Board Offline Status code causes sites on CloudFlare to go down and become unreachable

[Alpha1]

I'm not sure if this is a issue or a suggestion.

When you turn off your site and upgrade XenForo then it will return a 5.xx status code.
If you run CloudFlare then this will go into a spasm over that status code, as it considers your server unreachable. The CF admin panel fills up with all kinds of errors. On the front end the XenForo site becomes unreachable. And if you only have access though CloudFlare then cannot put your site back online.

Please consider to change this behavior so that sites running CloudFlare can upgrade without this issue. I understand that this problem also creates other issues.
@Xon @MattW @eva2000 Do you have feedback about this issue?

 

[Chris D]

We don’t set a 5xx status code, because they’re mostly reserved for server errors.

We return a 403 Service Unavailable code.

If it’s complaining over that code (which is not something we’ve experienced or had any other reports of) then there isn’t a lot we can do because that’s the correct code to return in this case.

 

[S Thomas]

We don’t set a 5xx status code, because they’re mostly reserved for server errors.

We return a 403 Service Unavailable code.

403 Forbidden
The request was valid, but the server is refusing action. The user might not have the necessary permissions for a resource, or may need an account of some sort.

503 Service Unavailable
The server is currently unavailable (because it is overloaded or down for maintenance). Generally, this is a temporary state

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#4xx_Client_errors

Huh?

 

[Chris D]

Hey, I was only 100 out

You're right, but even so, that's the correct status code to return here because, indeed, the service is unavailable. I'm not sure what is being described is the default CloudFlare behaviour though. Certainly, nothing we've seen here, to the best of my knowledge, and I'm sure there would be other reports if that was the case.

And, even if it is the expected behaviour, there isn't a more appropriate code we can send.

 

[Xon]

Cloudflare is acting as a loadblancer, a 503 also means "temporary overloading" so a loadbalancer should shed traffic and try another back-end, especially if HTTP health checks are configured. With only 1 backend, this causes outages.

Linode's loadbalancer when doing HTTP health checks definitely also reacts like this.

 

[Alpha1]

I was quite amazed to learn that this apparently is common with CloudFlare. It caught me completely by surprise.

 

[eva2000]

The CF admin panel fills up with all kinds of errors

what errors you seeing ???

Cloudflare is acting as a loadblancer, a 503 also means "temporary overloading" so a loadbalancer should shed traffic and try another back-end, especially if HTTP health checks are configured. With only 1 backend, this causes outages.

Linode's loadbalancer when doing HTTP health checks definitely also reacts like this.

Yeah it's normal

On the front end the XenForo site becomes unreachable

should still be reachable via the xenforo closed forum message though

here's with my forum closed behind cloudflare

 

[Alpha1]

I am using DigitalOcean combined with CloudFlare. Maybe that results in a similar situation as with Linode.
The errors in CloudFlare are not visible anymore, as only enterprise users have a log.

 

[eva2000]

so you had enterprise access ?

 

[Alpha1]

No, I am on a $20 plan. Errors only display when they occur. There is no log for old errors.

 

[Alpha1]

Im getting the same with XF2.