It has come to our attention that the Chinese Bytedance crawler is attacking a lot of western sites gathering content for its AI needs.
The Borg are after us !

Yes the site is back up but we are still experiencing a massive server load due to a rather aggressive crawler bot. The pest keeps jumping IP address and bypassing our blocks. We've called in the boys with the big sticks now!

Posted on behalf of the University of Sheffield Technical Manager – Performance Venues We have a new and exciting opportunity to join our team who manage and curate events, festivals and performances for both the University and city-wide audiences, as well as supporting our students' professional a ...

Listen to our superb extended length podcast and hear the real story behind the creation of the iconic DX7. In May of 1983, the world of synthesizers and electronic music as we knew it would change forever with the launch of the Yamaha DX7. To celebrate 40 years since its launch, Rob Puricelli spoke ...

We've made some changes to the breadcrumb system so it should now be consistent across the forum. We added Home back because Google SEO indexing was complaining and losing its way as it crawled the site. No Home left it without a top-level root term in the path.

SOS would not associate itself with any event that is scamming participants for money to enter. We've sponsored FMC for a few years now and it's a great contest for aspiring film composers.

I'm assuming you have downloaded the full issue PDF to your iPad. If you open it you can see small thumbnail images along the bottom by tapping anywhere on the screen. Then tap the fifth or sixth page from the start to find the contents page. Tapping any article name will then jump direct to the ...

Film Music Contest Awards 2023 - Winners Announced

I was recently in Budapest at this year's winners ceremony. Some excellent submissions from around the world. You can read the full story in SOS news here.
https://www.soundonsound.com/news/film- ... wards-2023

Further to this discussion. We have now completed work on a new cookie control system which uses a module called Civic. This replaces the current system and will bring us in line with the latest requirements for GDPR, CCPA and IAB (advertising) consent. This will go live on Thursday 16th Nov around ...

The 2023 SynthFest UK official mugs have arrived. On sale at the show.
Tickets selling fast and only 11 days to go!

https://www.synthfest.co.uk

It's starting, get there NOW !

Thanks Hugh for explaining the cookie options. I work with the Dev team so can provide more detail. The following relates to the screen shot below. Blue Cookie Bar When the EU law required all sites to inform users about their cookie choices, we introduced the bottom blue bar. This provides the ...

This is certainly not normal behaviour. Please do as Hugh has suggested and let us know the outcome.
If it persists we'll consult our Dev team.

UPDATE. The server checks out OK and is running as normal. Any slow site response and timeout messages are down to your internet connection. I'm aware that BT is having speed issues in various parts of the UK. Please do provide ongoing feedback if you continue to have problems and let us know your ...

Whilst there may be some BT problems around the UK that is a separate matter.
I can confirm that the site is running slow. We are looking into this and hope to be back up to full speed today.

Not a problem but what is your use of guitar then?

If you don't use one you could tick - 'I don't use or work with a guitar'

UPDATE

We have fixed part of the problem and some people may be able to access the July issue.
There’s still a problem displaying the correct issue information in your My Account but we should have that fixed on Monday.

Thanks for the feedback.

We are aware of the problem and are working to fix it.
The Replica has not changed but we would appreciate you all buying a digital subscription one day. We rely on your support to keep SOS publishing top quality content.

I'll report back once it's fixed.

Thanks for your feedback.
We are aware of the problem and are working to resolve it.
I'll report back when it's fixed.

It turned out that Google were running and experiment but it's ended now.
They bury a little toggle on/off permissions option deep down inside their web advertising site you don't even notice it.
I've switched it off now !

Sorry we had an error with an update we rolled out this morning. It should be fixed for everyone now.

Our web developer has investigated the situation. He thinks the problem was caused by a change with the Tapatalk plugin. We have no control over that so he's tweaked our code to see if that solves the problem. It did for him so it's now over to you helpful forum users to report back and let us know ...

The emoji selection is limited to what the phpBB forum software provides.
It may well be possible to edit the selection so I'll go find a man who can look into that.

Our tech guy can't reproduce this problem but he thinks it's not a Google Ad problem. It looks like the delay is due to some non-forum emojis being used. They are not part of the standard smilies collection. The forum is therefore searching for them externally and so the page load is delayed and, in ...