Oops! Looks like our GPS took you a bit off-trail. Sorry about that!

[Matthew / BPL]

JCH – Thanks for clarifying. I definitely misunderstood that.

[jscott]

wow, today things were worse than ever. I could not access ‘recent forum posts at all, until now. Plus, I wrote a long, brilliant essay on stoicism (yeah, yeah) that had to be deleted to exit from a crazed never ending downwards scroll, maybe on my end (i’m clumsy).

[Ray J]

I can’t get past the issue today, 8/26/2022.   I’m about to give up.  I plan to check the forum ONCE a day and if it doesn’t work, I’m not going to try again that day.

Admin, this is your Forum.  But it’s been unusable about 1/3 of the time, since April.  There are MUCH BETTER forum software available.  There were some posts about trying to increase membership and activity.  This forum software is doing the opposite.

[dirtbag]

I have to say, it is getting old quickly. Maybe go back to the old ways??  I enjoy reading posts and posting on this site and I am constantly browsing here throughout the day, it passes time for me at work, on the train.. But it is getting annoying how often I get that message.. And consistently too.. Perhaps they can change the message after every 10 times so it gives me something else to read???

[Ryan Jordan]

Thanks for your patience with this. It is frustrating.

When you get served an oops page, please note the exact time and the page you were trying to access and send to us via this email immediately: [email protected].

Please include what device, browser, and whether you are logged in or logged out.

and DON’T post anything in the forums right away. When you post, the links get reset and we lose the ability to diagnose what triggered it.

[Ray J]

8/26/2022, all day from around 9 AM Central USA time, thru noon on the same day.  I tried four times before I poked around to be able to find this post and state what a PIA it was today.  I am Windows, up to date and Firefox, also up to date, logged in, as I usually am.

I don’t get on a forum and start with a new topic, that would be a once-in-a-year(maybe) event for me.  I wish to browse the unread topics to see what is interesting.  I read topics first and research stuff.  The “OOPS” meant I would try a few times before moving on to the other forums I frequent.

An issue since April?   Developers still don’t know root cause?  Time for a new approach.  I browse three car-specialty forums a day, plus four other hiking forums.  None have these types of issues going on for months.  Sorry to be a pain, but if your software vendor can’t fix it, get a FULL refund and start over.  I know it’s painful, but so is this endless “OOPS”.

I’ll try to hang around just because I do get value from the forum.  But I really think you need to start over with different software.

[jscott]

I’ve had zero issues for two days. I wonder sometimes if I’m being randomly hacked, or if the website is being hacked. I’m sure that you’ve considered this.

[Ryan Jordan]

Don’t worry, neither you nor the website is being hacked :)

Based on the reports we’ve been collecting so far, we are seeing some differences in mobile vs. desktop, logged in vs. not logged in, and browser types being used. But we really need more reports to verify those trends. If we can verify them, we can put different types of logging in place for different types of users and really start to narrow this down.

Reminder:

When you get served an oops page, please note the exact time and the page you were trying to access and send to us via this email immediately: [email protected]. Please include what device, browser, and whether you are logged in or logged out.

Thanks for the suggestion about the forum software, but we have mostly determined that it’s not the forums. It’s actually related to what’s called a “flush permalinks” function in WordPress that is being triggered by something that shouldn’t be triggering it, and that’s what we’re trying to isolate – some script in some plugin is likely the culprit, so our efforts right now are focused on finding the likely candidates, installing logging to either prove or eliminate the cause-effect pairs, and then once isolated, we’ll install another script (that we’ve already tested and developed) that will immediately fix the links if/when they break so it will have minimal impact on users.

As for “all day” outages – this isn’t happening. Most users of the site see no Oops pages. And when the links are breaking, our caching servers are able to mitigate the damage for most users. That’s why it’s so important to send us the detailed reports above, so we can understand why some users are seeing these pages and some are not.

Thanks!

[Ken Larson]

[JCH]

Any progress on this?

