Something is wrong with xenforo.com

[Luxus]

First and foremost, this is going on for months and is not an issue on my end. Most of the time when I access xenforo.com I see this:



And this:



The site loads slow and as the two pictures show, CSS and Javascript are not or partially loaded. I'm not sure myself but this could be an indicator of high load as the server fails to serve me with CSS and Javascript files. Could it be that xenforo is a target of an DDoS attack?

 

[Paul B]

I access the site hundreds of times a day and never encounter that.

 

[Amaury]

No issues here, either.

 

[rwm1962]

I don't get that but many day's it errors on my mobile & just won't load but other sites are fine including other sites running Xenforo. Laptop & PC are fine. Working fine just now however!

 

[Luxus]

I took a picture of the Resources page right now and some images are missing:

 

[Paul B]

It sounds like an ISP or routing issue between the xenforo.com server and you.

 

[m1ne]

Try using OpenDNS or Google DNS.

 

[HWS]

This is -again- a common problem with the "base" tag XenForo uses in all it's pages. This tag is known to have problems in many situations with all of the browsers. Just search Google.

We also encounter such problems in our server logs daily. There is not much you can do about except reloading the page or using another browser. Many of our users have complained about it and I also see this issue from time to time myself.

 

[rwm1962]

I was checking the forums new posts on my phone today & it happened again. I couldn't get back on although I could browse other sites fine & my own XF forum.

I'm able to access now several hours later.

 

[HWS]

Our solution was to explicitly set the js and data urls to the regular forum URL in config.php and to create an add-on to move the CSS files to the data path also and serve them from there.

After this was done the "base" tag was no longer involved with those important links and all complaints have stopped.

 

[Luxus]

Here is a screenshot of the current thread. I'm not going to mess with my DNS settings just for one website.

 

[Mike]

It's unlikely to be DNS. That appears to be part of the CSS not loading properly, which would point to a network issue. I don't know of any issues in the network (in terms of SoftLayer's), so there could be something between you and them that is causing sporadic packet loss. Unfortunately, there's unlikely to be much we can really do to prevent it.

 

[Kevin]

I've also had this happen at work when going through our corporate network & proxy. For whatever reason the page content is presented in the browser but not the corresponding CSS and/or JS. Usually refreshing the page loads fine.

Since it is likely related to our network caching & settings it is something I just live it with since there is nothing that can be done about it from the site side (it's not just XF.com it happens on when at work).

 

[HWS]

It's unlikely to be DNS. That appears to be part of the CSS not loading properly, which would point to a network issue. I don't know of any issues in the network (in terms of SoftLayer's), so there could be something between you and them that is causing sporadic packet loss. Unfortunately, there's unlikely to be much we can really do to prevent it.

It would be fine if in a future version of XF the dependence on the "base" tag could be removed. This would help a lot with several such issues (CSS, JS, etc).

 

[Mike]

That's really unrelated to this issue though. The CSS is still going to fail to load with a network issue independent of whether a base tag is needed.

The base tag is in the source of the page, so if you get the page, the tag will be respected regardless of other network failures; if something accessing the page ignores the base tag, that's an issue with that agent.

 

[HWS]

That's really unrelated to this issue though. The CSS is still going to fail to load with a network issue independent of whether a base tag is needed.

The base tag is in the source of the page, so if you get the page, the tag will be respected regardless of other network failures; if something accessing the page ignores the base tag, that's an issue with that agent.

I do not know exactly why, but it seems that several agents have problems with the "base" tag occasionally. It looks like they've a harder job when the base tag is there and this job fails sometimes.

As said, we had a lot of complaints about js and css not being loaded and all that stopped after we circumvented the base tag with the js data url in config and a special solution (like "[bd] Cache") for the CSS.

It may improve XF and help agents/browsers to do their job correctly if you want to take a deeper look into that. The base tag has a history of making it harder for agents to render the page correctly.

 

[HWS]

@Mike

Such lines in the web server error log are a clear indication, that the "base" tag is the culprit of those problems (even if it is hard to believe):

2015/08/01 11:16:34 [error] 9698#0: *3262134 open() "/var/www/*****/threads/650086/styles/rogue/xenforo/avatars/avatar_m.png" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: **.112.80.150, server: *****, request: "GET /threads/650086/styles/rogue/xenforo/avatars/avatar_m.png HTTP/1.1", host: "*****", referrer: "http://*****/threads/650086/page-2"

Please grep your own error log and you'll see yourself...

 

[Mike]

I'm not debating that things like that happen. It's just likely orthogonal to this particular issue.

 

[JamesBrown]

I had to look up orthogonal

 

[Moshe1010]

preform a traceroute on www.xenforo.com when it happens to you and post here the full output.
What Is A Trace Route (tracert)? How Do I Run One? - Intermedia Knowledge Base