Plenty of fish Forums Gone.. Again!

A concerned visitor sent me an email the other day asking what has happened to the Plenty of fish forums? Did they shut down? I was like oh no not again, they have done something to the forums on POF. I still noticed the forums coming up in the search results so I visited forums.plentyoffish.com directly and was greeted with a nasty server run time error.

Now I know a bit about web servers and this is a Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) error. This is not good (see the full explanation below) because it indicates to me that the files for the Plenty of fish forum website has been removed. After further investigation it looks like this may have happened at least a week ago, since visitors have been searching our site about the Plenty of fish forums being removed for that long.

I am surprised that POF hasn’t addressed the problem. They must know about it as I am sure a large number of people have already complained about the issue as it has been a week now already. Also the POF forums are still very popular even though they are not directly linked to the main POF.com site anymore (I think POF wants to slowly kill the forums). What has me puzzled though is if they had plan to stop providing the forum, why not remove the website and domain record all together or at least display a nice message about the situation and the reason for the removal (which would take 2 minutes to do). Displaying a runtime error isn’t very professional. Heck even a redirect to the main POF dating site would have been better.

Update: After checking the POF forums off and on for the last hour it appears that this is an intermediate problem. About half the time I get a runtime error, about a quarter of the time I get some other one line text error and for the other quarter of the time the forums actually work. As I said before this has been happening for at least a week since others have reported on it.

I have a thought, let’s start a campaign to see if we can get Plenty of fish to fix the forums. I am going to tweet about this story on Twitter using the hashtag #FixForumsOnPOF. If you want POF to keep the forums alive like I do, then re-tweet my tweet or post your own using the hashtag. Maybe if POF is listening they will do something about it and fix the problem with the forums. 😊

In the meantime since you can’t use the POF forums all of the time you are more than welcome to post your relationship and online dating questions and observations in our dating forums. We have a number of forum categories you can post in about a whole pile of different topics.

So, what does the runtime IIS error mean that most people seem to be getting? It actually is 2 errors in one. The web server is complaining first about their not being a custom error file in the location specified to display to visitors when an error happens. The second error actually triggered the first error. The second error is harder to figure out since the current error message is all about the first error. The second error is some sort of application error which could be anything from the actual website files not being available to a coding error in the requested web file. Since an error message is displayed it does indicate that webserver is working properly and that there is nothing wrong with the domain record.

If you are looking for a popular free dating site to try and want some more information then you should read our Plenty of fish review.