Blank home page.

When I try to open http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/ it is blank. Can you please try to solve this? I am in Croatia, and I have tried to access it using multiple devices, but failed. Also, what about Flat Earth podcastes?

The home page seems to be down.  Until the situation is resolved, try using http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php instead. 

The index.php  file  ( or index.html )   is missing from the root directory,   the  url  I get by default is  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/       Since I don't have access to the cms,  I just see a blank page.
Also  the .favicon   is missing from the root directory,  so I don't get the site icon in the browser tab bar.

I think I saw  jack posting in the last few days,  maybe he can sort it out. 

Sorry, I currently don't have administrative control over the homepage. I've already contacted Daniel about this, though.

The index.php  file  ( or index.html )   is missing from the root directory,   the  url  I get by default is  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/

No, it's almost certainly not. You're probably just using Firefox which chooses not to generate its own error page there. Please don't talk about things you don't understand.

Quote from: Rayzor on January 02, 2016, 11:20:28 PM

The index.php  file  ( or index.html )   is missing from the root directory,   the  url  I get by default is  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/

No, it's almost certainly not. You're probably just using Firefox which chooses not to generate its own error page there. Please don't talk about things you don't understand.

Actually I'm using chrome,  but,  I see the exact same problem in seamonkey,  firefox, and chromium.   No idea about IE. 

And please don't tell me what I understand or not,  it's just annoying.   For your future reference I host several forums and multiple web sites.  Some on AWS and some own hardware.

As for proof of your stupidity I offer the following.

wget www.theflatearthsociety.org/index.php
--2016-01-04 17:42:48--  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/index.php
Resolving www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)... 104.28.28.107, 104.28.29.107
Connecting to www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)|104.28.28.107|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2016-01-04 17:42:49 ERROR 404: Not Found.

wget www.theflatearthsociety.org/index.html
--2016-01-04 17:43:38--  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/index.html
Resolving www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)... 104.28.29.107, 104.28.28.107
Connecting to www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)|104.28.29.107|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2016-01-04 17:43:40 ERROR 404: Not Found.

wget www.theflatearthsociety.org/index.htm
--2016-01-04 17:43:42--  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/index.htm
Resolving www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)... 104.28.28.107, 104.28.29.107
Connecting to www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)|104.28.28.107|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2016-01-04 17:43:43 ERROR 404: Not Found.

So index.php,  index.html and index.htm  don't exist in the root directory of the server,   go figure...    I'm pretty sure that's exactly what I said.

Please refrain from making insulting comments about things you  don't understand.  You obviously have no clue.

Let's try and keep debates of the perceived technical skills of others out of S&C.

Agreed,   I'll  try in future to ignore those sort of unhelpful posts.

I meant to post this as well,   pretty much tells a simple story.    Does no-one on here have ssh access to fix this?

wget www.theflatearthsociety.org
--2016-01-05 14:03:34--  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/
Resolving www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)... 104.28.28.107, 104.28.29.107
Connecting to www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)|104.28.28.107|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms [following]
--2016-01-05 14:03:35--  http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms
Resolving theflatearthsociety.org (theflatearthsociety.org)... 72.29.127.111
Connecting to theflatearthsociety.org (theflatearthsociety.org)|72.29.127.111|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms [following]
--2016-01-05 14:03:41--  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms
Connecting to www.theflatearthsociety.org (www.theflatearthsociety.org)|104.28.28.107|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/ [following]
--2016-01-05 14:03:42--  http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
Reusing existing connection to www.theflatearthsociety.org:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 500 Internal Server Error
2016-01-05 14:03:43 ERROR 500: Internal Server Error.

(I'm sorry, Pongo. I'll drop this after this post.)

For your future reference I host several forums and multiple web sites.

So does the owner of this website, and look where that got him.

Meanwhile, I have a degree in computer science. So what? It means absolutely nothing.

You see, claimed credentials like these are completely meaningless when in the end of the day you find yourself wgetting random pages and pretending it's helpful or useful.

