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"What's the Harm" web site down

Mr. Scott

Under the Amazing One's Wing
Mr. Scott
Joined
Nov 23, 2005
Messages
2,546
The What's the Harm?WP web site is down.

Anyone know why?
 
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ctamblyn said:
It looks to me like the [wiki]...[/wiki] tags were stripping the question mark from the end of the URL.
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No, I wasn't talking about the wiki site. I was talking about the target site, which really was down yesterday morning. This one: What's the Harm?

The stripped '?' issue should be forwarded to forum developers as a bug report, but that's a different issue.
 
Mr. Scott said:
No, I wasn't talking about the wiki site. I was talking about the target site, which really was down yesterday morning. This one: What's the Harm?

The stripped '?' issue should be forwarded to forum developers as a bug report, but that's a different issue.
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Ah, gotcha. No, that was working for me as well at the time, which is why I jumped to the assumption that you meant the Wiki page. It must have been a localised disturbance in the force :)

I suspect the question-mark stripping bug has to do with it looking like the start of a query string, but that would be a guess. I'll mention it to the powers that be.
 
ctamblyn said:
Ah, gotcha. No, that was working for me as well at the time, which is why I jumped to the assumption that you meant the Wiki page. It must have been a localised disturbance in the force :)

I suspect the question-mark stripping bug has to do with it looking like the start of a query string, but that would be a guess. I'll mention it to the powers that be.
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I sent a bug report to a forum administrator.
 
[URL="http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/member.php?u=36234 said:
ctamblyn[/url]"]I suspect the question-mark stripping bug has to do with it looking like the start of a query string, but that would be a guess. I'll mention it to the powers that be.
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yes, "?" separates the domain name and the query string (parameters)

e.g.

www. sitename.com/login.php?username=whatever&password=psw.
 
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Not sure why it was down, I suppose my web host was doing some maintenance. It wasn't anything I was doing.

Thanks for the note, though. It's up now.
 
krelnik said:
Not sure why it was down, I suppose my web host was doing some maintenance. It wasn't anything I was doing.

Thanks for the note, though. It's up now.
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Love the site, BTW, and it made me worry that it was under attack. Carry on!
 
Unfortunately, that's the nature of a site that links to news stories. It is a giant pain in my backside how fast news websites expire content.

(And it's really dumb of them too - the more content you have, the more "bait" you have for search engines to bring people to you. It is really no wonder newspapers are going bankrupt daily).
 
krelnik said:
Unfortunately, that's the nature of a site that links to news stories. It is a giant pain in my backside how fast news websites expire content.
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It's not so much that they expire content, is that they limit free content. The older stuff is typically hidden behind a paywall (with a URL change that breaks existing links).
 
You might consider webciting the links. I do that when I use references for papers and for blogs where I don't want them to get traffic. It doesn't always look the best though. But it's a valid reference. People can check the newspaper if they really need to.

www.webcitation.org
 
Yeah, I've had a back-burner project to re-do the way I do links so that I preserve the bibliographic info at least in the worst case, and web cite everything on top of that.
 
luchog said:
It's not so much that they expire content, is that they limit free content. The older stuff is typically hidden behind a paywall (with a URL change that breaks existing links).
Click to expand...

I question whether the revenue they get from selling content that way can possibly outweigh the marketing/PR benefit of leaving the content free.

Content length could be factored in. Clearly, a multi-part Pulitzer-prize-winning piece of investigative journalism that runs for many pages could do well behind a paywall. There's plenty of incentive for someone to pay a dollar or two to see something like that.

But many of the articles I link to are under 500 words long, and end up being priced for several dollars in the archives. Insane! Who's going to pay $8 to see an ancient article about a police case? Nobody.

Some journalism sites DO get this, note how BBC's articles go all the way back to the beginning of the web itself, and most are still accessible despite several site redesigns. That is no doubt helping BBC's Google rankings immensely.
 
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