Technical Web Help: Ampersand article

[Dragonblade]

Hey everyone,

Is anyone else having trouble loading the ampersand article? I'm running IE7 on Windows XP SP2, I have another computer in my home running IE7 on Vista. Neither one can open the article.

I keep getting an HTTP 500 internal server error which indicates that WotC has a bug on the page that keeps it from displaying.

But at a friend's house last night (his ISP is Comcast), he is running IE7 on Vista and he could pull the article right up.

I can open the older Ampersand articles without a problem. And I was able to get to the printer friendly page for the Sneak Attack article by going to the page for the Pit Fiend article and manually changing the URL. But going directly to the new article gives me the 500 error.

At first I thought this had something to do with my IE cache of temporary web pages, but I cleared all that out. Besides if that was the case it should only be affecting my computer. But no computer in my house can pull that web page up.

I use Verizon FiOS for my ISP. Any technical people have any ideas? Anyone else with this same problem? I consider myself a pretty savvy user but this has me stumped.

Its either something with IE7 (but then how can my friend open the page?), something on WotC's end, or a problem with my ISP or router. But for the life of me I can't think of why my router would have a problem yet have no trouble opening other web pages.

 

[Belorin]

Have the same problem, don't know why.
Been having it since early this morning.

Bel

 

[Lackhand]

Hey everyone,

Is anyone else having trouble loading the ampersand article? I'm running IE7 on Windows XP SP2, I have another computer in my home running IE7 on Vista. Neither one can open the article.

I keep getting an HTTP 500 internal server error which indicates that WotC has a bug on the page that keeps it from displaying.

But at a friend's house last night (his ISP is Comcast), he is running IE7 on Vista and he could pull the article right up.

I can open the older Ampersand articles without a problem. And I was able to get to the printer friendly page for the Sneak Attack article by going to the page for the Pit Fiend article and manually changing the URL. But the new article gives me the 500 error.

At first I thought this had something to do with my IE cache of temporary web pages, but I cleared all that out. Besides if that was the case it should only be affecting my computer. But no computer in my house can pull that web page up.

I use Verizon FiOS for my ISP. Any technical people have any ideas? Anyone else with this same problem? I consider myself a pretty savvy user but this has me stumped.

Its either something with IE7 (but then how can my friend open the page?), something on WotC's end, or a problem with my ISP or router. But for the life of me I can't think of why my router would have a problem yet have no trouble opening other web pages.

HTTP 500 is the actual message you're getting from the server. While it's just this side of possible (read: inconceivable!) that it's something like your computer claiming it only understands Urdu and their server not having Urdu installed, thus choking and dying...
... far more likely is that they have some internal servery nonsense that's broken.

From the outside, complete guesses include your login data (since they have that now!) on their side having some buggy bits, causing their server to choke and die; transient failures that you were unlucky enough to hit, causing their server to choke and die; overzealous load-balancer which hits your IP range... causing their server to choke and die.

After all, they're ramping up for a traffic surge during/after D&D XP, so I'd imagine this comes from them trying to save their servers when everyone tries to access the same article at once.

Or, I'm just blowing smoke.

 

[MaelStorm]

I use Firefox 2.0.0.12 and there is no problem. I'm not a computer expert, so I can't answer your question. But I hope they fix it soon for IE7 users.

 

[hong]

Try the &authentic=true trick. Maybe it's their authentication non-process that's screwing up.

 

[EricNoah]

Does this one work for you?

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dramp/20080222a&pf=true

 

[Dragonblade]

Does this one work for you?

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dramp/20080222a&pf=true

This URL works. In fact, this is how I had to get to the article last night to read it.

But the main URL does not work. It doesn't matter if I am logged in or out of D&D Insider. The &authentic=true trick does not work either.

 

[Oldtimer]

Hey everyone,

Is anyone else having trouble loading the ampersand article? <snip>

If you remove "Show friendly HTTP error messages" in Tools/Internet Options/Advanced (that's were it would be in IE6 at least), you'll be able to see the actual error message from the ASP engine:

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a003e' 

Input past end of file 

/default.asp, line 383

It seems it chokes on processing the login info from some browser configurations (I wish I could see what is on that line 383). If you tack "&pf=true" on the end of the URL, you'll be telling the server you want the printer-friendly version, which, as we all know by now, ignores your login - and therefore works fine.

 

[Dragonblade]

If you remove "Show friendly HTTP error messages" in Tools/Internet Options/Advanced (that's were it would be in IE6 at least), you'll be able to see the actual error message from the ASP engine:

It seems it chokes on processing the login info from some browser configurations (I wish I could see what is on that line 383). If you tack "&pf=true" on the end of the URL, you'll be telling the server you want the printer-friendly version, which, as we all know by now, ignores your login - and therefore works fine.

Yes, I have another friend who just IMed me. He is a professional web developer and he has the same issue with IE7, his Firefox works fine. He looked deeper into it and said its a problem with WotC's server being unable to handle certain IE7 configurations.

So, come on WotC!! Please fix this as soon as possible!

 

[Oldtimer]

Yes, I have another friend who just IMed me. He is a professional web developer and he has the same issue with IE7, his Firefox works fine. He looked deeper into it and said its a problem with WotC's server being unable to handle certain IE7 configurations.

I can tell you that it has the same problem with all my IE6 configurations as well. Being a developer in this area myself I tried to extract the source from their ASP page, but of course they've patched that IIS bug...

So they're better at applying hot fixes to their servers than to fix their own software.

Anyway, when I do a raw HTTP GET operation (not using a browser), I do get the correct HTML back, so it's something special it tries to do for IE (and only when login is needed).

They've had the same problem before, so I wonder why they don't just fix it. Maybe they don't have anyone who knows the source code well enough and don't want to spend the dollars on a skilled consultant.

Annoying, it is.