As for proof of your stupidity I offer the following. [snip - logs of you trying to wget files which don't exist and which shouldn't exist]

Sigh. You've just explained precisely why you have not a shred of a clue. Let's guide you through this step by step.

pp@besthacker2016:~$ curl -I www.theflatearthsociety.org
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2016 01:41:38 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=dcf77e89acab1d80897024c2087d096b01452044497; expires=Thu, 05-Jan-17 01:41:37 GMT; path=/; domain=.theflatearthsociety.org; HttpOnly
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Location: http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms
X-Turbo-Charged-By: LiteSpeed
Server: cloudflare-nginx
CF-RAY: 2603b8c009ae2aeb-WAW

Right, so www.theflatearthsociety.org is a 301 redirect to www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/¹. Knowing that, we know that checking for index.php, index.html, or index.htm is an exercise in futility. Even if they existed, they wouldn't be accessed through www.theflatearthsociety.org, since that's not what the server has been configured to serve. Let's continue our investigation by doing something correctly and simply following the redirect.

pp@besthacker2016:~$ curl -I www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2016 01:44:09 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=d87f9e516fe7dd265e87d83f1e5d809741452044648; expires=Thu, 05-Jan-17 01:44:08 GMT; path=/; domain=.theflatearthsociety.org; HttpOnly
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.29 (Ah, so the PHP interpreter was invoked. This wouldn't happen if the file was missing.)
Accept-Ranges: bytes
X-Turbo-Charged-By: LiteSpeed
Server: cloudflare-nginx
CF-RAY: 2603bc6cba232ae5-WAW

To reiterate: No, it's most certainly not a missing file. It's an application error, and it's being very loudly advertised by the server. So please, don't talk about things you do not understand.

Now that we know this, fixing this is easy - in theory. Unfortunately, this would require co-operation from Daniel, so things will likely remain theoretical for the foreseeable future. That said, if he does become available, I'll happily volunteer to look at whatever's going on with the PHP code.

---

¹ - It's actually a longer redirect chain which finally resolves to this. I sacrificed some accuracy for the sake of brevity.

Right, so www.theflatearthsociety.org is a 301 redirect to www.theflatearthsociety.org/cms/. Knowing that, we know that checking for index.php, index.html, or index.htm is an exercise in futility. Even if they existed, they wouldn't be accessed through www.theflatearthsociety.org, since that's not what the server has been configured to serve. Let's continue our investigation by doing something correctly and simply following the redirect.

And if the redirect is the error, what then becomes of your theory?    The redirect USED to be to http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum   but maybe you didn't know that,  so you are excused.

if the redirect is the error

That is a nonsensical scenario that we don't need to concern ourselves with. The redirect has been in place for ages, and the only person capable of making changes to the site has been AWOL for, well, also ages. It is so unlikely that anything about the server configuration or the code on the server has changed that we can safely dismiss it as an impossibility.

Quote from: Rayzor on January 05, 2016, 06:18:01 PM

if the redirect is the error

That is a nonsensical scenario that we don't need to concern ourselves with. The redirect has been in place for ages, and the only person capable of making changes to the site has been AWOL for, well, also ages. It is so unlikely that anything about the server configuration or the code on the server has changed that we can safely dismiss it as an impossibility.

So If  what you say is true, and it's not a server configuration problem  or  some code on the server.  What do you think the problems is? 

The only thing I can think of,  is maybe the hosting service changed something,  like upgrading to later version of php or apache,  and that broke it?

At this point we're entering the realm of blind guesses. I don't like declaring what the problem is when I don't really have a way of knowing. That said, my guess would probably be something like this:

The homepage is cobbled together from various pieces by a non-technical user. Hypothetically, it is possible that some of the externally-referenced resources or widgets have broken/changed/disappeared off the face of the Earth, and that the homepage code didn't have any error handling in place.

Yes,  I agree, that  sounds possible,    the only way to find out for sure is to get access to the server.    Does no-one other than Daniel have access?

I think John Davis might. I'm not sure.

The homepage is now back online.

I do. I fixed it. Contact me next time.  I'm back making my own schedule for a bit, so I should be a little easier to contact.  Just needed to update some junk.

I do. I fixed it. Contact me next time.  I'm back making my own schedule for a bit, so I should be a little easier to contact.  Just needed to update some junk.

All good here,   what needed updating?  Just curious.