Comments on: Website issues today

By: Edward

Edward — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 19:03:18 +0000

Shane the BtB Web Guy,
Thank you for your attention to this matter.

We truly appreciate having this web site, and we are glad that Robert has someone to turn to when trouble arises. I don’t think we realized that you have to perform weekly maintenance in order to correct the frequent updates.

By the way, I have been getting the “posting comments too fast” notice so rarely that I get surprised by them. The unannounced moderation (my poet disappears without telling me that it is in the moderation in-box) is so common that I just go with it. They always arrive when Robert moderates, so it is not a problem for me, just for poor Robert.

Also, I noticed the new “Verify you are human” check box. It is nice to know that I didn’t turn into a Borg or robot sometime during the day. I’m going to try out this new box now. Since you are reading this, it works (and I am still human *whew!*).

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:03:39 +0000

Shane the BtB Web Guy,

Does BtB have its own servers or is it hosted? If it’s hosted, is the hosting, as well as the software site app, provided by WordPress too? I ask because I sometimes get the “posting comments too fast” message on my first comment of the day, hours after my previous one. This would only seem to make sense if your WordPress site is sharing physical resources with those of other subscribers. In such a situation, I can see why such a message might appear on a first-of-the-day comment. In that case, the message wouldn’t be about me, personally, or maybe even the entire BtB site but about the entire hosted infrastructure and the aggregate of all the sites it supports being pressed hard at a given instant. Any further light you can shed on this matter would be appreciated.

By: Shane the BtB Web Guy

Shane the BtB Web Guy — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:15:06 +0000

The site has been fully updated and optimized. This was not a a result of hackers. Dick is correct that it is a complete nightmare with an enormous amount of potential conflicts. New WordPress patches pushed weekly, 5 different PHP versions currently being supported, plugins, themes, etc. There is little regression testing done due to the complexity of all the variables. It has become a huge issue over the past 18 months as when one thing updates, it breaks something else. The site itself is running on very high performance hardware, so that is not an issue either. It is an ongoing battle and these days I spend more time fixing site hiccups like this than doing routine maintenance. Also, FYI, The “posting comments too fast” is built into WordPress and is a site self-defense mechanism.

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:22:09 +0000

The site has been sluggish. Still is. I also had a couple of failures to connect. Hope you guys get this all sorted soon. On a positive note, it has been several days since the last time I got one of those annoying "You're posting comments too fast, slow down" messages. The current sluggishness and wonkiness are not a good trade for the lack of Karen messages, but I hope the absence of the latter persists once everything else is back to normal. While your problem might be of hackerish origin, I think it's statistically more likely to be an inadequately tested Wordpress update. Millennial and Zoomer coders now dominate in the software space and none of them show much evidence of having ever heard of regression testing.