To any Central Europe players affected by a very slow, intermittently failing site: It seems that there is a major issue with internet routing on transatlantic connections and some servers are hard to reach from Germany, the Netherlands and possibly some other countries.

If you are computer savvy enough, you can try going through a public proxy - locations in the UK or Canada might be your best bet - to get your games in with a reasonable time if you're playing for a monthly or GC. Good luck!

I have noticed in the last half an hour or so that Fun Trivia is really slow at loading pages etc...I wonder if it's connected to this. I'm in the Uk though, which isn't Central Europe.

All other sites seem to be working just fine

It's been like that all day for me - but only here on the Forums, the quiz site doesn't seem affected. I did get a database error message on one occasion when I tried to log on here but it told me it was an error that only the admins could see so I can't say which one it was!

I was slow on just the forums, but now it's the whole of FT.

Phew, thank goodness it's not just me!

I had a server error too, when trying to read one of the chat threads. It said that the server was busy, or resetting...

It went like this before the 'Big Crash' a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully Terry will fix it, or he may be doing some work on it. Fingers crossed it's sorted afore the next set of the Global Challenge

When I first came on this morning right at the end of maintenance at 3:30 AM, I got a server too busy message, please try to reload in a few minutes. It then came right up. This is Florida, USA.

All magically faster now?

Much faster for me... did you give it a good kicking?

Well... there's some weird DNS thing going on at my ISP it appears.

So I told the database to ignore DNS for now entirely... looks like some of those lookups were getting long delays and screwing up DB connections.

Doesn't look like connections are queueing up any more on the DB, which is a good thing...

Well done for spotting that, if I had a pound for everything that could go wrong with a website and its connectivity I'd be rich.

Many thanks Terry, you're a star! It's a lot better now thanks!

Still slow for me. I've cleared everything I can, checked my broadband speed etc., even tried switching it off and switching it on again (I could probably get a job on a 'help' desk!).

The main page just took 47 seconds to build from when the first part appeared.

Must be a network issue at your end dippo.. the site is blazing fast here...

It's only FT that's slow. I've reset my modem. Anyone else on BT having problems?

At around 3 p.m. UK time (around 3 hours ago) the forums had decided it was still January and weren't showing any recent posts. Then they decided they didn't want to play at all and wouldn't show anything. I'm not sure if it's related, Terry, but I thought I'd mention it.

That was me trying to work out the problem earlier today, rossian. I used an old database.

Hi Dippo,

I'm with BT, and most sites are a bit slower, but FT is a lot slower.

I'm on BT and it's playing up again, but only on here, everything else is working just fine.

Tis all super fast again now!

It seems to have fixed itself now - well, pages are loading in less than my worst time today (7 minutes).

Same here dippo, a lot quicker now.

The slowness of the site has meant I've almost given up on the site, I play very few games anymore and games that I do if they don't respond within a few seconds of cliking on them I just abandon them.

I don't know if it's a related issue, but I keep getting this message:

An Unexpected Error has Occurred
We are unable to continue because an error has occurred.
The administrators have been notified of the problem.
Please hit back on your browser to continue

on every page for about 20 mins at a time, before things start working again. It was happening to my sister over the last few days but hers is fine today on the same internet connection whereas mine isn't. It's also happened to her on other computers, so I guess it's just one of these things I have to wait for it to pass. I'm submitting some huge times on some games!

Not sure what to say guys... this appears to be specific to the UK.

I recall this happened about a year ago didn't it? Same thing.. everyone was fine except some people in the UK, and then one day it suddenly disappeared.

Sounds like there's a bad network connection somewhere?

My initial post of this thread referred to a similar situation, affecting Germany and the Netherlands a week ago when some of us could simply not reach the FT server at all and a trace did fail to find a route. In my case, my wife was able to get to FT fine, with minimal delays, while I, using the same DSL line, same provider and just one IP digit apart, could not connect at all (we both have fixed IP addresses). DNS also resolved to the same IP, so it wasn't that one of us was misdirected to the old server.

I was able to connect via a public proxy in the end, but the speed wasn't that great and my GC scores from that night showed that :P

Sunspot activity is coming to a peak. Are the noted failings daytime connected?

I suppose it could be BT related they are currently upgrading their system by intoducing BT Infinity which uses fibre optic cables and are currently digging up large numbers of streets, so maybe affecting the system. For some reason it affects Funtrivia and not other sites.