Ff.net problems

[CattyNebulart]

I get a message that they are unavailable due to upgrades or a 502/503 depending on page.,
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[TheTwisted1]

Is anyone else having problems accessing FFN right now? I keep getting a "the server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the server is busy. Wait for a few minutes, and then try again." error, but downforeveryoneorjustme.com says it's up. I tried pinging, and got 100% packet loss, while traceroute stalls after a point (somewhere in Colorado, according to whois).

--The Twisted One
"If you
wish to converse with me, define your
terms."

--Voltaire

[The Wanderer]

Every now and then, FF.net goes into a state where whenever I try to load a page it sits on "Waiting for www.fanfiction.net..." for an extended period, then displays a completely blank page; View Source shows the same blankness, not even the usual differently-colored background. After a few minutes, it goes back to normal. This wasn't happening a few days ago, but it's happened at least three times in the last two days IIRC.

Not every site responds to pings, so that isn't necessarily conclusive. For me, traceroute stalls on a site which is apparently in Los Angeles (on the far side of the country from me), even right now when the site is up just fine.

[Foxboy]

There's also the fun fact that one of their servers is in 403 lockdown
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[Bob Schroeck]

It's been on and off for me all evening -- it's in the middle of a dead period now, and even switching to the mobile URLs doesn't seem to be helping.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[HoagieOfDoom]

Still dead. Rats, just when I was going to sit down and finish The Hill of Swords, too.

[Dartz]

4:45 am, it's working fine for me. I don't think it ever stopped. Must be a routing/DNS issue in the US maybe.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[BYapes]

 Has anyone else just been getting a blank page visiting anywhere on FF.net recently?
 BYapes
Brian Y.
Seed Chronicles

[CattyNebulart]

yes, i am getting blank pages right now, it was working fine an hour ago.

I also couldn't reach it yesterday but that was an ISP issue, not a ff.net issue.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[Sweno]

Getting a blank page as well. Looks like they are having issues again
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

[BYapes]

 ...aaannd it's back up. Hopefully, this'll keep for a while.
 BYapes
 BYapes2001 on Y!Mess.
Brian Y.
Seed Chronicles

[Rod.H]

A new FF.net slow down, they're running a new scrip of this address: ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js

So there's a Microsoft server getting hammered to the point that Safari just skips it and tells ya that it did, Firefox eventually skips it silently. Don't know how IE's handling as I never use IE to access FF.net.

EDIT:

I chucked that address into noscript and blocked it. It removed the slowdown, but I appear to have managed to break a large number of page functions by doing so. Meaning no more tabs on Author pages, no more adjusting the text readablity, and who knows what else. I think I best unblock it.

EDIT2:

Ayep, unblocking it fixed it. Going by the info here: http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery it appears that someone in development chose to use a one of the three known free-to-all public hosted copy of that script. Bad form that, as there should be a copy on the local servers. Especially if you've made it essential for all the basic site operations.

--Rod.H

[The Wanderer]

Eh. They started using a Microsoft-hosted script Quite Some Time Ago Now, possibly more than a year. I've had it blocked this entire time, via NoScript (as part of "block all by default"); I'm not going to allow all scripts from microsoft.com just to get a few FFnet features. Frankly, not being able to get access to the "Recommended" tab has probably been a good thing for me, in that it's reduced my ability to casually sink hours into just scanning FFnet for new things worth reading.

Weirdly, every now and then it seems as if they briefly (as in, a few hours at most) use a copy hosted somewhere I've already allowed scripts from, and author-page tabs work fine for a little while even with microsoft.com still blocked - but then they switch back again. Possibly they've got some round-robin mirror-selection logic to decide which copy of the script to point to at any given time?

Point being, their use of a Microsoft-hosted script isn't new; the only thing that seems new is that the server which hosts that script is giving timeouts.

[Proginoskes]

Huh. That's a gratuitously stupid design decision if I've ever seen one. The obfuscated v1.4.4 is a minuscule 76.8 KB, having it local would improve the end-user experience considerably, and they wouldn't have to worry about it vanishing from the face of the Internet.

Speaking of, is there any way to get Firefox to use a particular script instead of one the page asks for? I've just downloaded a copy of jQuery, and think it would be good to deborg as much of my web experience as possible.
EDIT: to clarify, I want to make it a rule that gets applied any time "" appears in any page.

[Sweno]

I'm certain there is a greasemonkey script that will handle it. The problem is finding it.
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

[Proginoskes]

I've found it! It's Local Load Extended. It depends on the Firefox extension Local Load, which can't do the job on its own because it otherwise needs to be developed for, depending on the presence of nonstandard attributes that the userscript inserts.

[khagler]

I deal with this sort of thing by using Instapaper to read it on my iPad (for new chapters) or converting the entire story to a Mobipocket file using FanFictionDownloader. This way, I rarely need to go to the site directly.

[Morganite]

At first I thought, "That's odd. I know FFN's tabs have always worked for me..."

Then I remembered that I allowed microsoft.com so their developer documentation would work. '.' Still, that... really doesn't make sense.

-Morgan.