I've been here for greater than 10 years now (including registering on the board in 1998 and losing the registration and re-starting again).

But, I have never seen *SO* many WOLFPATHS here. In fact, since I joined, upto today, I must have faced the maximum number last 2 weeks.

Hey, Kayaker!!! Same thing I PM'ed you about.

Wood, time to increase bandwidth?

Have Phun

Heh, I saw you WOLPATH-ed again last night Aimless. I rebooted Apache at one point and that's why you were kicked out.

All signs point to search bots trying to slurp rss feeds from and otherwise catalogue a non-forum part of the site. There is a problem, unknown at the moment, where this causes high server CPU load averages, eventually leading to the WOLPATH ('unknown location') error and the "Server too busy at the moment" message many members have probably been receiving lately. WOLPATH is vBulletins term for "Help me, I've fallen and I can't get up".

This has actually been going on for quite a while, but rarely to the extent is has recently where it affects forum browsing. Last night I increased the threshold (cpu load average reading) where the vBulletin "Server busy" message kicks in. Hopefully this will allow our faithful members to at least log in, though there may still be times where response is a bit slow, but this should only be a temporary effect.

Anyway, thank you all for your patience, we're aware of the problem, yes it's a big PITA, and we'll try to figure out how to fix it.

Cheers,
Kayaker

Pardon me, but as a self-educated english speaker I'd really like to know what the hell a wolfpath is. Is it some kind of timeout? An overload? Something completely different?

Thanks a lot in advance for your answers.

Regards
darkelf

Actually that's two different animals.

WOLPATH, without the "f", is a vBulletin error message only seen by admins when viewing Who's Online, and occurs when vB can't figure out which page a member/guest/searchbot is viewing. Essentially a bug, google for "vbulletin wolpath" if you care.

Wolfpath is, well, the path a wolf takes I guess. Or maybe when Aimless chases after women or something, I dunno what he had in mind when he wrote that..

Does that clear things up?

The hint is provided in Kayaker's message above. Some googling would lead you to explanations similar to http://www.nexusarcana.com/forums/showthread.php/315-The-Dreaded-WOLPATH.

It's actually wolpath.

It's a Vbulletin term for "we have a bug in our software but we will call it something else until we figure out what it is".

Nice huh

Woodmann

Not a big dear sir, a feature that maybe impact production in some cases