bugs Simtropolis 9.0.x - Bugs & Issues Report Thread

[madhatter106 3,903]

23 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

As per the announcement shown atop the site header, that 503 error along with the 504 timeout is caused by our files host (Digital Ocean).

What they're encountering can broadly be described as sustained intermittent service degradation. Resultantly STEX files are significantly slow to process, or at times may not even download whatsoever. Over on their status page, it still reports increased error rates with their hosted S3 storage setup, which has been persistent on and off for a while now (and most notably the past week). This also affects site resources including file screenshots, attachments, profile pics and award icons.

Rest assured files are still intact, and the issue is the process of transferring them upon request. Global service overload is playing a part here (ST is not only affected), and we'll be considering our options. In the meantime our advice is to try again. It seems downloads may not work one minute, then be perfectly fine the next. It's very frustrating.

Again apologies for the inconvenience, and thanks everyone for your continued patience.

Is there anything we can do on our end?

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

As per the announcement atop the site header, our content storage host is currently offline. This is what serves the STEX files, avatars, attachments and other images around the site. All these files are currently unavailable. We're not too sure why this has happened and what this means, other than it's a new separate issue unrelated to the previous intermittent service degradation (503 and 504 errors). This UserSuspended error is generic from the files host, and is through no fault of any user.

I've informed @Dirktator our webmaster and hopefully it can be sorted out shortly. I suspect something is wrong at the hosting account level.

Again, we're sorry for the inconvenience.

[AsimPika3172 1,136]

Look likes too many members (including myself) and staffs was missing AVATAR?  I hope will fixed soon! 

[rsc204 21,808]

On 10/01/2018 at 7:10 PM, Cyclone Boom said:

Global service overload is playing a part here

Sounds to me like the fall out from the Meltdown/Spectre patches which would have made a performance hit. So basically lots of new hardware needed to sustain the original service. The timing is certainly right.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

20 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

As per the announcement atop the site header, our content storage host is currently offline.

I'm pleased to confirm this has now been successfully resolved, with functionality resumed and all content is back online. It turned out this was caused by the storage entering a lockdown state after an error with the host (Digital Ocean). This meant all files were inaccessible until measures were taken to mitigate the issue.

Should you notice any further errors, they'll likely be due to the ongoing stability issues with the host which will hopefully be resolved soon.

Thanks all.

[spiritualfire 138]

Good day everyone.

Does anyone happen to know how to get in contact with the admin over at sc4devotion.com (I assume it's CasperVG), and/or specifically with the file author Cerulean?

Although the file does not exist on ST, I am having an issue with one of the files: "CARCH_Daggerstra_executive_suites_bsc.exe", and Norton is giving me a W32.Rontokbro@mm as the reason, so basically it's attacking my registry files. Unfortunately I did not notice that there was an issue already in play per the comments section from a year ago. Here's the link if anyone is interested:

https://www.sc4devotion.com/csxlex/lex_filedesc.php?lotGET=2188

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

4 minutes ago, spiritualfire said:

admin over at sc4devotion.com

@Tarkus is their ever friendly admin who pops in here at ST quite often. My @ mention will draw his attention to your post.

You could create a new thread in our SC4 - Custom Content forum to ask about the technical aspects of the file. (If that's not the right place one of the staff more familiar with that section will move or merge it to where it ought to go.)

[Tarkus 6,932]

Thanks, Cori!   And thanks, spiritualfire, for bringing it to my attention--the previous comment on there from 2017 hadn't surfaced on the forums, and unfortunately got lost in the shuffle.

As I noted on the LEX page, Norton has been known to false flag files based on statistics heuristics, though usually, the flags it uses are things like WS.Reputation.1 and Trojan.GEN.2, which Symantec (Norton's parent company) admits are not actual viruses. W32.Rontonkbro@mm is a real thing, but given that the file date on the installer does indeed seem to match the original (it's from 2009), and Norton's known about W32.Rotonkbro@mm since 2005, it seems a bit strange that it would suddenly start getting flagged as a virus. In any case, however, given long-going discussions about ditching executable installers due other issues, and wanting to offer some piece of mind, in cerulean's absence (he hasn't logged on in 5 years), I have repackaged the file without the installer for at least the time being, which should eliminate even the chance of it being flagged.

