Pale Moon forum

A few seconds after posting "Google Mesh WiFi" (Post by moonbob69 » Wed, 29 Jun 2022, 14:59 in Browser Support) I decided to add something and clicked the Edit Post button in the upper right corner.

Although I had described that clicking Stop, then Restart would usually overcome my connection problem, in this case it didn't even after 10 tries; after "Connecting to forum.palemoon.org" was shown, I then got "The connection has timed out"; "Try Again" did not succeed either.

This was the first web site I have visited that totally refused to load!

Clearing cookies did not help either. Typing in forum.palemoon.org still hung at "Connecting to forum.palemoon.org"; in fact, after clicking Stop, the URL changed to the former "[https://forum.palemoon.org] /posting.php?mode=edit&f=3&p=229875" which had timed out. Was it trying to connect to that particular URL all along while showing what I typed in the address bar?

Clearing cache & logins also, still didn't get an actual connection. Closing PM and restarting it also didn't.

Lastly, starting Firefox 95.0.2 also didn't connect to forum.palemoon.org; even after selecting "visit forum.palemoon.org", it was occupied with "xfer data contile-images.services.mozilla.com" and didn't actually continue to palemoon.org.

Finally, rebooting allowed login and posting using PM without any delay, like the original post.

So, could this be a OS/IP problem?

There was about an hour downtime of the VPSes, looks like a datacenter networking issue.
This does happen on occasion.

So, /posting.php?mode=edit is done elsewhere than /viewtopic.php and you don't think this has anything to do with lost requests or misplaced responses (the general cause of timeouts when not the servers themselves)?

No, I don't think so. There's nothing wrong with using a different script to post form data to.
But if that's a concern for you then I suggest you toss up this question at phpbb.com -- we are simply using their software for the forum; we didn't write it.

I'm just trying to understand the timing. I thought that it was < 2 min after posting that I tried to edit, and then < 20 min after that (doing all the things mentioned) that I rebooted, and /viewtopic worked as normal.

I'm also trying to understand how, after the edit link timed out, and then typing in forum.palemoon.org which did not load either, clicking STOP caused the address bar to go back to the mode=edit URL. I can understand that if no connection is made, no history entry is made. Does SIOP normally cause the address bar to update?

The address bar reverts to prevent people spoofing addresses in it by initiating navigation then immediately stopping it. If the navigation wasn't complete, it won't retain the new address.