XF 1.2 Forum front page now shows error

[Solari]

Greetings.

This is a bit of an urgent problem. Our XF forums are now showing an error on the front page of the forums, simply saying "The requested page could not be found."

This is at http://www.gatorcountry.com/swampgas

I'm trying to troubleshoot this - the category pages themselves seem fine as well as thread indexes inside each forum itself, but the forum front page is showing this error.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Ray

 

[Paul B]

Your forums are working here, which is the default route: http://www.gatorcountry.com/swampgas/forums/

Do you have any kind of redirect or index route set up?

Any add-ons installed?

 

[Solari]

Hmm, I think what happened was when I updated the forum email address, somehow /forums/ was added to the forum route, probably an autofill thing in the browser I didn't see. I removed it and it is working now. PHEW.

Thanks!
Ray

 

[Solari]

Spoke too soon - it's happening again. I had to go back into the Basic settings and re-save it and it's okay now. Something keeps getting reset in there. Any suggestions?

Ray

 

[Paul B]

I can only assume it's an add-on or an individual.

Settings don't change on their own.

 

[Solari]

I'll dig around. We haven't added anything new for awhile, only change was the forum email address recently.

 

[Solari]

We haven't added a new add-on in a good while. I disabled the ones we don't use anymore just to be safe. I also went through the admin logs, don't see any appropriate settings changed that should impact it.

It's very random - it'll work fine for awhile and then suddenly the forum front page will show "The requested page could not be found." Each time this happens, if I just go to Basic Board Information and just click save, it fixes this somehow for a few hours. Then I have to do it again.

Any suggestions on how to further trouble shoot this perplexing problem?

Thanks,
Ray

 

[Solari]

Additional findings - something is definitely going on - every two or so hours I have to do that resubmitting of basic board info to somehow reset it so the error doesn't show up on the front page. I've been going through other options to try and isolate the cause, I turned off " Fetch public templates as files" to see what happens and this time in an hour or so, the front page of the forums became completely blank, just a white screen. When I did the resubmit basic board info as usual it came back.

So something that runs every hour or two is making our front page error out. Any way I can further isolate this?

Thanks,
Ray

P.S. This is a live site with a paid customer base so this thing throwing errors every two hours or so is hurting us. If someone can step up and help us with this, I would be more than willing to pay for your time and expertise.

 

[Mike Edge]

I have seen clients have unexplainable stuff happen before as a result from Cloud Flare.

When the basic board info resets, is there still posts and things from shortly before it happening?

 

[Solari]

We don't use CloudFlare if it helps any, nor any CDN on the forums.

Yes, posts, threads, etc still there, just that the forum front page goes blank where it should be listing the forums and says "The requested page could not be found."

 

[Mike Edge]

We don't use CloudFlare if it helps any, nor any CDN on the forums.

Interesting... http://www.intodns.com/gatorcountry.com

Domain NS recordsNameserver records returned by the parent servers are:

gabe.ns.cloudflare.com. ['173.245.59.114'] [TTL=172800]
sue.ns.cloudflare.com. ['173.245.58.145'] [TTL=172800]

c.gtld-servers.net was kind enough to give us that information.

 

[Solari]

They host our DNS. What I mean is we don't use their CDN or whatever you might call it. The DNS alone shouldn't impact things as far as I understand it?

Ray

 

[Mike Edge]

They host our DNS.

Ray

Correct.. You are using CloudFlare

Hosting DNS is all they do...

I would try using your web hosts DNS direct, allow 24-48 hours for propagation and then see if the issue continues. We had a client that had this exact issue, once they dropped CF for our direct DNS, it never happened again for almost 7 months now.

 

[Solari]

I thought they primarily do caching/CDN? That part we don't have turned on in our CF accounts. But good idea, I will try switching the DNS back to us!

Ray

 

[Solari]

P.S. I also had our ajax hosted by Google in the XF settings. Wonder if that makes a difference too?

 

[Mike Edge]

P.S. I also had our ajax hosted by Google in the XF settings. Wonder if that makes a difference too?

Shouldn't, but you could try local.

 

[Solari]

It's local now and just switched DNS, fingers crossed. This thing has been driving me batty ; )

Thank you!
Ray

 

[Mike Edge]

Good luck!

 

[Solari]

Hmm. The blank page showed up again the front page of the forums but I was in the Performance settings of XF and I just clicked submit to see what happens (without changing anything) and the front page came back. Next time I'm going to see if just going to any random setting on the XF options page does this, seems it's somewhere in the settings that keeps getting reset?

I'll also see what happens after the DNS propagates.

Ray

 

[Solari]

PS. I also had a Notice up letting folks know there were issues but it always disappears every time this happens so I have to resubmit the notice to get it to resume. Just trying to fill in the gaps.