-Tarkus

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

On 30/03/2018 at 12:45 AM, spiritualfire said:

Norton is giving me a W32.Rontokbro@mm as the reason, so basically it's attacking my registry files.

Just adding to what @Tarkus has said above:

Over the years there have been numerous reports of custom content installers being flagged by antivirus suites. In other words, Norton may have scanned the file and found the structure matches a known threat. However, as scans aren't always totally reliable and with countless variations, there can be files incorrectly deemed unsafe. But even though probability would suggest this was likely a false positive, I highly commend the action Tarkus has taken to remove the installer as a precautionary measure.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

Hosted Content migrated to Local Storage

Over the past several months, I'm sure you'll have all noticed the persistent issues we've experienced with our external files host.

Originally this was meant to be be a viable storage solution complementing our brief encounter on the IPS Cloud. Then when moving to a dedicated host again in October 2017, the idea was to offload resources and reduce local server load. However, it's become clear their service is currently incapable of sustaining consistent and reliable performance. The main problem being they imposed request rate limits which really took their toll on a site the size of ST. Especially when images include avatars and smaller icons as with the awards, there can be hundreds of images per page. This was the main cause of the "service degradation" and the intermittent yet frequent 503 and 504 errors.

As always, @Dirktator strives to make Simtropolis the best it can be, and has therefore moved all files to our dedicated storage. Once again this shall restore much more control having everything in a central location, which will surely be of benefit in the long run. Throughout the ongoing issues, you also may have noticed file upload errors for attachments and STEX uploads. All these problems are now fully resolved.  (And as a side bonus, the hashed file name attachments bug has been resolved in the process.)

In the event of experiencing any new errors, however big or small, please keep letting us know.

Thanks everyone.

[spiritualfire 138]

Good day Simtropians! Anybody else experience a Cloudflare Host Error 524 yesterday?

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

26 minutes ago, spiritualfire said:

Good day Simtropians! Anybody else experience a Cloudflare Host Error 524 yesterday?

Hi there,

Yes, I can confirm we were having persistent server trouble yesterday evening for an estimated 5 hours until 22:10 EDT.

During this time you may have experienced fully unresponsive site pages, followed by the eventual 524 or 522 timeouts, or even some intermittent 525 SSL handshake errors. These were displayed because Cloudflare (the CDN) wasn't able to bridge the connection to the host server.

In addition there was then the scheduled weekly site backup which was initiated from 01:00 EDT lasting several hours thereafter. The site would have been functional while the backup was in progress, however loading times would be significantly increased.

It remains unclear what the cause of the initial errors were, but thankfully today everything seems back to normal.

[redfox85 659]

@Cyclone Boom Just an FYI - I also got a 403 forbidden error yesterday because it could not access the htaccess file, and again about an hour ago.

[Dirktator 2,320]

7 minutes ago, redfox85 said:

@Cyclone Boom Just an FYI - I also got a 403 forbidden error yesterday because it could not access the htaccess file, and again about an hour ago.

Curious.. Do you recall what area of the site you were trying to load up at the time?

[Ocram's Razr 963]

I too had a 403 forbidden error. It lasted at least an hour (I gave up after an hour) and wouldn’t let me load the forum, main page, or anything (even / was forbidden). I went to Discord, which worked but no one was on so I couldn’t check with others. Also, I didn’t care enough to bother anyone snoozing/away so I took a walk outside, I really need to exercise more anyway.

[redfox85 659]

3 hours ago, Dirktator said:

Curious.. Do you recall what area of the site you were trying to load up at the time?

 

It was simtropolis.com . 

[AsimPika3172 1,136]

Look likes this forum have 524 timeout error again since yesterday. Today is back OK right now! 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

3 minutes ago, AsimPika3172 said:

Look likes this forum have 524 timeout error again since yesterday. Today is back OK right now! 

