WTF-Beta

If you wonder why you have to login again ...

Some of you may recall we had an issue back around 2026 August 2 where folks could not login. (Old record at https://wtf.coffee-room.com/topic/3928/forum-issue-2026-august-2-fixed . ) The same issue hit us again.

Supposedly we were visited by over half a million "unique visitors" this month alone, and even more last month. Quite obviously most of these "unique visitors" were bots. That's what led to the problem on Aug.2 and the same problem resurfaced again.

So I had to deploy the old short-term fix again, the side effect of it is that all of us good users have to login again.

While we wait for the forum software's developers to deliver a more permanent fix, I have tweaked some configurations hoping that we can prolong the intervals between recurrences of the same issue while we wait for the more permanent fix. The soft goal here is to make it such that you won't have to re-login any more frequently than once a month (per-browser, per-device, of course).

The above notwithstanding, we are quite up-to-date on the forum software, the middleware, the security fixes, the underlying operating system ... everything.

UPDATE (2026-08-03):

• Issue is fixed.
• Please "reload" / "refresh" your browser and re-login.

Technical note: Redis DB memory filled up; the fix was to flush Redis.

(Not urgent, but still to do: figure out what caused Redis' memory to "fill up" in the first place.)

UPDATE (2026-08-03):

• Issue is fixed.
• Please "reload" / "refresh" your browser and re-login.

Technical note: Redis DB memory filled up; the fix was to flush Redis.
For future reference:

• https://forum.cloudron.io/post/127716 - future fix, need Cloudron 10
• https://nodebb.the-new-coffee-room.club/post/367944 - short term fix
• redis-cli -u "$CLOUDRON_REDIS_URL" flushdb

(Leaving old information below for archival purposes.)

As of this writing we have an issue with the forum software not allowing new logins.
But if you're already logged in, your existing login session should continue to work (so please don't deliberately log out, as you may not be able to log back in until this issue is resolved).
I don't have a fix yet. (Simple thing like "let's restart the app and see what happens" has been tried to no avail.)
I cannot find any useful information on the NodeBB community forum yet, but I am starting a new thread in the "tech support" forum that's now queued for approval to be posted.

@wtg if you don't mind, please see if you can get into "admin" mode and let me know. (I cannot get into "admin" mode myself due to this login issue.) Thanks in advance.

OK ... I think the "Reactions" icon issue is fixed now.
If you still see the issue, please refresh/reload in your browser.
If the issue still persists after you refresh/reload, please let me know.

Will be doing some maintenance to attempt to fix the "Reactions" icon issue.
WTF may be unavailable on-and-off for a while as I may need to trigger multiple restarts.

Our forum's underlying operating system has been upgraded (now Ubuntu 24.04 LTS).
This allows the middleware to be automatically updated (now Cloudron 9.1.5).
The forum software itself will also continue to be automatically updated (now NodeBB 4.10.1).
I have made backups that will be kept for a few days just in case we need to roll back (low probability; this is precautionary).
If this upgrade continues to do well (high confidence!), the current technology stack that we are on should be good until 2029.

To be clear, the intended operating system upgrade still has not succeeded.
The "clean up" was merely to clear out some now-useless artifacts left over from the failed upgrade attempt.

DONE

Need to do shutdown to do some clean-up ... should not take long.

Upgrade attempt failed.
Everything rolled back to the whole-server backup that was made just before I attempted the upgrade.
Will keep running existing OS & software until further notice.

The software we rely on to host WTF-Beta has dropped support for the current version of operating system we use.
So I am working on upgrading this underlying operating system, WTF-Beta may be "down" from time to time.
Fingers crossed!

Updated to NodeBB 4.2.0 / Cloudron NodeBB package 2.17.0.
Auto-update re-enabled.
Maintenance done.

I plan to update the forum software sometime over this weekend to get over the issue (previously discussed here) that has been preventing us from updating since January 2025, and hope to get us back to doing automatic updates again.

There will be multiple restarts so at times you may see that this website/app is unavailable.

Also, it has become increasingly clear that the Apple/iOS emoji plugin that we have been using won't be compatible with NodeBB past version 4.0, and there is no indication that the developers who originally packaged up the Apple/iOS emoji plugin for NodeBB are around to update it. So we will have to revert back to NodeBB's older/default emoji plugin.

Sometime around 6:00 PM Eastern Time today (2025 January 30), the system automatically upgraded our NodeBB software to a new version that proved problematic.

Took many trials and errors to find a restoration point that has a slightly older version of NodeBB that works well, and the most recent workable restoration point happens to be one from 2025 January 21. So ... very sorry, whatever you have posted between 2025 January 21 and now cannot be restored.

For the time being, I have disabled auto-update so the system won't automatically upgrade us into a bad release. Will re-enable auto-update after the NodeBB development team releases a solid update.

(FWIW, other people are seeing similar issues, e.g.: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/13213/issue-starting-nodebb-on-cloudron-after-server-restart )

Oh ... please be sure to "reload" or "refresh" your browser page (close and reopen the window to this website or even "clear cache" if you have to) so your browser picks up a complete, coherent set of changes for this website.

Recently there has been a software update (NodeBB 3.10 to 3.11) that broke certain "skins" for the "Persona" design theme that this forum has been using.
One of the problem that people noticed is that for these affected "skins" you cannot tell apart, just by font color, which threads have "new/unread" posts.

To fix this issue, I (ol' Ax) have switched this forum from the old "Persona" design theme over to the "Harmony" design theme.
This change brings about three major benefits:

1. The "Harmony" theme is not affected by the aforementioned problem brought about by the NodeBB 3.11 update.
2. The "Harmony" theme allows the "search" function to be shown on smaller screens -- previously on the "Persona" theme you could not see/use the "search" function on a cell phone or a mini tablet, now you can with the "Harmony" theme.
3. The "Harmony" theme is the newer "default" theme for NodeBB and is better supported by NodeBB's developer community anyway; switching to the "Harmony" theme should make us more future-proof.

Also added and activated the "reaction" plug-in -- i.e., you can react to a post using emoji (as opposed to posting a reply).

Done.

Need to do a quick reboot to pickup some operating system security update.