Sorry, attaching or viewing attached pictures is still not working , despite two database programmers helping me out. Linking and displaying pictures from other websites works fine and is the only solution so far.
As we learn more about the problem, it's becoming more and more difficult to repair or solve, not sure yet if we can repair it at all at this point without losing the old attachment description information, for example to which message they belong to. The actual pictures are all safe and backed up, of course.
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While we were working hard on this technical database problem (defect SQL table that cannot be repaired), another even bigger problem has appeared and shut down the entire website, every page just displaying a mysterious 510 Not Extended error message, but no content whatsoever. So the entire website, not just the forum but also the Lamma-zine and everything else became inaccessible.
After a lot of struggling with the webhosting tech support, resulting in no helpful advice, I figured it out myself in the end:
a spam attack from a website on the Mainland, overloading our shared server with too much traffic and "simultaneous connections". This spam attacks have been happening occasionally for years but I've closed all loopholes long ago. They (almost) never succeed in spamming our forum anymore, but they keep on trying, probably automatic Spambot programs. This overloading triggered the webhost to shut down the entire site automatically (too much traffic/sec or more than 100 simultaneous connections), without informing me what they did and why they did it. This happened last Tue, this Mon and Tue mornings that I'm aware off. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
I've edited some the forum's PHP programs by hand and blocked the offending Mainland webhost, probably only a temporary solution. If you see any more 501 Not Extended messages, please email me immediately at
info@lamma.com.hk. Thanks!
In the meantime, you can still include pictures from any other website into your post, from Facebook, Flickr, any online photo gallery or website. Just copy and paste the web address of the picture into the message you're posting or editing, select the address and click the
[Img] button at the top left of the message window. Done.
If your pictures are not online somewhere yet, you can upload them easily, for free and without registering on many free websites, for example
ImageShack.
Sorry, that's the best I can advise for now' a lot of (often frustrating) time has gone into solving these technical problems already, including nights and weekends, and I can't tell at this point how much more time it'll take. In the meantime, I have to spend more time away from this non-commercial forum, going out and trying to make an actual living...
P.S. I can't read my
Private Messages anymore either. So if you're waiting for a reply, please email the original message to
info@Lamma.com.hk. Thank you.