Could someone familiar with TV Tropes wiki help me out?

Cafe Society
#1

According to “Down for everyone” the site is up, and there doesn’t seem to be anything on their twitter feed, but every time I’ve tried to access any page on tvtropes.org in the past 24 hours or so I get a “connection reset” message from Firefox.

I’ve only ever made 2-3 tiny edits to articles there several months back (and I’m the only person in my household who uses the site), so I can’t imagine why my IP would be blocked, but I can’t think of why else I’d be having the problem when no one else seems to be.

I do use Adblock Plus and NoScript plugins for Firefox, could that be the problem? If not, and if you aren’t having any difficulties accessing the site, could you please PM me an appropriate e-mail address to get in touch with someone at the site so I can try to straighten things out with them? I really enjoy the site and would hate to be unable to browse it because of some misunderstanding.

#2

I’m not using Firefox at the moment, as I just upgraded OpenSuse — and am working through Asus motherboard issues — but TV Tropes comes up on this browser, IceCat, which is a form of Firefox. AdblockPlus, Ghostery and Greasemonkey included.
Their contact address is thestaff @ tvtropes.org — which is not private; I can’t see any other contact.

#3

…well now I’m really confused. I just managed to load the home page by going to: http://www.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/

…and when I tried to search it went to a url without the “www.” and gave me “connection reset.” When I typed the “www.” part of the url back in it loaded the search results just fine. WTF? Anyone have an idea what this could be?

ETA: Thanks Claverhouse, I’ll get in touch with them. Didn’t see your post when I started to write this.

#4

Websites have the choice of including the canonical www., as is proper, or using the inferior bare http:// since both are available when one hires an address — whichever they choose, they have to redirect the unused url to redirect to the other seamlessly.

Maybe something’s wrong with their .htaccess file ( if they use apache ).

#5

I was going to try to help, but in the process, I loaded TV Tropes, and it took me half an hour to escape.

(It loads fine for me in Firefox with NoScript and Ghostery running, using the bare http://tvtropes.org address.)

#6

FWIW I’m running Firefox and don’t have any issues with no “www” in the URL.

#7

Oh, hey Balance, how’s things?

Thanks for the input guys, I sent them an email, so I guess I’ll see what they have to say, but it’s useful to know that it isn’t just a Firefox issue or something with the site in general.

#8

Maybe you have a bad copy of the page in cache, and so your browser chokes on it if and only if you use that specific form of the address.

#9

Well, I cleared my cache and wiped TVTropes.org from my history, but I’m still having the problem. Apparently ctrl-F5 does reload the page correctly, which I didn’t think to try at first because refresh and the retry button on the connection reset page didn’t do anything. Strangely, if I try to go back to a page that I got to load, I still get the connection reset page first. I also still get it whenever I click to go to a page I haven’t visited.

#10

Just got an e-mail from them (Didn’t think I’d hear back from them until business hours tomorrow). They suggested that it might be a DNS thing and gave me instructions and it fixed it, so I guess that’s it.

Thanks for trying to help guys!