Seem familiar?

Always Online keeps a limited version of your site online if your server goes down. Prior to using CloudFlare, if your server went down, your website most likely went offline, which meant that your visitors could not access your site.

With Always Online, your server goes down, CloudFlare will serve pages from our cache, so your visitors still see some of the pages they are trying to visit. Your visitors will see a message at the top of the page telling them that they are in offline browsing mode. When your server comes back online, CloudFlare will bump users back to regular browsing seamlessly.

If CloudFlare does not have the requested page in its cache, the visitor sees an error page letting them know that the website page they are requesting is offline.

https://www.cloudflare.com/always-online

Some pages and actions require the server to be accessible to be executed, for instance Cloudflare can't cache reply or preview actions. In this case, you would be able to browse the site but not post. My guess is that this is the problem you're all experiencing.

There's absolutely nothing that you can do on your end to make OD's server respond. The last time I checked, it was hosted on a shared environment, possibly it's running on a PHP-FPM instance with slightly misconfigured resource allocation.

Cloudflare was originally activated as a safe-measure against DDoS, so that OD could "hide" the actual location of the server. As I demonstrated earlier in this thread, the location of the server can still be found, and Cloudflare seems to be doing the site little to no favours. It's possible that Cloudflare is just exposing more symptoms of an otherwise unavailable (overloaded & misconfigured) server, for instance hitting PHP-FPM's pm.max_children setting too often.

In my experience, Cambodia periodically has terrible connectivity to Cloudflare servers. Especially when AAG breaks, overloading our Vietnam uplink.

If it's not Cloudflare, then most likely another (to me) unknown layer of cache.

Just my 2 cents of speculation.

Possible client side solution: Cloudflare bypass

Warning, doing this is a great way to get greeted by this message:
You may have to end your current session (logout) before doing this. Don't worry about the message though, my IP is obviously not banned.

If you wish to disable Cloudflare to see if it gets better, add an entry to your hosts file pointing the CEO domain (including www) to x.x.x.x The webserver is incorrectly configured to allow traffic from any sources, not only Cloudflare, so the site is perfectly accessible this way. It may be a good solution if the entire problem turns out to be connectivity problems between Cloudflare and OD's host. Google "hosts file <your platform>" if you don't know how to find or edit your hosts file.

Please note that the IP shouldn't be considered secret since it's publicly available by looking up the DNS MX record, which points to the "secret" location itself:

Username Taken wrote:So, in the hosts file, we would add something like:

cambodiaexpatsonline.com x.x.x.x
http://www.cambodiaexpatsonline.com x.x.x.x

Would that be right?

Depending on your platform you may have to purge local DNS cache somehow, on Windows I guess that's more or less a reboot.

Username Taken wrote:Cut and pasted your code into the hosts file. Cleared the cache. And now its seems I'm banned from the site!

Roll back . . . . .

Don't worry, you're not banned :-) Did you try logging out before? I mentioned this in the post by the way, nothing to be scared of.

Edit: Just tested it, indeed no difference. I'll see if I can come up with a workaround anyway, will report back if I find something.

Don't see why this would have anything to do with themes.

I notice the server is still available at times when Cloudflare can't reach it. Disabling Cloudflare for the domain would solve the problem.

General Mackevili wrote:

BOFH wrote:Don't see why this would have anything to do with themes.

I notice the server is still available at times when Cloudflare can't reach it. Disabling Cloudflare for the domain would solve the problem.

I'm not sure that it does, but it all started acting funny again at the same time he flipped the themes. We'll see what he comes up with.

It has everything to do with themes. There's something wrong in one of the mods in the old one that's causing apache to chew up a shitton of memory. It resets apache, thus making the site unavailable while it does so, and yet the server is still reachable.

I've switched guest user and bots back to the new theme for the general to take some of the load off... the rest of the user base could help him out by switching themselves.