Blue Ice wrote: ↑4 months ago
Hello ^^ I receive this message too and I was a bit afraid no longer being able to connect to this site or worse, having my profile deleted :/
Hello
@Blue Ice and everyone else reading this thread.
Please be patient as the administrators and their volunteer helpers try to resolve these issues. Note that no one is being paid or making money off this forum; those who run this forum do so purely through volunteer, unpaid (and sadly often ungratefully unrecognized), hard work, while holding up real life jobs and living with the constant demands of real lives outside this forum.
If you are like me and not an expert in SQL databases, or otherwise not Internet and online blog savvy, there are still things you can do to help, whether a registered user or an unregistered guest. I do these myself.
1) Login or browse ONLY and absolutely ONLY through the https link. The verbatim link, without the extra white spaces between the letters and punctuation marks, should be exactly 22 characters long as follows (without the blank spaces)
h t t p s : / / t u g s t o r i e s . c o m
That 's' after the first p is super important. If it is not there, you are logging in or browsing on a unsecured (even if through a VPN) connection, and the entire world, if not the universe is intercepting your non-encrypted network traffic (even if through a secured VPN). Never ever connect to a non-https URL, unless you absolutely know what you are doing and are getting into.
Moreover, it is super-important that the link you use to start browsing or logging in has exactly those 22 characters and nothing else. If there are other characters between the backslash and the word starting with tug, you are connecting through a pirated or otherwise illegitimate site that is most likely using crawler bots to data mine this forums stories and re-post them as its own, contributing to the SQL errors we all see. Likewise, if you see characters after the .com that are not php related (like .com.atlaq.com) you are either connecting to one of many WHOIS information sites (so not actually linking to the forum) or, if you do see the stories pop up, again connecting through a non-legit site. To make sure you are still on the legit site, the only characters you should see after .com is a backslash immediately followed by a /viewtopic.php? string or other similar .php codes.
2) DO NOT have multiple tabs or windows opened to the forum. Unless you are an administrator or one of their explicitly elevated helpers, there is no technical reason to have multiple connections to the forum. Each tab in a browser, each browser window, each "remember me" login, contributes to the simultaneously active connection count and query count to the SQL database (this forum's content). If you absolutely want to keep track of multiple stories and threads, at the exact location you have caught up to, do so using a separate and free text file editor and copy-past the URLs into it. You can easily obtain the URL for the page you are on by copying the URL from the tab you have open, and then adding some textual notes about how far down the page your point of interest is. For example, I have in a text file the following
My last two sentence:
https://tugstories.com/viewtopic.php?f= ... start=250# (about two-thirds down the page)
I now can link to my last time I wrote a two-sentence story, without having to keep that tab open all the time, whether as a registered user or as a guest.
3) If you do manage to login, check your "Remember Me" login keys, under User Control Panel, Profile tab, Manage "Remember Me" login keys option. I'm not sure all those login keys contribute or not, but just to be on the safe side, I've deleted all of mine. Now, whenever I login, I deliberately keep the Remember Me unchecked, as I do not need that functionality anyway.
I'm not trying to be preachy or anything like that. I'm not a network guru; I'm merely trying to help and mitigate the issue until it is fully resolved.
Good luck everyone.
