BodySpace Official News Blog

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After an extraordinary effort expended by our programming and hosting teams, we are happy to announce that the outdated avatar issue has been fixed!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

It’s been hard not to notice the recent bouts of downtime BodySpace has been suffering over the past week.  (Yes, we use BodySpace, too!  LOL)

These annoying hiccups and unfortunate stutterings are being caused by some behind-the-scenes hardware, DNS, and database reconfigurations and upgrades all occurring at the same time, often requiring server reboots and, thus, some lapses in service.

The worst of these, hopefully, should now be behind us, so we appreciate your patience with our ever-growing site.  We should hit that 50,000 members mark in a few weeks! 

Many users reported having mysterious "À’s" show up in their blog posts.  This anomaly has been tracked down and eradicated.  If you are still seeing this issue in your blog, please PM Mike.  Thanks!

Last night, we switched from Apache to LightTPD (pronounced “lighty”) for the forum’s web server software. Everything seems to be working great, but here are a few notes on the change:

1. A minor issue where emails were coming from some weird address when sent through the forum. This has been fixed, it’s back to normal now.

2. Forum1.bodybuilding.com (an alias of forum.bodybuilding.com) will be phased out shortly. We shouldn’t be using that anymore (we used to have forum1 and forum2 when we did some load balancing a few years ago), but some people might still have it bookmarked. Thus, if you have old bookmarks for the forums, you should edit them so they point to just “forum” instead of “forum1″, so that your bookmarks continue to work as expected.

Thanks to Ryan for the forum speed upgrade! 

The new Control Panel is now available!  Check out our new look!  =)

Kudos to Jeran and Skippymobile for the upgrade!  =)

A ‘flood control’ system has been implemented in the photo galleries section.  Similar to the forums, users must now wait a few seconds between ratings, and any low ratings must have an accompanying comment explaining the rationale.

Since BodySpace is all about providing honest feedback and helpful suggestions for improvement, this change should help foster the spirit of camaraderie found here at Bodybuilding.com and yield generally useful tips for improving one’s physique, while at the same time discouraging the frequent abuses of the system many have recently experienced.  Kudos to Skippy PB for this one!

Michael has been working tirelessly on making improvements to my.bodybuilding.com - the page that ties together all the parts of Bodybuilding.com, the forums, BodySpace, the store shopping cart, BodyPoints, etc. into one control panel of sorts.

New today, you’ll see the addition of progress pics, body stat charts, forum posts, etc.

So, check it out, and please direct any feedback or suggestions for improvements directly to him, using any of these methods:

• PM
• Email
• Feedback form
• Profile comment

Ah, the joys of slow blogging… Not.  The recent slowdown of blogging (posting would take up to 2 minutes) was caused by a recent implementation of ‘Update Services’ pinging each time a blog was updated.  This feature is a good thing, and helps to attract the search engines to your blog, but it was discovered that a couple of the services we were pinging were taking too long to respond, so…

Those services have been skipped, and now blogging is much faster for everyone.  What used to take anywhere from 45 to 120 seconds, now only takes around 5 seconds.  Kudos to Mike for fixing this!  =)

‘Nuff said.  Those that were abusing the system have been banned.

When you click on the BodyBlog main page now, you’ll see that it’s been given a beautiful facelift!

Kudos go out to Jeran for his mad graphix skillz.