Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

Over the past few days, y'all may have noticed that the forum was down for an extended period of time, only returning a "General Error" when trying to access it. This was caused by a cache issue with the forum that Gillson had to fix, which he did by emptying the forum's cache.
However, we weren't entirely sure what was causing the issue at first, and we believed it may have been related to the server running out of space again (due to Tommy trying to put out another massive update), so we had to wait for Gillson as he was busy, and then he had to get onto a computer he doesn't regularly use to be able to tell the server host to give us more space and look into the forum's issues.

However, we should be running mostly fine now, especially once the server space is increased and Tommy finishes his update. However, the smiley list on the right side of the text box when creating a new post seems to be broken for some reason, so I've notified the other admins about it and we'll see about getting that fixed as soon as we can.

Thank you for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
-David (freebrickproductions)

And we're back again after the forum going down due to another cache error. Turns out that the cache errors appear to have been due to the site running out of space on the server, so it couldn't write a new copy of the cache to the server, causing it to throw an error. However, after the ISP increased our server space, this issue now appears to have been resolved and the forum works once again. What's even better is that the smilies work again as well!

Again, we thank you for your patience and apologize once again for any inconvenience this caused. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.
- David (freebrickproductions)

As much as it pains me to say this, have y'all considered hosting the site's images off-site at a place like imgur? I have no doubt that the images are what make the site's overall size as big as it is.

ZachL wrote:As much as it pains me to say this, have y'all considered hosting the site's images off-site at a place like imgur? I have no doubt that the images are what make the site's overall size as big as it is.

It'd be possible, but difficult. Plus, if we did off-site storage, especially with large image hosting services like Flickr and imgur, we'd have to get the unique URL for each image and put that into the pages that we use. Not to mention that image availability would be up to if that website remained live. And if the website that was hosting all of the images, then practically everything would be inaccessible until we could get it all back up on a new site.

Putting the images on another website would also be risky. The recent s*** that photobucket pulled, suspending their free service, and removing all images posted on it in another forum is prime example of this. Its best to keep them where you have as much control as possible.