Recent Website and Email Issues Mostly Resolved

Back home from our four-week Europe trip. In the last two weeks of the trip, we explored northern Spain and Portugal, a 1200-mile road trip on excellent highways, picturesque back country roads, and narrow lanes through the steep vineyards of the Douro valley.

As usual in life, things happen at the worst time. While being away and having limited online time, our website and our email server developed serious issues. The website issues impacted our events calendar resulting in intermittent “404” errors, which made booking drive and socials attendance impossible at times. Essentially the heartbeat of the club activities, making reservations and buying tickets was severely impacted. One remedy I found was to flush the permalinks periodically, but with being in a time zone 9 hours ahead issues could last for hours. After my return, in a zoom call with our web support company in Florida, we identified the likely cause of the issue, a misalignment of DNS settings between our web hosting provider and our local network caching provider. For the last week since we changed the DNS settings, no further “404” errors have appeared. But it’s still too soon to declare victory, intermittent software issues are the hardest to fix.

To make things worse, the email server for our club email addresses developed issues as well. That impacted any email members tried to send via the Contact Us link on the webpage or emails using any of ORPCA email addresses like communications@ oregonpca.org. The cause of that issue was a noncommunicated change in the email server setting of our provider. After updating the settings, we are mostly back in business again. I say mostly because one issue remains: our email provider has not updated to the new security encryption standard required by major email providers like Google. As a result, our club emails end up in the spam folder of our members. A new transactional email service will go live in the next few days and resolve that issue.

There is some good news on our website: you now can purchase shirts, jackets, hats, etc. with the ORPCA logo on our PCA webstore. Go to our web page, click Merchandise, click Shop and select ORPCA Goodies Store in the sub-menu.

Let’s Drive! You can reach me at vicepresident@ oregonpca.org n