Yeah. I was getting 522 & 524 this morning for a couple hours. I posted in our emergency channel and then did other things for a while. When I got back @Cyclone Boom had worked his magic and got it fixed.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

It seems this was the exact same issue as happened last Sunday. Still it remains unclear what the cause was here, but one common factor is since this was the same day the weekly site backup is scheduled to run. In which case, it's possible something on the server end may need optimising.

For a brief period just like previously, you may have observed a 403 "Access Denied" error when trying to visit any page of the site. This was triggered in the process of my attempted fix. After notifying Dirk, I changed the permission of the site's directory in order to relieve the load on the server, giving it chance to recover. Then after 30 minutes, I set the access back to how it was before. Sure enough the site loaded again straight away, and from what I've observed it's been fine all day since.

[RobertLM78 1,597]

Having trouble posting and liking comments. 

Edit: though I was able to post this.....  :-/

 

  Edited June 18, 2018 by RobertLM78  
update

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

1 hour ago, RobertLM78 said:

Having trouble posting and liking comments.

Occasionally I've noticed if writing a lengthy post and taking a while before replying, the button turns to "Saving..." but doesn't actually submit the post. Also the same for reacting to replies if not refreshing the current page for a while. This then throws an error and it doesn't go through.

I believe this is potentially caused by how sessions are assigned to each of our accounts. Basically when browsing the site, all users are individually allocated a unique key which grants access to perform actions around the site. But after 30 minutes or so it times out. Therefore not having the permission to perform actions, it causes an error or nothing to happen as with posting. So I recommend copying a post to the clipboard, refreshing the page, then pasting back and all should then work as normal.

I've given the site cache a purge in case that helps. Sometimes things can get stuck and then the temporary data needs rebuilding (as it does after a reset).

[RobertLM78 1,597]

1 hour ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Occasionally I've noticed if writing a lengthy post and taking a while before replying, the button turns to "Saving..." but doesn't actually submit the post. Also the same for reacting to replies if not refreshing the current page for a while. This then throws an error and it doesn't go through.

I believe this is potentially caused by how sessions are assigned to each of our accounts. Basically when browsing the site, all users are individually allocated a unique key which grants access to perform actions around the site. But after 30 minutes or so it times out. Therefore not having the permission to perform actions, it causes an error or nothing to happen as with posting. So I recommend copying a post to the clipboard, refreshing the page, then pasting back and all should then work as normal.

I've given the site cache a purge in case that helps. Sometimes things can get stuck and then the temporary data needs rebuilding (as it does after a reset).

I get an error trying to tag 'Thanks' to it:

Sorry, there was a problem reacting to this content.

 

I tried refreshing the page and it too still doesn't let me react.  I'll try purging my own browser's cache and see if that helps

 

Edit: So I was obviously able to post here yet again, but I still can't post to the other topic, nor react to anything anywhere. 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

7 minutes ago, RobertLM78 said:

Sorry, there was a problem reacting to this content.

I wonder if it's post specific. Would you post a linky to the one you are trying to react to?

[RobertLM78 1,597]

4 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

I wonder if it's post specific. Would you post a linky to the one you are trying to react to?

Well, I thought that too, but then I couldn't react to any post here on this thread - but here's the page:

Edit - and now I can react to posts on this page.  Let me try the original again.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

@RobertLM78

I've taken a look at your account from the database side and everything appears in order as far as I can tell. I checked by inheriting your permissions and was able to successfully react to a test reply I made to this topic. On there all 7 reactions could be successfully added and removed without error. Then I proceeded to the linked STEX file and Liked it and also one of the comments. Both those also went through and I confirmed the data was populated into the system.

Do you receive any error when attempting to reply there to the comments? Feel free to submit a few test posts there and around the site to check whether the issue can be narrowed down to a specific item of content. I tried saving your profile from our admin panel in case that re-aligns anything which fell out of place.

