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*It's fixed!* road.cc website issues — an apology and some updates

road.cc and its sister sites have been a bit under the weather recently, but we should be back in business now!

* Update: all of our sites should now be fully back to normal, it turns out it was an issue with our servers after all! It's frustrating how long this has taken to resolve, once again huge apologies to all of our regular readers and everyone who reads road.cc for the patchy experience over the past couple of weeks.* 

You might have noticed that the website has been running a little on the slow side recently, and navigating between pages, especially when logged in with a road.cc account, has been particularly difficult. We’ve definitely noticed too, as it’s made working on the website pretty tricky and frustrating these last two weeks. 

We’ve been experiencing a number of issues with the server over that time and the exact cause of them has been hard to pin down. The ChatGPT bot (and some others) hoovering up a fair bit of the server’s bandwidth certainly wasn’t helping, and we’ve blocked those, but the root cause of the slowness looks to be down at the database/application level and we’re still hunting for the fix. We haven’t released anything new to the site in the past few weeks, so the reason why the site has suddenly slowed is unclear.

What can you do?

The site currently works better if you’re logged out, because a lot of the time you’ll be seeing cached pages that aren’t directly from the affected server. Obviously you can’t comment if you’re not logged in, but you’ll probably find the site easier to navigate. Other than that, it’s mostly going to be a case of being patient with us. We're really sorry for the continued disruption and are confident the site will be back up to speed soon. 

Thanks to HoarseMann for conjuring up the lead image, originally posted in the comments underneath the live blog on 21st September. This has been a hugely frustrating time for us, but you gave us a good chuckle!

Dave is a founding father of road.cc, having previously worked on Cycling Plus and What Mountain Bike magazines back in the day. He also writes about e-bikes for our sister publication ebiketips. He's won three mountain bike bog snorkelling World Championships, and races at the back of the third cats.

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54 comments

Avatar
chrisonabike replied to Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
2 likes

There's a band name in there somewhere... road10, that sounds good!  "I'm Madone Ride Me"...

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kil0ran replied to Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
2 likes

This prompted me to remember a conversation from my student days -what would a Steely Dan and 10cc supergroup be called?

Being edgy indie kids we settled on "Utter Wank"

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belugabob replied to Spammercial | 1 year ago
1 like
Spammercial wrote:

Hello everybody. Get the service from servers from Pornhub, or Youporn, etc...they are the fastest in the world...really...it won't affect the content...only the speed...  1

...and it'll stay up...

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Left_is_for_Losers | 1 year ago
1 like

It's an improvement, leave the site like it is. 

Less rubbish to read, and more elderly mamils tying themselves in knots trying to work out how to comment now haha

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perce replied to Left_is_for_Losers | 1 year ago
8 likes

I've just been reading about the Purton ships graveyard again.

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Rendel Harris replied to Left_is_for_Losers | 1 year ago
5 likes

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

It's an improvement, leave the site like it is. 

Less rubbish to read

It's true, you have been on here less so it may well be a price worth paying.

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Left_is_for_Losers replied to Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
0 likes

Rendel Harris wrote:

Left_is_for_Losers wrote:

It's an improvement, leave the site like it is. 

Less rubbish to read

It's true, you have been on here less so it may well be a price worth paying.

Not to worry, it's back to normal now pretty much so I look forward to more dialogue with you (who definitely doesn't follow me around)

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Backladder | 1 year ago
7 likes

It's definitely getting better, the error messages are appearing far quicker than they did at the weekend!

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stonojnr replied to Backladder | 1 year ago
3 likes

Not convinced it's getting better

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Backladder replied to stonojnr | 1 year ago
0 likes

Check your irony filter  3

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Backladder replied to stonojnr | 1 year ago
0 likes

Check your irony filter  3

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Backladder replied to Backladder | 1 year ago
3 likes

I obviously meant to say "double check your irony filter"

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stonojnr replied to Backladder | 1 year ago
1 like

Two'che

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yupiteru | 1 year ago
1 like

Thanks for the update, thought it was my ancient Linux laptop at first.

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EddyBerckx | 1 year ago
6 likes

Thanks for the update! 

It's a free site so I'm not gonna complain, we appreciate there will be problems from time to time

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brooksby replied to EddyBerckx | 1 year ago
1 like

EddyBerckx wrote:

It's a free site so I'm not gonna complain, we appreciate there will be problems from time to time

I'm a subscriber.  So I'm paying, even if it is generally a free site.

When I first come to the site - before I log in - the initial pages loading are waiting (a long time) while I get lots of messages saying this or that is loading (when I've googled them, they're all ad server services).

Once (if) I do manage to log in, about half the time I get a 504 error when I'm trying to 'like' a comment, or to reply or quote one.

I get a 502 error from time to time too, but not that often...

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HoarseMann | 1 year ago
4 likes

Interesting point about being logged in. I've just tried browsing the site using a Safari Private window and it's loading really quickly.

Good luck with tracking down the issue. From the small amount of software development I did in the past, I can imagine the difficulty fault-finding a live system.

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gazza_d | 1 year ago
10 likes

I just assumed you'd been bought by Elon Musk and hat he was applying the same technical genius that he polished twitter with

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RoubaixCube | 1 year ago
1 like

Should have recruited ChatGPT to help you find the problem with your database.

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Drinfinity | 1 year ago
13 likes

I see there is a new box in red over the Road.cc logo that lets me know how long the next comment will take to load. Which is nice. 

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Paul J | 1 year ago
0 likes

The new WYSIWYG comment box editor is somewhat new, isn't it?

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Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
15 likes

Superb trolling. At least I hope it's superb trolling...

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Secret_squirrel replied to Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
3 likes

Damn.  Beat me to it!

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mark1a replied to Rendel Harris | 1 year ago
2 likes

I saw that and just assumed it was symptomatic of a dodgy query join or corrupt database index.

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