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The full message digest and image digest are not working.
This page isn’t working
news.povray.org is currently unable to handle this request.
HTTP ERROR 503
- BW
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hi,
"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscape net> wrote:
> The full message digest and image digest are not working.
>
> This page isn’t working
> news.povray.org is currently unable to handle this request.
> HTTP ERROR 503
all working here, let's hope it was transient/a "glitch".
regards, jr.
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"jr" <cre### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> all working here, let's hope it was transient/a "glitch".
Alas, I noticed this yesterday (at home) hoping the same, and it persists here
at work. So not computer/cache related.
- BW
Post a reply to this message
Attachments:
Download 'screenshot 2026-09-18 142018.png' (21 KB)
Preview of image 'screenshot 2026-09-18 142018.png'
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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> The full message digest and image digest are not working.
>
> This page isn’t working
> news.povray.org is currently unable to handle this request.
> HTTP ERROR 503
>
> - BW
Everything works for me.
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Looks like everything is working again, both at home and work.
Fingers crossed it stays that way.
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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> Looks like everything is working again, both at home and work.
>
> Fingers crossed it stays that way.
Who runs the forum and is responsible for it?
I'm a PHP programmer, maybe I can help.
Ma
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hi,
"Maetes" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> ...
> Who runs the forum and is responsible for it?
the infrastructure is owned, and maintained, by Chris (Cason); see eg this
recent post:
<news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/%3C6aaca6da%241%40news.povray.org%3E/#msg-hdr-448237>
regards, jr.
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On 19/09/2026 00:49, Bald Eagle wrote:
> The full message digest and image digest are not working.
Just the usual abuse. Maybe not as heavy as past weeks.
Post a reply to this message
Attachments:
Download '3a.png' (162 KB)
Download '4a.png' (96 KB)
Preview of image '3a.png'
Preview of image '4a.png'
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Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
> On 19/09/2026 00:49, Bald Eagle wrote:
> > The full message digest and image digest are not working.
>
> Just the usual abuse. Maybe not as heavy as past weeks.
Hey Chris, Is there anything we can help you with?
I have little experience with forums and don't know how helpful I can be, but
I'm a Backend PHP programmer.
I had also thought about whether I should take a closer look at an open-source
forum software and try my hand at importing individual forum threads. To maybe
bring our message board into this millennium, with a few more functions. But
nothing has come of it so far.
Greetings Ma
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On 23/09/2026 19:16, Maetes wrote:
> Hey Chris, Is there anything we can help you with?
>
> I have little experience with forums and don't know how helpful I can be, but
> I'm a Backend PHP programmer.
Thanks for the offer - I do appreciate it. At this point, there is not a lot that can
be done in software. If someone decides to hit the forum with 1,000 requests / second
(for example) there really is no programmatic solution unless they are using a single
IP (what we tend to see these days are residential botnets). Mostly I rely on
Cloudflare now that we are proxied by them.
Generally speaking I try to avoid turning on managed or interactive challenge to stop
them (the latter is quite effective) but am coming to the point where I might have to
add a cron job to auto-activate it (via API call) if the forums get hammered.
I am already planning an exit from the current forum software and have been coding an
"archive" version that is fully static and contains the magic markup that allows
google to index it correctly (we already have valid JSON-LD but google ignores it).
Most likely will go to structured markup. This is also part of work to bring better
search (I'm using Algolia). I'm having good results with the latter but need to work
on the crawler side more.
FWIW the "archive" view will be aggressively cached on Cloudflare. The downside of
this is that no logins work in archive mode (cached version is always the logged-out
view - but there will be a link to the live version), they are single page (this is
also an upside since modern browsers are quite capable of handling even our longest
threads), and no sorting.
The archive view is what will get indexed by search engines and where possible I will
redirect scrapers there (not always possible but we'll see).
> I had also thought about whether I should take a closer look at an open-source
> forum software and try my hand at importing individual forum threads. To maybe
> bring our message board into this millennium, with a few more functions. But
> nothing has come of it so far.
You are looking in the right direction: our forums (as most of the world sees them)
were originally written in an era where the majority of users were connecting via NNTP
and the web view was kind of a fallback. Now most posts and views are from the web.
