Site performance, Server errors, outages and tunings

[Like Ra]

In this case there was some misconfiguration from my side. When I bought the new IP I made the changes but did not reboot the server, because there were too many people around, and was going to reboot after installing a new kernel patch. But the VPS was restarted by the Linode team when I was not around, and I began to look at it when the server was not reachable for around 2.5 hours.

[bondagetom1]

Apparently I've reached this point again. I hate the design of this site, I hate the structure, I hate the menus, I hate how the site is shown on the mobile devices, I hate when the referenced material disappears, I hate to keep searching for and reuploading lost photos and videos, I hate to go through the lengthy troubleshooting procedure after upgrades, I hate promoting the site everywhere on the Internet, ....

I'm more or less happy with how the forum is organized - the result of moving posts and threads around to keep everything on-topic. Unfortunately it's not mobile friendly - the next major version will be dedicated to mobile devices, but ALL existing plugins will become incompatible after the upgrade. Unless the plugin developers are still around and are willing to rewrite their projects, some functionality will be lost. And I do not like the current default theme, which is planned for that version.

The rest of the site is a different story. 16 years ago it was all HTML and frame based, then I rewrote it in PHP, then I added one blog software, later, when the blog platform became abandoned, moved to WordPress. Despite my efforts to update all bits and pieces, the site still contains atavistic elements, like very small pictures (to save space and bandwidth), incompatible with various browsers and devices pages, etc. Most of it looks severely outdated.

Out of despair I rewrote the main site page, removed a half out of it, and directly linked the forum, instead of the blog. Yeah, "the lowest hanging fruit"...  The menu system is next in the urgent TODO list...

And as always - all your ideas are very welcome!

You do an amazing job Ra. Love the new homepage and features. Thank you for building an incredible community!

[Like Ra]

The site supports TLS1.3 now! But to enjoy this faster and more secure protocol you must have Firefox 63 or Chrome 70. Apple and Microsoft are far behind, sorry.

[Like Ra]

The forum and the blog software have been upgraded to the latest versions.

[Tinker D]

Are you sure everything is fine? Did you reboot ?

[Like Ra]

Did you reboot ?

Yes 😉

Are you sure everything is fine?

No 😉

[Like Ra]

I tweaked how the Alerts popup window is shown up. It should work more reliably now on all devices.

[zan]

It wouldn't be a bad idea to disable TLS 1.0

https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/ar...-early-tls

[Like Ra]

It wouldn't be a bad idea to disable TLS 1.0

Good point! Done!

TLS 1.3 Yes
TLS 1.2 Yes
TLS 1.1 No
TLS 1.0 No
SSL 3 No
SSL 2 No

[zan]

It wouldn't be a bad idea to disable TLS 1.0

Good point! Done!

TLS 1.3 Yes
TLS 1.2 Yes
TLS 1.1 No
TLS 1.0 No
SSL 3 No
SSL 2 No

If you want other security enhancements, consider the following:

• DNSSEC (some registrars or authoritative DNS providers still are working on support for this though)
  
• HSTS header (Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=63072000)
  
• HTTP to HTTPS redirection (<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName www.likera.com Redirect permanent / https://www.likera.com/ </VirtualHost>😉
  

Great work so far! This is one of the best administered small forums I've seen