What Ever Happened to iSPY?

[acbaker]

Hey, Guys...

What ever happened to the iSPY function? When the forum first started up again, I could click on the "New Posts" link and would get the iSPY page. That was very handy because it seemed to update in real time regardless of the forum in which a thread was posted. I bookmarked that original link, but when I use that bookmark now I only get a "404 Not Found" message.

The link I get now does not update itself after it has been opened so I have to keep coming back and back to click on that link. Even so, it doesn't seem to track posts that I have not yet seen. I seem to miss a fair number of new threads until well after they were submitted and there are already several replies.

Is there a way to get the iSPY monitoring link back?

TIA,

ACB

[Mandy]

Uh oh, weird! I don't know what happened to it; I'm sure Kyle will reply here, but I will send an email his way, too, just in case.

As an admin, I have the setting turned on to get an email notification for every new post or thread (which adds up to a lot of emails! haha)... so I don't really have a need to use the iSpy function and hadn't realized it wasn't working anymore. I'm glad you said something!

As a possible alternative in the meantime, I wonder if you also have the ability to "subscribe" to the forums of your choice? If you click the "Spider and Arachnid Identification" forum, for example, then look on the top right of the list of threads, do you see a "Forum Tools" drop-down menu? My account shows a "Subscribe to this forum" option, but I don't know if it's available to everyone or not (should be). If you do have that option, I think it will send you an email every time a new thread gets posted.

[acbaker]

I do see the "Forum Tools" drop-down you describe and it will let me subscribe to that forum.

I think I still would prefer the iSPY page because it just scrolls as new posts are added. That way I see the most recent two-dozen or so posts on a browser tab and can go to previous pages to backtrack.

I do get e-mails regarding threads that I've contributed to or selected to follow. I don't know how you keep up with the flood of stuff you must get!

Anyway, thanks for checking. I'll keep my fingers crossed that iSPY can come back.

[Kyle]

This will be back soon.. but it caused some severe server problems due to the load. It makes it easy for people to accidentally or intentionally DDoS the server because each user that opens iSpy has a persistent connection to the forum database open, with new posts being shown in realtime.

[acbaker]

OK... understand, Kyle. Thanks for giving it your attention. I previously limited connection time to when I was actually at the computer but always logged off when not actually here. Just let us know what is acceptable practice there.

[Mandy]

I had to look up "DDoS the server." Does that mean someone might have been trying to hack the forum, Kyle? Or does it just crash and then there's no way to tell what specifically happened?

[Kyle]

When the forum crashed a month ago, I looked through the logs after it happened to try and diagnose what may have caused it. The iSpy script was being overloaded by some visitor. They loaded it in hundreds/thousands of browser windows (which means it likely wasn't a web browser at all but some custom script). It was weird though, as some of the evidence suggested it wasn't intentional.

[Mandy]

Weird!

[Kyle]

It's back, for now!

[acbaker]

Thanks, Kyle!

I'll be careful to use it only when I'm at the computer and checking frequently.

Arch