[jscott]

It occurs to me that this may happen when I hit the ‘recent posts’ tag right after logging on to the home page. Even if the circle thing has stopped turning, it may be that the page needs a few more seconds to fully optimize…? and then once I get the message, it’s game over for some time.

The above is just an impression and may be entirely off base.

[jscott]

I forgot to add to the post above: a friend sent me an Ecard from a company that I’ve been receiving and sending ecards from for two years or so. Suddenly, I can’t load her card or send a reply via that card company web site. Their Q and A section mentions that they’ve recently run into problems with Chrome users.

edit: I jsut updated Chrome and can now load the ecard. I thought that Chrome automatically updated. Apparently not. Possible source of the issue?

[Matthew / BPL]

Any progress on this?

Our developer has a solution worked out. It’s going through testing right now. We don’t have a date for it to be installed yet (they have a queue). Our fingers hoping that happens sooner than later.

Good news: The number of reported problems has gone down by 10X since its peak. Anecdotal but I am on the site constantly because of my position and I am  seeing far fewer incidents. Also, I now have a way to reset the site which is great in the situation where Ryan is unavailable out in the field.

Please continue to report the error when it happens to [email protected] as per Ryan’s request earlier in this thread:

When you get served an oops page, please note the exact time and the page you were trying to access and send to us via this email immediately: [email protected]. Please include what device, browser, and whether you are logged in or logged out.

 

[Philip Tschersich]

Reported. 100% Oops rate for hours this morning on iOS Safari and Chrome on a PC for the recent topics link while logged in.

[Matthew / BPL]

🚨Really Important Message🚨

Hey everyone. Please continue to post reports of 404 errors (aka Oops! error) via email but DO NOT post to the forums. Posting on the forum when we are having a 404 error occurring interrupts our ability to test what is happening.

We may take the whole site offline to prevent all access while we run tests.

We are working hard on this. BPL is devoting significant resources toward resolving the issue.

Thanks for understanding!

[Trisha F]

Both Account and Community tabs are inaccessible for me, with this OOPS message. Only the Gear tab seems to be functioning. Somehow managed to navigate here through Google. But I’d like to verify my subscription cost and status. Is  there another way?

[Matthew / BPL]

PM sent!

Friendly reminder to everyone:

🚨Really Important Message🚨

Hey everyone. Please continue to post reports of 404 errors (aka Oops! error) via email but DO NOT post to the forums. Posting on the forum when we are having a 404 error occurring interrupts our ability to test what is happening.

We may take the whole site offline to prevent all access while we run tests.

We are working hard on this. BPL is devoting significant resources toward resolving the issue.

Thanks for understanding!

[Dan]

I haven’t been able to use Recent Forum Topics for a couple of days now.

[JCH]

editing

 

[jscott]

I had issues this morning. Couldn’t access “recent posts” over several attempts.

[Ray J]

3/23/2023 9:55 PM Central US time.  Just got this GPS message when it opened a bookmark to “Recent Forum Topics”.  Windows, current V11, Firefox also current.  This forum opens with 4 others.  The others opened fine.  This one took the error.  I read two other hiking forums and then tried the “Recent Forum Topics” for a second time and it again failed.  I clicked it a third time and it failed.

[Matthew / BPL]

Thank you for letting us know. Hopefully this is an isolated error.

[Brian G]

(I haven’t seen the “GPS took you a bit off-trail” problem for a while, but several months ago it was quite persistent.  Sorry I don’t now have more data on that…)

[Matthew / BPL]

I am currently getting 404/Off Trail message on Member Profiles and in PMs. We have shared example URLs with the developer. Hopefully we can get a quick fix. Thank you all for your patience. I will update here as we know more.

[Ken Larson]

“Go To My Private Message Inbox”….Oops!
Looks like our GPS took you a bit off-trail. Sorry about that!

27Mar2023 / 0730 hrs

[Author]

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