Reason for the site being down this morning

[PowerSwitchJames]

For some reason the host didn't process the payment. Bah. Working again now though!

[Eternal Sunshine]

Your cheques bouncing then?

[RenewableCandy]

Either that or they're onto us...

[Andy Hunt]

Maybe your bank's gone bust.

[Mean Mr Mustard]

I'll chip in with some barter goods at PeakSpeak4.

[jmb]

James,

There looks to have been a significant traffic increase in the last couple of months, which might be relevant - sending you some mail about it separately...

cheers,
jmb

[PS_RalphW]

I'm getting a suspicious request to run the add-on
'QuickTimeCheck Scriptable Object' from Apple Computer, Inc (unverified publisher)' on every page of the powerswitch site. Is this a new feature or has the site been hacked? There are some dodgy viruses around that infect web sites to get unpatched visiting computers.

[jmb]

Well, I've added a few lines of tracking code to the site - Google Analytics, and a similar free tracking system phpMyVisites- which both use JavaScript. If your browser is complaining about scripty things, that's the most likely cause.

Are you using a Mac? I don't, myself, and haven't tested how the site behaves with one, but the message you're seeing sounds rather like an Apple browser warning of scripts in the page, and giving a chance to avoid running them.

Alternatively, perhaps it's down to Google Analytics' newfangled tracking code. I could try reverting it to the old-style urchin snippet...

I'll have a dig around and see if I can find a more solid answer for you. In the meantime, if there's an option to say "No thanks, and stop asking me", feel free to hit that button - it's not likely to cause problems with normal site functioning...

Thanks for the report!

-jmb

[jmb]

Looks like it's the phpMyVisites tracking code that's the problem - and I think only for Internet Explorer 7 (are you using this?). The product's been fixed, I think, but we have a slightly old version from the hosting provider.

I've removed it, leaving only the Google Analytics code. Is it behaving for you now?

-jmb

[jmb]

Looks like Googlebot is being very busy looking at the Powerswitch site...

Number of pages crawled per day: max 30107, average 16048, min 2108


Number of kilobytes downloaded per day: max 1827836, average 857537, min 109836


That's an average of 26G a month just for Google crawling - and increasing! If the trend gets up to that "max" figure, that's 56G a month...

-jmb

[jmb]

I've turned on an option to compress the forum pages in-transit. You shouldn't see anything different - if you have problems, please let us know...

-jmb

[PS_RalphW]

Looks like it's the phpMyVisites tracking code that's the problem - and I think only for Internet Explorer 7 (are you using this?). The product's been fixed, I think, but we have a slightly old version from the hosting provider.

I've removed it, leaving only the Google Analytics code. Is it behaving for you now?

-jmb

The problem was on my home PC running IE7. Haven't tried it since. At work on a Mac/Safari and no problems for now.

Cheers!

[jmb]

This isn't about server downtime, it's about browser compatibility.
And it's not about GA, analysis suggested it was the phpMyVisites code.
And it was over two years ago.

[PS_RalphW]

Did this site get hacked today?

Lot's of database critical errors and spinning icons

- and one page loaded that I don't want to see whilst at work!

[emordnilap]

Simply not loading here - but there again, it wasn't just PS, so there might be a wider issue.