Intermittent problem posting to the BBS

Does anyone else find that for periods of several days at a time they are unable to post to the BBS when accessing from certain places? Every so often I get a 404 (or similar) when clicking the final "Continue" button in the send process. It rectifies itself a few days later.

In the mean time, it always works fine from the office.

I thought this could have been down to my screwy cable ISP (NTL) but I just talked with Patrick (pca) and he is also experiencing this. He has been unable to post to the BBS for the last week or more, from his Telewest cable account.

Rob

I have not had this problem, the BBS has been working fine for me the past few weeks. I do it from two different locations.

Something that often helps me with BBS troubles is hitting the "Logout" link at the top of the page, then logging in again. I've gotten into the habit of doing this once per day, it prevents me from getting the old "unread marks" bug.

Rob, I am not a cable access expert since I use DSL. However, one of the things I do know is that many US cable ISPs put you on a proxy (similar to what squid does) to reduce traffic since everyone in your area shares the same bandwidth. To me, this is totally unacceptable and is one of the reasons I use DSL. I will bet you are having trouble posting due to their selfish proxy horse sh*t. I access this BBS from my DSL line and a T1 primarily and have never had a problem sending a post.

I'm not saying DSL is perfect... don't get me wrong. However, given the choice between the two, DSL is the winner for me.

And remember, the people who get jobs at the cable companies are the people who couldn't get jobs at the phone company.

I have experienced problems linking my avatar to my nickname...and occasionally I have the problem Rob described above. I also browse from two different places (work and home) but I doubt it is the ISP...I get the same performance usually from both locations. As for DSL versus cable, I had DSL in Winnipeg (at an old Army base!) and cannot get it here in downtown Windsor! I am happy with cable so far and really don't experience much of a differance at all.... The avatar problem I attribute to the host location (Yahoo briefcase)...still can't figure that one out tho...

Geocities doesn't allow linking to images from pages off their server. This is to cut down on bandwidth from people using their service to host eBay images. Since Yahoo owns Geocities now, I guess they imposed that restriction on Briefcase as well.

Hmmmm

I wasn't aware of that...funny thing is tho, it worked for a few days for each of the three avatars I had posted and then they crapped out...gotta find me a new pic host I guess...

Just attach your avitar to your next post and then link to that. I think that's what Tony does.

Seen!

Thanks Rob, I never thought of that....

(and here's my pic!)...

edit: the original pic does not display to the left because I noticed a problem with it..it (and the link) were deleted so that's why it shows up as a x-box...

I have had this same posting problem. Recently i went to friend's house and checked the bbs from there and could not post. It was the damnest thing. I had to wait until i got back to post anything.

I've never had problems posting to this board. Not with my current cable ISP or with my former DSL one.
I've also never had to log out and back in again to correct a problem.
I guess I'm fortunate.

It could be the proxy, although I've not had a problem accessing any other sites.

The cable service is mostly reliable and nothing else around here comes close to the price (£25 a month). I might consider changing to ADSL but I'm not sure that's available here yet, and in any case I guess it would involve becoming a BT phone customer which is something I've sworn I'll never do again.

Rob

I've had the same problems, always at home, using various browsers and with two proxies (NTL's and the open Pipex one I use when NTL's one is down). Has been fine for the past few weeks though.

I've also had problems accessing the site from home (on NTL). I used to get "Connection Refused" or somesuch. In the end, I tracked it down to an interaction problem between my squid proxy at home and NTL's transparent proxy. If I configure IE to not use my home proxy for *.comms.net, it works fine. I've not had a problem with it in the last two months.

<my2cents>

I find cable access at my house to be superb.
I get about 2 MegaBit off the internet and about 400 KiloBit to the internet just about any time of the day.
My experience with DSL is lag lag lag... the old click and wait... then go... fast.
Although most cable setups are not as fast as mine and or DSL,
I never encountered a lag on any cable connection and never found cable speed to be inadequete.

</my2cents>

Hi.

I noticed three problems of why the BBS wouldn't allow me to post:

1. Disabling cookies
2. Disabling referrer transmission
3. not being logged in
   

Especially the second point is tricky, because many personal firewalls and/or ad blockers block the referrer request-header field. Also, quite a few proxies are configured to block the referrer information.

cu,
sven

Hi.

<my2cents>
I find cable access at my house to be superb.
I get about 2 MegaBit off the internet and about 400 KiloBit to the internet just about any time of the day.
My experience with DSL is lag lag lag... the old click and wait... then go... fast.
Although most cable setups are not as fast as mine and or DSL,
I never encountered a lag on any cable connection and never found cable speed to be inadequete.
</my2cents>
If DSL lags noticably, there is a problem that does not correlate with DSL directly. Actually, most cable modems are technically DSL modems, only with a higher bandwidth (because TV cable can transmit higher frequencies than the phone lines typically used by DSL). Still, cable modems usually have a delay of about 30-80ms between two hops, while normal DSL usually has about 80-120ms delay (in both cases with many exceptions). At least for the cable modems and DSL modems and lines I've seen so far.
But a noticable lag would be in the 200-300ms area. Except in egoshooter games maybe. But certainly not when talking about downloads.
Still, being a DSL user, I would _love_ to switch to cable, even if it was only for the bandwidth. Unfortunately though, cable isn't available at my home currently.

cu,
sven

I've had both at my house, and let me tell you, at least in my experience, cable is most definitely faster. My only complaint about cable is that they just capped my nntp d/l's to 48 kbps. Ick. Enter» Easynews. Problem solved.

And your only reason for having cable or DSL is to decode usenet binaries?

Cheers Rob,

I had given up on posting my avatar for that very reason - geocities being crap.

Wonder if this'll work?

Hmm - guess not

2nd attempt

Sorted. Cheers Rob.

Actually, while having my avatar loaded from my website is quite useful for finding out who's been reading (or at least looking at) my posts on the BBS, I really can't be bothered with it.

So I'm attaching my avatar here, then.