I have had a simple machines forum for over three years now that does get a decent amount of use.
Quite suddenly today the PM "my messages" area does not load at all.
index.php?action=pm
Anyone have any ideas?
in what way does it not load? anything in the error log?
Is it only not loading for you? Other members? Only certain members? Errors in your forum and hosting error log?
Ah - so true! Guess this is why you are the experts! ;)
Turns out it does not seem to be affecting the 'normal' member base - just moderators and admins? But still cannot figure out why...
Nothing at all showing up for errors in the error log or on my server log either.
do your admin and moderators have a lot of pm's?
No here is something else odd... Suddenly today I could access them. I had 5 pages which I deleted thinking having too many may have been part of the problem, etc.
However whenever I tried clicking on the 5th page it wouldn't load - but all other pages did load. It only worked too after I was sent two PMs this morning that brought me up over the 5th page.
Deleted all my PMs and it doesn't work again.
We don't have that many moderators actually - I checked with them and they only had like 9 and the other had 20 or so - nothing that seems it would break anything? I have had hundreds in the past without problems (since been deleted though).
And actually just checked - I can now access the area again as someone sent me a PM that brought me up over to a second page of PMs - but if I try and click on page one it won't load - but page 2 and 3 will?
So random and odd behavior.
PS: I wouldn't mind paying someone to help me fix this. We use the forums a lot and it is crucial everything is working properly.
So... I ended up solving the problem by going through and purging all the PMs from all admins and moderators and things started working again.
I guess one of the moderators sent a really 'big' PM to another moderator - a whole chat log - and it must have freaked out the system?
Thanks for the help guys.
Large PM's can cause the BBCode parser to balk and fail... not sure why, but it happens.