BodySpace Official News Blog

Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?  Hmmm…  Okay, bad news first:  the ‘friends’ module is currently disabled, and will be off all weekend.  (It’ll be fixed on Monday.)

Also, we’ve been having ’sidebar’ issues all day today.  So if it looks like you’re logged out, you might actually still be logged in.  Confusing?  Yes.  Critical?  No.  You should still be able to use BodySpace just fine over the weekend (it shouldn’t prevent you from logging in or out, you just may need to do so from the main site instead of from BodySpace.)

Okay, time for the great news!  In the BodySpace Workout Tracker (BWT), you can now add/change an exercise on a previous workout (add a forgotten exercise, for example), and also do the same on a saved workout template (in your workout library.)  Kudos go out to Wayne for the BWT added functionality! 

As many people reported, the Advanced Member Search tool has been offline for a few weeks.  This was due to some database load issues, but everything has been fixed, and the search tool is now back online! 

Many of us have noticed (and reported) various BodySpace problems today, and we are working on correcting these issues as we speak.  Thus, please consider BodySpace to be in "maintenance mode" today.  If something doesn’t work quite normally, please just try again later, as we are tweaking some code and server settings to make everything run better.

Some of the items reported today:

Blog comment CAPTCHAs not appearing - FIXED.
Broken images - FIXED.
Workout tracker giving error messages - FIXED.
Long load times and timeout error messages - FIXED.
Report & forum emails not being delivered - FIXED.
Can’t connect error messages - FIXED.
Forums and blogs down sporadically - FIXED.

3/25 - 4/09/2008 UPDATES:

The programming team is working on optimizing our BodySpace code for speed.  Previously, the code worked, but it wasn’t coded in the most efficient manner (too many database calls, not enough caching/data warehousing, etc.)  During this process, some modules will be turned off and on for testing and optimization.  Please pardon our dust!

Slow blog load times - FIXED. 
Visitors counter stalled - Temporarily turned off for performance reasons.
BodyPoints not accumulating - Temporarily turned off for performance reasons.
BodyBlog RSS feeds not working - FIXED.
BodySpace advanced member search not working - FIXED.
Lifting Stats not working - FIXED.
Missing latest blog post on BodySpace profiles - FIXED.
YouTube videos not embedding in blogs - FIXED.

These are some of the error screens you might be seeing:

These will be fixed soon.  Thanks for your patience.  Once everything is back to normal, if you are still seeing a maintenance message, you may have to refresh your profile or blog (CTRL+F5, or CTRL+R in your browser) to see the current version.

BodySpace experienced a minor hardware failure last night with the server’s RAID disk array, and while no data was lost, some of it was crosslinked between users, which is why a small subset of users have reported seeing someone else’s photo on their profile, etc.  (This was not any hacking activity, but a glitch in the real-time data restore & synchronization procedure when the new harddrive was installed.)

If you were in the middle of writing a blog post during this time period, it’s quite possible that the post was not saved, as the database was not logging new activity during the restore.  Everything else, however, should still be there.

This is obviously being inspected, and hopefully everything should be back to normal ASAP for those users.  If you are seeing anything weird like this on your profile, please report it ASAP:

bodyspace@bodybuilding.com

Thanks, and we’re sorry for the hiccup.  Incidentally, the drive that failed was also contributing to the recent slowness on BodySpace since the weekend, so once everything is back to normal, BodySpace should be faster, too. 

3/5/2008 UPDATE:  frozen profile views are also related to this and will be back to normal tomorrow.

3/7/2008 UPDATE:  frozen visit counters are back to normal, but profile visitor list still being worked on.  Hang tight.

3/10/2008 UPDATE:  profile visitor statistic lists are now being updated again.  Yeah!

As silly as this sounds, we’ve received enough complaints about lots of photos of lots of different members on the site to warrant this addition to the Official BodySpace Photo Guidelines.

Please take a second to read the details of the new rule (effective immediately and retroactive to existing photos) in the BodySpace “Help/FAQ” section:

http://blog.bodybuilding.com/BodySpaceAdmin/category/help/

Yes, we are currently experiencing a problem with the photo galleries, wherein some users cannot delete existing photos from their galleries, whilst other new users cannot upload any:

This is being worked on, and should be fixed within a day or two, so please hang tight.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

(For those interested, this is a direct result of BodySpace being so popular, so much so, in fact, that we’re running into minor scalability problems such as running into theoretical (and obviously real-world) file system limits on the number of subdirectories within a folder, etc.  We’ve encountered this problem before under a different set of circumstances, and the fix is underway, but just takes time.)

