[barmar]

As many of you have probably noticed, for the past several days there have been frequent problems when you try to post to the forum. The symptom is that you wait a long time, and then get a "Gateway timeout" error message. We're aware of this problem and are investigating, but currently don't know what's causing it or how to fix it.

When this happens, the post you're submitting inevitably has been added. Please do not click the Refresh button to resubmit your post, as it will just result in a duplicate (and multiple duplicates if you keep refreshing). Use the browser's Back button to return to the thread, or a bookmark if you have one.

Thank you.

[barmar]

The problem also seems to affect sending Private Messages and using the Report button. If these time out, don't resend them, either.

[barmar]

We believe we've resolved this, although we've had to degrade some other forum functions (we hope this will be temporary).

We discovered that someone was exploiting the forum's email feature to turn the forum into an open mail relay, so we changed the mail configuration on the server to disable email from forums@bridgebase.com. However, there was an error in the configuration, and this caused the forum software to hang when it tried to send email.

This impacted posting replies, because some users have their forum notification settings set to send them email when threads are updated in forums that they're watching. It also impacted private messages if the recipient has email notifications enabled. And it affected using the Report button because one of the admins has email notifications of reports enabled.

We've fixed the mail configuration to drop these emails silently, instead of hanging. So for now, if you have email notifications enabled in your settings, you won't receive them. We're looking into implementing a whitelist based on the addresses in the forum database.

We'll keep you updated as this progresses.

[barmar]

Here's the final update, I expect. We've implemented the whitelist that allows email to addresses that are configured in forum user profiles. So if you have email notifications enabled, you should be getting them again. Please let us know if this isn't working properly for you.