Monday, December 12, 2011

Slow e-mail on forum fixed

For the last couple of months, e-mails sent from the forum have taken many hours to arrive. This was particularly frustrating to new users who want to ask a question and have to wait until the next day for their verification e-mail to arrive, but it also delayed my ability to get notified that a new post needed attention.

Last week I was able to dig into this. Initially I suspected the web hosting company had an overloaded e-mail server, so I submitted a help desk ticket with them. They couldn’t find any issues on their end, so I started looking at the source code of the open source forum software YetAnotherForum.NET. Eventually I tracked down an issue with their code, which I was able to work around by clearing out one of the database tables that held e-mails waiting to get sent. I submitted an issue with their bug tracker, so hopefully they’ll be able to resolve it.

E-mails seem to be instantaneous again, so I think we are back in business. I offer my apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.