Living in Crete | Murphy's Law at BiC Forum

The Irish turn of phrase, "Murphy's Law", or Sod's Law as Brits are more inclined to say, seems rather apt for BritsinCrete Forum right now. You know the saying, that if anything can go wrong expect that it will.

On Labour Day, May 1 I went into the BiC Forum as usual checked it out. Great, lots of messages. All was well. Then, suddenly my browser flipped up a message saying I need to install updated Flash software for the page. There was no apparent reason for this to happen as BiC Forum does not require Flash. I immediately posted a message in the Forum, do not download flash to view Forum pages, concerned that something wrong was afoot. It has since turned out one of the social bookmarking links I use on the site requires Flash. Phew ..

I got right on with adding more content to our main website BritsinCrete.net and fiddled with finalising the paperwork related to the domain names, britsincrete.eu and britsincrete.org.uk on what should have been a public holiday.

Then e-mails from BiC Forum members started to appear in my e-mail inbox with the subject: "forum problems" that turned out to be a 3-4 hour hiatus in the middle of the day.

What happened is simple in server terms. We got back online late on Friday, April 27 with our new web host with great effort after a 12 days break offline. Things were back to normal with lots of supportive messages in the Forum.

It seems the volume of visitors to the forum reached saturation in the server space allocated for BritsinCrete. In my layman's language, the Forum software coughed and spluttered under the strain, and threw a technical wobbly. We did not go offline but some members suddenly found themselves as "ex-members" and when clicking around the site, got the "300 No Such File" messages popping up for the General Board and the top postings in a number of other boards. When we ran the Forum software repair tool, we lost some of the postings since last Friday.

This is really gulling for me. Two major disruptions in the space of two weeks!

The solution is to move on and dust off. That is what I would like members to do and put these events behind us. We have to continue to make the useful postings and not be discouraged. There's a reason: I received an e-mail of encouragement from a member (Caroline2), who I do not know, nor had contact with before, who has ended up in the Valencia region of Spain. She received the in-house email I sent out explaining the server problem. I am sure she will not mind if I quote a part of her reply: "I just wanted to add how important the forum is to newcomers and expats living in Crete. Keep up the good work...."

Caroline2 chose Spain. That is Crete's loss but clearly a gain for Valencia where she says "the scent of orange and lemon blossom is pure heaven right now". May I thank Caroline for her support and wish her a fruitful and happy future across the Mediterranean.

Several members suggested I take a break after all this. Holiday! What's that?

A friend told me once: "Living in Crete must be one long holiday for you."


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