11/08 Update #1:  We are planning to implement the fix for this issue on Monday, 11/12.

11/08 Update #2:  Oops, it’s already fixed!  (Thanks Zeke and Cory!)

The login problems that many users were seeing last night and this morning have now been fixed.  This was a hardware issue (failed NIC) with one of the servers, and the problem has been corrected.  Sorry for the partial downtime for some users (this didn’t affect everyone).  

Everything should be working again now. 

Kudos go out to Kelly for fixing a longstanding problem with the Search By Location section of the Advanced Search page on BodySpace.  We used to have it, then it was disabled for performance reasons, and now it’s all been optimized, and it’s now back!

http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/search.php

Enjoy! 

UPDATED History:

10/30/2007 - Location searching reenabled (again).
10/20/2007 - Location searching re-disabled.
10/10/2007 - Location searching reenabled.
5/15/2007 - Location searching was disabled.
12/8/2006 - Advanced Searching (including by location) was introduced.

Just a friendly reminder to all: BodySpace is not an advertising outlet.  We’ve been getting lots of complaints recently about people spamming via PM for personal training services, recruitment for other fitness networking sites, and websites selling clothing apparel and/or supplements.

As per rule #8 in the forum/BodySpace rules, these type of advertising activities are not appropriate.

If you happen to own a company that sells stuff, you are, of course, most welcome to use our site.  A single link to your website on your BodySpace profile would be appropriate.  However, PM’ing your link out in your signature file would not be appropriate, nor spamming your link in profile comments, or actively recruiting customers via our site.

Likewise, if we see too many of the same t-shirt logos on the BodySpace main page, we will start removing those photos, since it sends the wrong message about who we are and what we’re trying to do.  Thank you all for your respect of this rule.

The age, location, occupation, personal website input fields are all now fixed!  Please test it out and please let us know if anything’s still not working for you. 

For those needing closure (LOL), all the problems reported in these previous posts should now be fixed:

08/22 minor sync problems
08/03 update on lingering issues
07/27 lingering issues from last night

SEPT. 7th UPDATE:  Okay, this is fixed for real now.  Sorry for the additional delay.

After an extraordinary effort expended by our programming and hosting teams, we are happy to announce that the outdated avatar issue has been fixed!

If you’re still seeing your old avatar in the forums, please change your BodySpace profile pic to refresh your avatar (force an update).  And, as always, please let us know if you encounter any other problems.  Thanks for everyone’s patience on this longstanding issue!! 

See Feedback Here:
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=3969203
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=4359903

We’re looking at next Monday (August 27, 2007) to be the realistic fix date for the following BodySpace/Forum problems:

- can’t enter age, location, homepage, occupation
- can’t modify contact/private message settings
- forum rep points are gone
- forum avatar doesn’t match BodySpace pic
- missing PM’s, rep comments, workout section
- forum sig never updates
- & other minor issues

These minor database synchronization annoyances were directly caused by a hardware failure and a subsequent reconfiguration.  The databases will be resynched on Monday after the affected hardware is reintroduced into the cluster, tested, and burned in.

During the next hour or so, the BodyPoints system will be offline, undergoing a planned upgrade.  During this time, the accumulation and viewing of BodyPoints will be unavailable while this important backend revamp is performed.

This will bring us one step closer to the pending reality of the redemption of BodyPoints in the Bodybuilding.com Cyberstore!  Stay tuned for more details!

Well, the past week has been a whirlwind of patching, bug fixing, and putting out fires, let me tell you.  Our I.T. guys are working hard to get everything 100% completely restored after last Friday’s hardware failure.

