Grand High Pobah

Update: To all of you who have waited for the issues to be resolved, the wait is mostly over. The new web hosting company now has my website functioning, sort of. The DNS name servers that do the translation for cacherstats.com to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx are still updating around the world but should be finished soon if they have not already completed. Databases have been moved and new users and permissions set up. A number of programming changes have already been done. There are a number more to do. I am handling them based on average usage for the pages. Bear with me on this one. The data is still old, about a month out of date. I will get it updated just as quickly as I can. In the interim you can click on the link for Current Stats and see where things are. I expect to have new data out there in a couple of days. On the plus side, the new web pages will be more functional and user friendly than what was there in the past. I have tried to consider how the information is used and I think I have come close with this design. Just a few more days for this. Until things are finished, go out and find more caches and have fun

Just a short update. I am currently working with the new webhosting company (A2 webhosting) and the transfer of the website is in progress as I write this, July 27, 2018 13:00 MDT. I expect a few days of disruption but I will be trying my best to get everything up and running, even if not perfect, as soon as possible. The offer of help out with any cost is very much appreciated but I maintain this website for the benefit of all geocachers with a no cost to users philosophy. On the days when I feel overwhelmed and don't want to do things, I take solace knowing that no one has paid a cent for this offering. I would like to keep it that way. Try to think kind thoughts about my efforts, if you can, and that will be enough reward for me. I will post another update when things seem to be up and running. Cache on, Grand High Pobah/Brady Nellis

I last put out an update on April 17th and figured now would be a good time to provide another update. The history of what is going on is in March my web hosting company made changes to their servers which resulted in all of my larger pages no longer being sent out when requested. The web hosting company was acquired by EIG , a holding company with a large stable of web hosting companies that they own, sometime in 2017 I believe. When first notified of the ownership change it was basically a "don't worry, everything will work out fine" message. I guess I should have just run for the hills at that point. I opened a trouble ticket in March and then followed up over March and April. From time to time there was some small progress so I let them continue along with my ticket. Mind you, they never got back to me after mid April but at least a the smaller pages continued to work, ie, state pages. I also started looking around for a replacement web hosting company that was not associated with EIG. Research had shown that EIG customer ratings were unacceptable. I found at least one web hosting company that has what I need and had good customer ratings. They are a good candidate. I started to reprogram the web pages because I was losing hope that they would ever get around to resolving my ticket In the third week in June I got an email from IX Webhosting (my current web hoster) saying in broken English, the problem is yours because we are not going to change the configuration of the server. No acknowledgement that they caused the problem in the first place. Kind of irritated me in the extreme. Last week the other shoe dropped. I got an email that said in essence "tough luck, we are dropping you come the end of August when we shut down the servers". Oh, and you better get you stuff off the servers pronto because we may just lose your stuff at any time. And there are going to be outages. Sounds like a Russian fairy tale where people are being thrown to the wolves from a sled. I suspect they had a limited budget for migration and it got used up. I can tell from database id's that there are a large number of users they turning their back on. I started backing up everything and I think I have it all. I am spending every moment I can to get everything reprogrammed and prepped for the new hosting company, whoever that may end of being. At this point I do not yet have a timetable but I am hopeful to have most things in place by about the end of July. If you have additional questions or thoughts, please reply to me. I will do my best to get answers to you in a timely fashion.

After a somewhat lengthy chat session with the support personnel at the web hosting company, I think more progress is being made. From everything I can learn the bottom line problem is a security mod that was put on the web server that hosts my pages back in early March. Yes, I know it is now April, but no task can be done before it's allotted time, sadly. The problem ticket has now been expedited and moved over to the system admins for resolutions. Why this wasn't done any of the other times I contacted them is a mystery but I suspect that the true nature of this problem, which probably affects a fair number of hosted web sites, was not known until quite recently. I was told that the systems admins work on problems in the order that they get them so we are back at the end of another queue. Let's hope for a speedy resolution

As of today still no progress. I am now looking for a new web hosting company as an alternative that is not associated with the new web hosting holding company EIG. To move will be painful, so what isn't I guess.

I have another update now. It is truly amazing what you MIGHT accomplish after doing a whole bunch of "being on the outside looking to the inside" investigation and being in a chat session for an hour and a half. The long and the short of it is I have been promised that the problem ON THEIR SIDE will be resolved very shortly. Let us hope that is the case. Here is what I found. I opened a trouble ticket and clearly explained, with examples, what I had found while attempting to access the main page entry page. By this I mean I got back some boilerplate html that displayed nothing. I got no response to the trouble ticket for the intervening 11 days which was frustrating. Today I had had enough so I bit the bullet and started running tests to see what I could get to work. It turned out that any static web page over about 512Kb in size (interesting number that 512) would fail to display the desired result. After I pinned that down, I screwed up my courage, laid in supplies for a long siege, and started a chat session. After explaining the problem to the representative what I had determined, I got the response that the ticket would need to be escalated to back end support which is where it stands as I write this. With any luck, they will make whatever changes are required to the Apache Web Server involved. Apparently, this problem came about as a result of a maintenance run on the web server during the early days of March.

