[Paul B]

Live from a shed in the middle of the bald ass prairies, I'm happy to announce that after many years of collecting dust DukeMaps.net is now up and running. Locally hosted in my first endeavor of leaving the data center only to run a free hosted Linux virtualized server environment from my closet (literally). After many updates to PHP, MYSQL, Wordpress Plugins and the never ending manual fixes that come along with the updates I'm happy to let you all know the site is now up and running. While behind on the user content I'm hoping i'll somehow find time to get back in the swing of things for publishing a back log of years worth of quality content that I've missed. Anyway, at least I got it up before the movie came out.


So here's a toast, to Dukemaps.net and the community that drives it. Game on!

[Mark]

I think one of those pesky prairie dogs chewed thru your internet connection. I can't connect.

[slacker1]

Its working for me but some requests are hanging for a bit.

Edit: Saw this error on a few pages:

Quote

There has been a critical error on this website

Ex: https://www.dukemaps.net/?p=2044

[Paul B]

Mark, on 08 March 2024 - 07:05 AM, said:

I think one of those pesky prairie dogs chewed thru your internet connection. I can't connect.

Hi Mark,

Please try again and let me know how you make out? It may have been because you were accessing thewebsite using HTTP only and not HTTPS. I'm not sure but i've made some adjustments on my side to accomodate HTTP and HTTPS requests by redirecting everyone through HTTPS.

Thanks Slacker1 for the update as well. I wouldn't have seen this right out of the gate. I was playing around with some page caching plugins and I think it torpedoed a good portion of my site. I've tried to go through all 700 pages to make sure things were restored but I might have missed a few because there was so much to go through. Hopefully this has corrected the majority of the problems and I really do appreciate you guys taking the time to let me know.

[Paul B]

Paul B, on 09 March 2024 - 12:40 PM, said:

Hi Mark,

Please try again and let me know how you make out? It may have been because you were accessing thewebsite using HTTP only and not HTTPS. I'm not sure but i've made some adjustments on my side to accomodate HTTP and HTTPS requests by redirecting everyone through HTTPS.

Thanks Slacker1 for the update as well. I wouldn't have seen this right out of the gate. I was playing around with some page caching plugins and I think it torpedoed a good portion of my site. I've tried to go through all 700 pages to make sure things were restored but I might have missed a few because there was so much to go through. Hopefully this has corrected the majority of the problems and I really do appreciate you guys taking the time to let me know.

Please don't use http://www.dukemaps.net for some reason it works internally but not from the internet. You can use http://dukemaps.net which goes to: https://www.dukemaps.net or you can use https://www.dukemaps.net or https://dukemaps.net. I'll need to look into this further when I have more time....

[Paul B]

Oh I'm such a n00b!! You know it never fails when I'm 100% confident I've done something right, that's when I am dead wrong. I was fooling around with NGINX Linux conf files for domain redirection which had nothing to do with my problem at all. And when I said it works internally but not externally... I should have known it wasn't with Linux at all but with my misconfiguration of my firewall rule binding both HTTP & HTTPS into a single rule to redirect to HTTPS when I needed to separate the services into their own rules. Sad to say I only caught this by accident while adding a new rule for my SSH connection to troubleshoot the problem from work. HAHAHA Geez the answer is always right under my nose and sometimes I'm too damn stubborn for my own good. Anyway, the problem has been solved now & all redirection from all angles work.

What I have noticed.... since upgrading my PHP there are certain problems with the website menu system which isn't translating well with the latest engine, the star rating system on the back end appears borked and a few other quirks I can't remember. If anyone has any CSS / PHP Skillz let me know, I could really use a hand, otherwise these problems could take me a while to sort out... so bare with me.

[Mark]

I was able to get to the website fine using https:

[Aleks]

Dunno if it's only me, but it seems the downloads might be broken on the site. I've tried with random maps on two different laptops and using different browsers, but to no avail - the furthest I could go was the captcha "puzzle" loading in (only once), but after verifying it, I couldn't proceed any further. I thought it could be problem with AdBlock in Opera and Chrome blocking pop-up windows, but tried on Edge and nothing as well.

[Paul B]

Aleks, on 13 March 2024 - 05:42 AM, said:

Dunno if it's only me, but it seems the downloads might be broken on the site. I've tried with random maps on two different laptops and using different browsers, but to no avail - the furthest I could go was the captcha "puzzle" loading in (only once), but after verifying it, I couldn't proceed any further. I thought it could be problem with AdBlock in Opera and Chrome blocking pop-up windows, but tried on Edge and nothing as well.

