504 Gateway time out is back

Well, pretty clearly “But in one specific post, probably about January, he said the problem was in our user computers being infected with malware, and had nothing to do with Kalmbach” was not the whole story at that time. hange in ownership often means a clean sweep of the old The recent off and on aspect of the forum is likely the prelude to curtailing their existence.

I think Steve Otte was saying that the Ad Distributor is to be blamed for their content impacting the User Experience. If my interpretation is correct then this rings true to me as Facebook has the same problem with whomever their ad distributor is in the upper right corner of the FB page because it is a recurring problem with FB that a malware ad pops up that emulates a user getting a FB message or response to a FB post…click on it and they can hack your FB account. Not easy to track that nonsense down via FB staff because they do not own the content in the web page region where the mischef occurs. I suspect the same is true of the Kalmback webpage in the area of problematic content ads.

Do they ban the ad distributor and lose a chunk of revenue or do they put up with it and try to fix the issue as it occurs?..so that is the quandry I believe. So my take on this is it is the ad distributor they use and only some of the ads that are at issue, well initially anyway…noticed the problem is slowly getting worse over time. So I also surmise a Forum Software update is part of the issue as well and it might not have been kept as current as it should have been. Just all gueses on my part as thankfully I am not on Kalmbach Staff. IT is not the only issue that was slipping in my view. Marketing has slipped. I remember when Kalmbach had a booth at most major Model Railroading shows or would show up at railfan events and make their attendence known. Not so much anymore. I suspect regular ebb and flow of business cycle for a company of this size and right now appears to be a definite ebb vs flow.

They could be doing a lot more with marketing without spending a lot of

That was my take as well. FWIW, I’ve been able to set up Firefox to kill the ads by the simple expedient of enabling HTTPS only mode and setting enhanced tracking protection to “strict”. Do wish the advertisers/websites take note that ads that don’t cover content are less likely to be blocked. Ads can also be created to be worth reading/watching in their own right, Analog Devices “Rarely asked questions” was often a more interesting and useful read than the content in the magazines they appeared in.

3 days without a 504 error…

I can’t make that statement.

There is a free ad blocker called Adblock Plus. It is an add on to Firefox and works very well. I have been using it for years. No ad of any kind on my system.

I have been using U Block on Chrome without issue.

I have a hosts file. Granted, it’s a Windows thing, but I see virtually no ads and I don’t have to worry about the ad blocker being malware itself. Most of the ads come from just a few sites.

I can’t click on the “sponsored” ads if I search for a product, but the same site usually shows up further down the results list.

Use your favorite search engine for more info on hosts files.

I still get them but I don’t want to go through the hassle of changing web browers, though I might start using Edge to access the website instead of Chrome. For some reason everyone gives priority to testing Microsoft over other products. Ad distributors do not care what garbage they send out…I noticed.

Microsoft operating systems security has more holes than swiss cheese. Every time I see a company get hacked or ransomwared I have a good laugh. Microsoft will never learn. Unix operating systems have a program built into the operating system itself called selinix which stands for security enhanced linux. It was first created by the NSA to help secure their systems. As far as I know, haveing retired in 2010 they are still using it. A version was eventually released into the public domain and is constantly being upgraded.

The “hosts file” is pretty much standard with any OS that uses DNS software that was derived from the orginal Berkeley (Go Bears!) software. This includes just about every variation of UNIX (Solaris, Linux, BSD’s (MacOS userland is BSD), HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, QNX, etc) along with MS-Windows. The standard UNIX file is usually in the /etc directory i.e. “/etc/hosts”, though MacOS stores it in the /private/etc directory, and thus “/private/etc/hosts”.

The advantage of the “hosts” file is that it just has to be set up once on the computer (though may need updating), doesn’t cost anything and should work with any browser.

Addendum: Got hit by the 504 error message when posting - post succeeded, error came while refreshing the webpage.

Dear trains got another hit Sunday evening about 23:00. These 504s are so tiring.

Ditto

I never go to the MR or CTT forums, just Trains and Classic Trains. With the magazines having subscription in the many tens of thousands, is it really worth it to keep the forums up and running when there’s only about 25 regular posters and some of them don’t subscribe?

A more important question would be whether it makes better sense to ‘monetize’ the forums by including them in a trains.com Unlimited type of subscription. All that would change is that you’d need “valid” trains.com sign-in credentials (which would only work if your suscription was current, as for all the other digital collateral that constitutes “IP”) which is something that’s already been debugged and set up on a ‘modern’ basis.

The ‘fair’ thing to do in that case would be to ‘reimburse’ the frequent posters or useful idiots with credit equal to the time and effort put in, applied toward their “$6.95 per month” in the month(s) that contributions are present. Now that we can expect more funding the Kalmbach ‘experience’ to be provided in the new organization, I suspect there would be members of staff who could make a fair evaluation and provide a sensible accounting of how that might be done.

There is the additional question whether merely reading threads on the forum, referred from all the Google and other bot ‘indexing’ (some of which is remarkably fast, indexing and providing links to posts that in some cases are only seconds old!) should be allowed to people who haven’t signed in (or paid dues). There are plenty of examples where Google displays text that cannot be searched or read when actually trying to reference a given source…

I wonder how many of the primary posters plus non-posting regular readers would pay for the dubious privilege of entry to a dying forum?

It would work for me as part of the “unlimited” membership benefits.

Participation in this General forum is indeed very low now. But it was not always so. It seems to me that this falling participation is something that began in just the last few years. Prior to that, I would estimate the average number of active, frequent posters was maybe 100, and the number new threads per day was maybe 10.

To make a decision on how to proceed with the forum, it would help to know why the General forum participation is falling. It may be a natural decline based on user interests and habits.

Or it may be because of all the recent technical problems that are limiting participation. So I think that before trying to solve the operation problem with an entirely new system, it would be better to first find out what the current technical operational problem actually is. Why not have the problem professionally diagnosed and then get a price quote to fix it? Then fix the problem and maybe the participation will shoot back up to pre-2020 levels.

Participation is down due to a number of bannings and a number of deaths with few if any new participants coming on board.

The slipshod operation of the board’s software has made it problematic for anyone to withstand the aggravations.

I suspect the decline in forum participation is something beyond just this one. I follow a couple of forum topics on railroad.net, and that forum site software works near flawlessly. 10 years ago there would be at least several posts a day and several new topics per week. Now it is common to go several days between posts, let alone new topics. People seemed to have moved on to other types of social media, I.e Facebook, Instagram, etc.

A once active firefighting forum hasn’t had a post in months. People have passed, moved on, or whatever.

It’s funny, in a way. The stuff we complain the most about on fora is the very same thing that generates activity - posts with some form of controversy.

I suspect, too, that at some point, most of the questions that could be asked have been asked (as has been pointed out when a newby does ask a question). With only six Class 1’s now, regional interest lags, too.