When testing, you could use the "Hide" function to remove any posts from public view and we can tidy them up later.

Should the issues still persist, here's a few other possible ideas to try:

• Sign out and back into your account. This will force a new session key to be assigned.
• Perform a force refresh (Ctrl+F5) on the affected file or other site pages.
• Check whether it makes any difference if using another browser.
• Clear cookies and all temporary browser data for ST.
• Reboot your computer and/or router.

[RobertLM78 1,597]

18 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

to check whether the issue can be narrowed down to a specific item of content

I think this is the case.... maybe because the post has to do with a puppetician... erm politician..... 

I wasn't going to say anything 'radical'.... despite my reputation......     XD

[Tyberius06 12,189]

Hi!

I've noticed something wierd. The "max size per file": reduced on my end to almost zero. 
I can't even upload this picture as a forum attachment to prove it, because it would be bigger, than 0.02 MB. What happened here?

Yesterday I wanted to update a lot broken image links of mine in the "Show us..." topics and since I re-sized the pictures and changed the png format to jpg, they could fit into the 4 MB limit, which had been previously, but I found that in the most cases I didn't have 4 MB per posts (not even 4 MB per file what was originally), rather 1.95 MB, so I needed to link all of them via third party image hoster. What is this wierd behaviour? And this issue is appearing in all topic what I want to use, even in the PM system. Now everywhere 0.02 my allowance, if I start deleting pictures here and there, than this number is starting to be increasing... 

Thanks in advance!

- Tyberius

EDIT: Now it's working again normally. But what was that?? After I send this post I closed the google chrome than came back and it was OK again. But yesterday my browser was closed more times and the problem with the 1.95 MB limit was appearing until this post...

  Edited August 9, 2018 by Tyberius06  
Problem disappeared suddenly

[Dirktator 2,320]

1 hour ago, Tyberius06 said:

EDIT: Now it's working again normally. But what was that?? After I send this post I closed the google chrome than came back and it was OK again. But yesterday my browser was closed more times and the problem with the 1.95 MB limit was appearing until this post...

That's very odd... is it consistently working for you now?  The file limit should be pretty healthy certainly should be more than 0.02 MB

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

Hi @Tyberius06,
 

1 hour ago, Tyberius06 said:

EDIT: Now it's working again normally. But what was that??

That would be because I've just pulled a few levers behind the scenes.

Taking a look at your account from the admin panel, I can confirm this was due to your site Attachments Quota being used up. Well, technically it was on ~99.984% with just the 2 kilobytes remaining. Then when attempting to upload a file which was larger than that, it consequently triggered the error.

When this happens, it reduces the max upload per file down accordingly since 4 MB wouldn't be possible with more than 121 MB already used. This limit was previously 125 MB for all members which I've increased to 200 MB giving yourself and others a bit more breathing space for local storage. As I'm sure you'll appreciate, there is only a finite amount of server space, but for now there's enough to justify this increase above the previous limit.

To make it clear this is a possible cause when people encounter this in future, I've now amended it to say the following:

 

Continuing on I recommend using JPG as you've done for rich detailed images (e.g. gameplay pics) while keeping file size to a minimum. This provides a good balance between quality due to the benefits of lossy compression. One time I would actually recommend PNG is for graphic icons which use simple colours (like for the above error message I captured after testing). Then it preserves the full detail accordingly, whereas JPG causes degradation which adds unwanted detail and amplifies the size.

External sites such as Imgur are a possibility to host additional quantities of images. As I'm sure you're aware, when doing this just use the direct link ending in the file extension and it'll then resolve to load (as opposed to the album link). Double clicking each image provides a dialog option to resize them if desired.

[Tyberius06 12,189]

Ah I see, I wasn't aware of this "Attachments Quota" limit, but yepp it makes sense. Now I see, that I have this option to check, but totally missed this option in my profile so far. Thanks for the reminder. I think I'm gonna be doing a nice a house cleaning.

And thanks for increasing the limit.

- Tyberius