New forum software is definitely on the tables - potentially with an import from the
existing one, or if not the existing one will serve as a read-only reference
side-by-side with the new one.
We still have some NNTP users (including myself) and I do not want to cut them off.
Nothing out there really caters for threaded views though - yes there are a few
exceptions, but not many. I will do my best to make it happen since I still much
prefer threading for forums (and the entire opposite for emails).
Currently my two top choices are Discourse (open-source and not to be confused with
Discord, which is a proprietary walled garden that does not share information) and
self-hosted XenForo with the Media Gallery and Resource Manager add-ons (commercial
but not expensive).
Also, a footnote regarding import (regardless of what we use): all new forum software
requires login to post, with each article thus attributed to a poster or other
identity on the server. While many posts on this site are able to be connected to a
login, particularly recent ones, this is not the case for all activity (even recent)
and much less so 10-20 years ago. I would not want to treat the two groups
differently, nor would I want to import all posts under a "default" user identity. If
we import at all, at most only very old posts will have a default or missing forum
userid. I will need to engage with currently active NNTP users to get them to create
an account on povray.org (if they don't have one) and find a way of definitively
linking their NNTP posts with the account.
-- Chris
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On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:41:52 +1000, Chris Cason wrote:
> Currently my two top choices are Discourse (open-source and not to be
> confused with Discord, which is a proprietary walled garden that does
> not share information) and self-hosted XenForo with the Media Gallery
> and Resource Manager add-ons (commercial but not expensive).
FWIW, I am an admin in an open source community that uses Discourse. If
you want to deploy it yourself, the Docker-based installation is (a)
officially supported, and (b) super easy to set up and use.
They also have a hosted option, but that may be cost prohibitive for this
community.
There was an older plugin for integrating with NNTP, but I don't know if
it has been updated recently or works with the current database schema.
An experienced coder who understands Ruby (their language of choice) could
probably update it pretty easily since NNTP hasn't changed in ages.
I also noticed that they recently added fully threaded discussions as an
option. I haven't looked at it yet, but probably should (I've got 3 or 4
different sandbox environments of my own set up).
Jim
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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On 23/09/2026 19:41, Chris Cason wrote:
> Currently my two top choices are Discourse (open-source and not to be
> confused with Discord, which is a proprietary walled garden that does
> not share information) and self-hosted XenForo with the Media Gallery
> and Resource Manager add-ons (commercial but not expensive).
>
+ 1 for Discourse - it's very neat and convenient.
Often visiting this forum and like how it works:
https://discourse.threejs.org/
--
YB
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Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
> You are looking in the right direction: our forums (as most of the world sees
> them) were originally written in an era where the majority of users were
> connecting via NNTP and the web view was kind of a fallback. Now most posts and
> views are from the web. New forum software is definitely on the tables -
> potentially with an import from the existing one, or if not the existing one
> will serve as a read-only reference side-by-side with the new one.
Having written most of the forum software in PHP and a bit of C++ a quarter
century ago (!!!), I think it had a pretty good run an should really be retired
:-) I would never have imagined it running for that long, and in all those years
no NNTP server ever appeared as open source that also supported a web forum
software, which, iirc was the original hope when developing this stop-gap
solution.
Thorsten
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On Fri, 16 Oct 2026 11:59:57 EDT, Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> and in all those years no NNTP server ever appeared as open source that
> also supported a web forum software, which, iirc was the original hope
> when developing this stop-gap solution.
There have been a few web forum platforms that have had NNTP connectors,
however. I used to help admin a vBulletin system, and there was an NNTP
plugin there that ran a bi-directional polling routine every 10 minutes or
so. (Arguably, vBulletin wasn't open source; it was written in php, but to
use it required a paid license).
More recently (relatively), there has been a plugin for Discourse, however
it hasn't been maintained in a few years and to my knowledge, is no longer
compatible with the current releases.
There was also hypernews IIRC. Though all I have been able to find
suggests it had an e-mail gateway but not NNTP. But when I was involved
in the forums at Novell, NNTP users were a big part of the audience back
in the day (90s and early 2000s), and we used hypernews for a short period
of time (and absolutely hated it).