Hi Aleks, I've been fighting with this problem for most of the morning and I have no clue why all of a suddent this stopped working. It works when I'm signed into Wordpress but doesn't work as a visitor to the site. I've confirmed Captcha is infact working and connecting properly I suspect this to be a result of me updating the plugin to a newer version which introduced this problem. I've sent a request for help from the developers of the plugin to see if they can release a fix and now i'm patiently waiting to hear back. Thanks for the report.


Man this webhosting stuff is frustrating, once i get this website running like a top I'm going to shut off all updates so things don't keep screwing up.

[Paul B]

Okay finally got some relaxing time at home to look into why the downloads just stopped working. Turns out I'm the culprit I disabled a setting in one of my plugins in the name of Securitay which effectively stopped the downloads for visitors. The setting in question was: disable JSON REST API for not logged in users. Sorry guys it sounded like a good idea at the time. So secure nothing works! =)

[Sanek]

^Just tried, the downloads work now.

[Aleks]

Thanks, yeah the downloads work now and glad my report helped - was a bit reluctant with reporting at first thinking this might be something on my part Good luck with the site, it's always cool to see more active sites with Duke stuff, especially user-made content!

Quote

Man this webhosting stuff is frustrating, once i get this website running like a top I'm going to shut off all updates so things don't keep screwing up.

As tempting as this might sound, it might not be the best idea - we've just had a similar case at work where our site just stopped working due to not updating Wordpress for some time, shit got so serious that even the admin panel stopped working so even if we wanted, we couldn't update without basically doing a hard reset of the site

[High Treason]

Depends. As there's no client side input, the better option is often "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and therefore, to not update something unless it no longer works. Then you only have to wrestle with the hassle of updates once on rare occasion, rather than every time they decide to push one.

My own web runs on software that is decades out of date (or should, have to repair the motherboard) and requires only minor attention to get around it. It will stop working in the year 2320 or some such due to a bug in MSSQL and IIS, it seems, but I doubt I'll be too bothered about it any more by then. Amusingly the museum web, running on software that's nearly twice as old as the main web, should basically run forever so long as the hardware exists to host it, although I suppose the world will run out of 286s eventually. Otherwise no breakages on either as the site remains the same, the only changes being additional pages of the same design, employing the same systems, so there's no real reason it should go wrong.

In any case, really glad to see it back online.

[Paul B]

My old website deployment was running an old version of PHP 5 and an outdated version of MySQL. I upgrade both the Database and PHP to 8.3.1 running the latest Wordpress 6.4.3 which my previous Tier 1 hosting company said was impossible and they couldn't upgrade the Wordpress core without breaking the site. Not sure what the heck they were doing, but it worked for me. My menu system for the site has always been a bit tempermental with Microsoft but hey that's Microsoft. The menu system works just fine in Chrome & Safari and I've been through the code countless times not finding any errors or debugging reports that lead me to believe there is a problem with the code itself. I even resorted to AI assisting me with the debug process and still no luck. So for Edge users they can just click the menu item a second time to refresh the menu NAV pane option to reactivate the drop down menu. I'm kind of done fighting an invisible battle unless someone else wants to take a stab at it. The problem might go as deep as a Wordpress itself with the way it interprets the submenu system coupled with the wordpress theme code as it was written many years ago for Google Chrome but I've had this problem since day 1 back in 2017.

[Paul B]

Guys exciting news for me anyway. While I wasn't able to find problems with my website, theme or Wordpress code my site still wouldn't render the drop down menus consistently while practically working in every other browser aside from Edge. Today I came across a solution which is to import the following registry key into your Windows computer. This sets a Forced "Microsoft Edge" policy which adds the Adobe PDF extension to Edge. When this policy is set, it will totally correct the sub menu problems with my website. Go figure! See the attached registry file if you're wanting a seamless solution for a shitty browser.

Attached File(s)

•  ForceAdobeExtension.zip (383bytes)
  Number of downloads: 232

[Paul B]

Well I never thought for a second I'd get to the bottom of the sub menu system sucking royal ass on my Dukemaps.net website. Well tonight I've finally tracked it down and replaced the CSS responsible for screwing with my menus for 7+ years of it just not working right. I'm pretty happy about this as now it won't be such a painful experience for new visitors and for those that were able to put up with it for all these years it's not like I wasn't trying to fix it. Enjoy the site guys, this is the site where you can find all your hard work! And if you think I'm missing something well then let me know! All the best!

[quakis]

Congrats on the fix, it's always a pain having that one site issue you can't pinpoint a solution, had that headache numerous times on TAW. Tried messing around with the submenus just now and they do seem way more consistent at showing up.