Living beyond our means

Re: !

What happened to this board format? I think it looks better.

Due to problems with outages/unreliability AAM was moved from the host.ie/UBB based platform to the current ezBoard platform a while back although the archives were retained in place. I guess look & feel is largely a subjective personal issue but the reliability of ezBoard definitely outweighs any perceived look & feel drawbacks. Looking back on the archives makes me feel so old sometimes... :\

Re: !

The problem with ezboard is that the search facility is
absolutely terrible and they don't automatically archive
threads so good advice can be lost etc.

.

Sounds like the problem was with host.ie rather than UBB. We use some American hosting company, and they very, very rarely go down.

Re: .

host.ie had reliability problems at the time including performing unilateral upgrades without warning which were not always successful leading to unexpected downtime. UBB was also a bit heavyweight with some of the underlying Perl GCI scripts taking a long time to run. Taken together, these problems forced the transition to ezBoard although I can't remember why/how ezBoard in particular was chosen. Maybe UBB upgrades in the meantime have solved some of these problems. The search option on UBB used to be poor too. ezBoard's search facilities are also poor in my experience. I often find using Google's advanced search facility restricted to pub145.ezboard.com often yields better results although this URL also hosts ezBoards other than AAM and sometimes the URLs refer to the wrong specific page of a topic (possibly due to Google caching of old links?) necessitating some hacking around to reconstruct the correct URL. Overall, bar some minor exceptions and notwithstanding the poor search facilities, ezBoard has proven to be more reliable, responsive and easier to manage than the host.ie/UBB setup. In an ideal world a dedicated server with the best bulletin board software available (whatever that might be these days) would be the best solution but that would probably cost a lot more money than is available (from Brendan's own pocket by the way) for maintaining the site right now.

problems

for the last couple of weeks Im getting a lot of pages unavailable on AAM. Seems to be happening when I backpage, a click on refresh does the trick to bring the page up but Im only getting it with AAM. Is there a problem with connections maybe?

Re: problems

Haven't noticed any such problems myself on various internet connections (dial-up, leased line, DSL etc.). What sort of internet connection are you using? Do you have any similar problems with any other sites that you visit? Are you connecting through a proxy server? Do you get a specific error (page) when this happens?