These issues have been fixed:

Blank avatar problem
Forums offline
PhotoPost (photo gallery) offline
PhotoPost thumbnails showing but main image "not in database"
BodySpace running incredibly slowly

And these ones are still not fixed at this point:

Occupation, personal website, PM/IM details, age missing (from profiles)
BodyBlog post counts incorrect for some users (but not all)
Mismatched avatars (forum has outdated avatar)
Forum signatures not showing for some users
Toggling forum avatar is unresponsive (setting)
View statistics & moderate comments pages fail for ultra-popular users
BodyBlog "you can only post every 15 seconds, slow down cowboy" error
BodySpace visitor stats/friends lists/comment counts might be outdated
YouTube video thumbnails have outdated links (for some users)
Forum reps and forum searches are outdated
Forum last activity and recent posts are outdated
Changed username doesn’t reflect in PhotoPost gallery
BodyBlog posts 6-minute delay off main page
Some activated users seeing "Not Activated" error message upon login

These will most likely take a few more days to get fixed, so please hang tight until late next week.  Thanks, and sorry for the delay on getting these fixed - it’s actually quite complicated on the backend, so in fixing one set of problems, we created more, but we had to choose the lesser of two evils so that most of the major functions of BodySpace were back online more quickly.

As many of you already discovered, we experienced a service outage last night around 7:30 p.m.-ish (Mountain Time).  This was due to a hardware failure.  BodySpace, BodyBlogs, the forums, and the photo gallery were affected - our main site was still available.  BodySpace and the forums are fine once again (albeit running a little slowly), however the photo gallery still remains broken.  We are working on this and it should be fixed soon.

Also, if you are logged into BodySpace and then visit our main site, you will currently see a blank avatar and no log in details.  Technically, you are actually still logged in and everything is fine, just the information and the links are not appearing.  This also will be fixed soon.  (If you return to the forums, my.bodybuilding.com, or BodySpace, you’ll see that you are indeed still logged in.)

We are currently experiencing a problem with image uploads.  Our support staff is researching the cause, and it should be fixed soon.  Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE: We have isolated the cause of this problem (a file system limitation), and are fixing this now.  This particular issue is only affecting new users since Saturday.  Already existing users (who signed up before Saturday at roughly 4:30 p.m.) are unaffected.  Please stay tuned.

UPDATE #2: More info on the image upload problem:  we reached a limit of allowable folders on the server this past Saturday, which means that we have too many users!  LOL, J/K!  Actually, we are so excited that we are continuing to grow so fast but it doesn’t come without some growing pains!  This issue is being worked on right now, and everything should be fixed and finalized by tomorrow at the latest.  Once again, we thank all our new users for their patience in this matter - after tomorrow it shouldn’t happen again!

UPDATE #3:  This issue has been fixed (as of 7/3 @ 4:45 p.m. MT).  Everyone who has had problems updating their main profile photo, please try again - everything is working now. 

As many of you are aware, BodySpace suffered some unexpected downtime late last night and earlier today.  This was caused by some hardware failures on our server cluster, and was fixed as soon as possible.  Even still, this took longer than we would’ve liked, so we apoligize for the inconvenience.

Some have commented on the sudden disappearance of the Advanced Search feature.  This handy feature was found to be the cause of some notable slowdowns in performance on BodySpace across the board, so has been disabled until it can be optimized for better performance.

Stay tuned, it should be back soon!

UPDATE:  I just got word from CEO Ryan DeLuca, and the Advanced Search feature has been turned back on, but without the location search (which is still a little problematic).  Enjoy!

The service outage BodySpace experienced last night & this morning was caused by a hardware failure.  Thanks to our hard-working IT support staff, things are back up and running smoothly now.  Kudos, guys! 

UPDATE:  We’re seeing some residual problems with some people’s profiles coming up blank and other people’s stats sections not allowing edits.  These issues are being worked on as we speak…

Many members who have recently joined BodySpace have noticed some issues with activating their accounts, and also with changing/resetting passwords.  Currently, these modules are experiencing some problems, and are being investigated.  (These modules worked fine when we had fewer users, but due to recent growth, the underlying code behind these features needs to be rewritten and optimized.)

If you can’t activate your forum/BodySpace account or need to have your password "reset" (changed or recovered), please email us directly, and we’ll handle this for you personally until we can get these automated tools fixed. 

Note: This may take a day or two, especially over a weekend.  Please don’t send your request twice, it just slows everything down for everyone, including yourself.  All inquiries will be addressed ASAP.  Thank you.