I can confirm that there was a problem on Wednesday evening until the following morning caused by an "Application Pool" timeout which happened because another process was holding onto a resource.
It turns out that the holding resource was trying to read a picture file (jpg) which was corrupt and until that error was cleared it could not continue.
The picture file in question was uploaded as an attachment to a posting and I am not going to say which picture file it was, only to say that the corruption was corrected.
The above problem was totally unrelated to an on-going issue which some members may have noted which occurs particular at times of heavy Internet network traffic and/or heavy server traffic where when you either write a post or press the "Home" button you wait sometime and then get my "catch all" error message. If posting, it sometimes does do the posting, but does not quite finish before the timeout period. Unfortunately the timeout period cannot be changed.
You may recall back at the begining of the year I moved the Beoworld web site to our own server under our direct control and I plan to do the same with the forum as soon as we can. There are a few technical issues to resolve first, the biggest issue is the fact that currently the forum runs on a server in the East coast of the US and of course uses US date format. As the date is used as part of the forum login process, if I was to move it to a European server no one would be able to login. So one of the big tasks is to create an SQL script which converts all the dates for every user on the system which is more than 13,000 changes. So, this move is several months away.
However, in the meantime I have changed quite a few settings and certain code changes to improve or mask the current problem, in other words the core problem remains, but you may not see it or only rarely hopefully.
One major change I will be making in the next few weeks to hopefully dramatically improve the forum relates to the search facility which uses a lot of SQL database resourses not only for actual searchs, but as part of the posting process. I will be installing an "Enterprise Search" to replace our current not very good "Search Barrel". This is a complex installation which I intend doing "on the fly" meaning the forum may pause for a few seconds, but will not go down during the upgrade. The exact time and date has not been decided yet.
I will keep you all informed on progress, but the major changes will not occur until after I return from my holiday in Italy meaning after 14th September.