Brian,
I had similar trouble for a couple of days. I'm running XP pro and use IE explorer to access the internet. I originally thought it was my computer and after I discovered it was not I contacted my ISP. They told me that it was a band width issue.
Long story short, from Toronto ISP's purchase band width from major service providers (the ones who own the cables). If you are with a very small ISP who has limited band width you will likely have slow downloads and other problems.
Fortunatly my ISP has upgraded their band width and all has been fine.
I hope this is a little useful to some.
Cheers,
Mike

We are hosted by the largest ISP in Canada. But for sure this is on their end.

It's still happening even when I'm already in the board. A second ago I couldn't get to three threads on Intro board, then clicked on forum list and couldn't get to that. Tried agin and it worked.

I'm Windows XP and Explorer in office.

Take care,
Eileen

I have talked to our ISP. They are going to try and move us to a server that has less demand on it so this does not happen. This is a problem with the demand on the server being higher than what it can deal with. So that is why if you hit reload, reload, reload, or leave the site and come back to it, the page will eventually display. The other giveaway is that peak hours create the most problems. This is demand issues not a problem with your machines or the web site itself. They probably will not be able to address this till monday, please bear with us. The truth of the matter is that OCF needs to be on a dedicated server by ourselves wince we use so much bandwidth with the millions of hits the site gets, but we do not have the money to pay for this.

I'm glad to see this is being addressed. Thank you Brian and Chester and server people. At first I thought this was a problem with my computer system at work (which has been having some issues) but it has continued and I just noticed this thread about it...

Nelie

Hi,

Haven't been on the website for about a week and when I went into introductions got the same URL/ubbthreads message. I use Mozilla Firefox. I closed out and reopened and so far haven't had any problems (last 5 minutes).

Nancy

I think this is going to only be resolved by a move from our current ISP to our own dedicated servers. The traffic to the OCF site is more than we would have ever expected. We originally decided on the big firm in Canada because we got to pay in Canadian dollars which saved the foundation some money. Next month we will be moving to dedicated servers in California. At least one day the site will be down, but we will let everyone know in advance. This is expensive but there is no simple fix. I apologize for the inconvenience this is causing people. It is also affecting other parts of the site. Even our home page sometimes will load with just the links and HTML with no graphics. This is definitely a factor of the server being to busy to "serve up" the graphics.

We will correct this soon. Know that you just have to hit "reload" the page several times, or leave the site and come back and it will self correct. The NYU walk will raise $ for OCF mid next month, and we will make the investment in this very important aspect of OCF from those funds.

Thanks Brian,
and yes the site is still very much useable, despite the minor inconvenience. The main point is that people know where the problem is ... otherwise once might get the idea reloading Os'es and have "fun with that".
Perhaps if this continues for some time Chester could put up a login message (motd or whatever that is called these days) informing people that there are issues with the site and that repeated reloads may be required.
Where does the traffic come from? Certainly not from the board, there are at most 10-12 concurrent users.
This would lead the main site? Is the traffic due to excessive "false" hits?

M
currently trivialities is all I have to worry about

Over 15 million hits per month, mostly on the main site. We use Google Analytics to monitor visitors, page views, and more. People that come here usually mean to come here. When you are the number one find in Goggle for oral cancer... it refers a lot of people to us. Combine that with the tens of thousands of other sites that link back directly to us (from the NCI and CDC to ACS and private sites) the RSS feed subscribers, and other referrers like MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and you can see how we get so much traffic. You cannot see it on your board, but even our message board is spidered all the time by the major companies mentioned before. As I am typing this there are 6 spiders on the message boards cataloging what they find.

Brian

I am sure that you have done your homework, but from someone who is in the business, might I suggest Layered Technologies.

http://www.layeredtech.com/

I am in the process of switching all of my servers over to their operation. The hosting business is not as straight forward as it was when I started back in '95.