A big part of the challenge is that there are so many different nntp
server platforms out there; inn is an open source option, as is dnews, but
configuring them properly is challenging unless you've done it before (inn
in particular is difficult to set up securely correctly). Other platforms
(I had worked with a proprietary one from Highwinds that had a high-
availability clustered configuration) have lots of different options, but
the implementation of the core NNTP protocols could also vary
significantly - particularly things like XOVER and other extended
commands. So a web-based forum implementing something could only ever
really implement the most basic set of commands, and handling things like
superseding messages and cancel messages was very hit-and-miss (for
vBulletin's connector, cancel was implemented, but not supersede).
One of the successors to the Novell forums that I worked on is the
openSUSE community, and we eventually dropped NNTP (to the chagrin of a
small group of users - which included myself) because the effort to
maintain the code ourselves wasn't in the cards for us given the very
small number of users who still used it.
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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On 17/10/2026 02:59, Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
>> You are looking in the right direction: our forums (as most of the world sees
>> them) were originally written in an era where the majority of users were
>> connecting via NNTP and the web view was kind of a fallback. Now most posts and
>> views are from the web. New forum software is definitely on the tables -
>> potentially with an import from the existing one, or if not the existing one
>> will serve as a read-only reference side-by-side with the new one.
>
> Having written most of the forum software in PHP and a bit of C++ a quarter
> century ago (!!!), I think it had a pretty good run an should really be retired
> :-) I would never have imagined it running for that long, and in all those years
> no NNTP server ever appeared as open source that also supported a web forum
> software, which, iirc was the original hope when developing this stop-gap
> solution.
Your code has held up remarkably well! A few things had to be changed for PHP 7 but
the database schema and other functionality is still pretty much as you wrote it all
those years ago. The one thing I occasionally tweak is the thumbnail generation as we
never anticipated all the way back then the size of some of the images that are being
posted :)
I do need to do a cleanup run of all the thumbnails as some are missing due to not
being able to be handled at the time. But overall it's held up remarkably well, even
when being pummeled by hordes of bots.
One problem we have now is that Google has changed the way it scrapes forums and for
quite a while they have not been indexing us properly. I have added JSON-LD markup but
they still don't like it; the next step would be to using structured markup. I also
need to unroll the short page size - while 10 pages was about all a 1990's-era browser
would like, nowadays there would be few if any threads on this server that would be
too long for a current-generation browser to handle. As it is I have set the default
page size for new visitors to I think 50 messages, and allow up to 100.
I am also playing around with Algolia as a search provider, plus Cloudflare has its
own search in a beta phase. But I need to get the structured markup sorted before I
return to trying to get it all indexed.
-- Chris
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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> The full message digest and image digest are not working.
>
> This page isn’t working
> news.povray.org is currently unable to handle this request.
> HTTP ERROR 503
>
> - BW
it's still not working - regular pages work fine.
All the digests are unable to be used (for me)
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On 18/10/2026 09:14, Bald Eagle wrote:
> it's still not working - regular pages work fine.
> All the digests are unable to be used (for me)
To rule out a caching issue, could you please find an example of a page that does not
load and add ?bypass-cache=1 to the URL?
If that does not work, please use your browser developer tools (usually F12), go to
the network tab, make sure caching is turned off (usually a checkbox), then
shift-reload the page. If you get a 5xx series error, please inspect the headers of
the response - I need the cf-ray header at a minimum, plus any other ones you choose
to share.
-- Chris
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Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
> On 18/10/2026 09:14, Bald Eagle wrote:
> > it's still not working - regular pages work fine.
> > All the digests are unable to be used (for me)
>
> To rule out a caching issue, ...
OK - but of course it's working now.
So the next time it happens I'll try to provide as much info.
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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> OK - but of course it's working now.
> So the next time it happens I'll try to provide as much info.
Full message digest wasn't working again, so I did
?bypass-cache=1
and that worked.
Post a reply to this message
Attachments:
Download 'screenshot 2026-10-18 102927.png' (37 KB)
Preview of image 'screenshot 2026-10-18 102927.png'
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