Hi All, I am the keeper of Cacherstats.com. First, I apologize for the outage. The only excuse I have is it is out of my hands. Such is life. Here is an update on the status. Earlier this month my web hosting provider started having problems serving selected pages to you. As background, the web hosting company was acquired by another web hosting provider a couple of months back. Earlier this month they did web server maintenance about the time all the problems started. I suspect, but do not know, the maintenance activities are behind the problem. From time to time what a user sees is anything from a blank page to a page indicating there is a general server error to a page showing links to other loosely associated pages by subject. None of this is helpful.. I have opened a trouble ticket with the web hosting provider but have had no response for a week. I am getting more than a little frustrated with their lack of support. I am investigating changing web hosting providers but that will be painful to me and I really hate to go down that path. As a potential interim partial solution, you may go directly to your location by using http://www.cacherstats.com/Colorado1.html or the like. Absolutely no guarantee that any particular location will work but it is worth a try. Also, http://www.cacherstats.com/Rank1-250.html. I intend to stay after the web hosting provider to see if I cannot get some resolution. I will also try to see if I can somehow make it work from my end but I have grave doubts about that possibility. I will keep you all informed as the status changes. Wish me luck, Grand High Pobah/Brady nellis

I am happy to report that Cacherstats.com is back up and running. Some of the data is a little out of sync but right now the goal is to identify the true source of the problem and to provide solutions that will keep the problem from reoccuring. I will try to keep you informed about what is going on with posts here. The ultimate solution may be down the road a piece, but proper solutions will be found. Ya all have fun and go find some caches for me to count.

I am happy to report that Cacherstats.com is back up and running. Some of the data is a little out of sync but right now the goal is to identify the true source of the problem and to provide solutions that will keep the problem from reoccuring. I will try to keep you informed about what is going on with posts here. The ultimate solution may be down the road a piece, but proper solutions will be found. Ya all have fun and go find some caches for me to count.

I am happy to report that Cacherstats.com is back up and running. Some of the data is a little out of sync but right now the goal is to identify the true source of the problem and to provide solutions that will keep the problem from reoccuring. I will try to keep you informed about what is going on with posts here. The ultimate solution may be down the road a piece, but proper solutions will be found. Ya all have fun and go find some caches for me to count.

I am happy to report that Cacherstats.com is back up and running. Some of the data is a little out of sync but right now the goal is to identify the true source of the problem and to provide solutions that will keep the problem from reoccuring. I will try to keep you informed about what is going on with posts here. The ultimate solution may be down the road a piece, but proper solutions will be found. Ya all have fun and go find some caches for me to count.

Hi all. Sorry for the late reply. I am the keeper of Cacherstats. The web hosting company took the website down because of excessive resource consumption. After some anaylsis, it was determined that a bot was beating up on the site so we are now atempting to put an end to the bot caused problems. We thought we had it all taken care of but for some reason, the stand in page cannot be removed. Their tech support staff has been trying to resolve that issue since midday Saturday. Hopefully we will get things under control soon.

Hi all. Sorry for the late reply. I am the keeper of Cacherstats. The web hosting company took the website down because of excessive resource consumption. After some anaylsis, it was determined that a bot was beating up on the site so we are now atempting to put an end to the bot caused problems. We thought we had it all taken care of but for some reason, the stand in page cannot be removed. Their tech support staff has been trying to resolve that issue since midday Saturday. Hopefully we will get things under control soon.

Hi all. Sorry for the late reply. I am the keeper of Cacherstats. The web hosting company took the website down because of excessive resource consumption. After some anaylsis, it was determined that a bot was beating up on the site so we are now atempting to put an end to the bot caused problems. We thought we had it all taken care of but for some reason, the stand in page cannot be removed. Their tech support staff has been trying to resolve that issue since midday Saturday. Hopefully we will get things under control soon.

Hi all. Sorry for the late reply. I am the keeper of Cacherstats. The web hosting company took the website down because of excessive resource consumption. After some anaylsis, it was determined that a bot was beating up on the site so we are now atempting to put an end to the bot caused problems. We thought we had it all taken care of but for some reason, the stand in page cannot be removed. Their tech support staff has been trying to resolve that issue since midday Saturday. Hopefully we will get things under control soon.

Ace Flapperhacker is my brother so I can speak from a certain amount of experience here. Once he gets something in his mind, he does it come Hell or high water. dadgum the torpedoes, full steam ahead kind of guy. All I can say is at least all the family members don't carry the gene. Some of us are not obsessed (I tell myself that daily). More power to him but for me, I'm bowing out of the race.

How do I upload a photo to verify a virtual when there are specific requirements that photos not appear in the log? When a textual verification is needed for a virtual, I know that I can click on the profile hyperlink from the cache page, then click on "send an email" and type in the text into the email for verification. But what do I do when a photo is required? There doesn't seem to be a button or hyperlink to "upload image" or the equivalent. I tried sending a text message as described above with the "Send a copy to my email" checked so I could see their email address but apparently they are protecting their email address. Anybody got any ideas?