the backup routine utilises a built in procedure of the site, (a cron task). The task needs a user account to trigger the backup so it selects a random one from anyone who happens to be logged on at the time. David got the coconut this time, I know he will say he was happy to help. If no members are logged on at the prescribed time of the backup, the "anonymous user" account that is built into phpBB and is used for other background tasks is used.

[Tripps]

I never felt a thing - happy to help.

[Stanley]

Good man Ian!

[Big Kev]

Cant remember if this one is one of Docs panoramas or is it one that BigKev did?

It's not mine, I did an autumn pic of the town square that was used for a bit