Website is currently unavailable?

[TechnoScrabble]

I use google chrome and about once every half an hour there's a small (30 seconds to two minutes) period where if I try to visit any page on the forums I get redirected to a page with a white background, an exclamation mark in a big circle, and large blue letters declaring the site to be unavailable. I have to close all tabs with this forum in them and go back to the forum from the main site to be able to get on again once the period in which I cannot access the site is over. This doesn't happen with any other websites, and started happening a few days ago.

[Siosilvar]

A few days? Consider yourself lucky. It's been happening to the rest of us for a few months because of the enormous amounts of people coming to the forums.

[Zherog]

It's been happening to the rest of us ...

Um, no? I've seen the screen TS describes only a few times. I could count them on one hand and have fingers left over.

Incidentally, the screen you describe is from Cloudflare - a service that's supposed to increase up-time of the site (and has for some). Getting that error so frequently doesn't sound right to me, and I'm sure Rawhide will appreciate you providing the info.

[Serpentine]

Having to close all the tabs seems weird, too.

[Kalrany]

It has not been as fequent for me, but I have seen it for at least the last month or two. I would say maybe once or twice a day? The sounds right... I don't know about multiple tabs, since I rearly have more than one giantip page open at a time. When I get any error I typically wait about 5 minutes and it generally takes care of itself. I never thought to report it. (I only ended up in this section becuase I was checking for when the search function might return, to be honest.) But, anyway, you are not the only one getting this one.

[Siosilvar]

Um, no? I've seen the screen TS describes only a few times. I could count them on one hand and have fingers left over.

To be fair, that exact screen hasn't been showing up much. But it's an artifact of the same problem (huge amounts of traffic) that's been plaguing the site for a while now.

[Zherog]

I'm not getting 50X errors, either. I got a 500 error today; it's the first error I've had in at least a week, and probably longer than that. I do get the ocassional message from the forum that things are busy and try again in a few minutes; but that's not an error, that's as-designed.

The site definitely has the blessing/curse of being popular. I'll not contest that. I'll also not contest that people - maybe even lots of people - still see error messages on a regular basis. My point was that it's not affecting everybody; since bringing up Cloudflare I've seen a marked improvement. Whether I'm in the minority or the majority, however, I don't know.