dmweb.free.fr

[Phoenix]

I can't seem to reach the DM encyclopedia. Is there a problem?

[Saumun]

Seems to be working okay for me.
Maybe a temporary thing.

[Phoenix]

It's working now, but it wasn't even responding to ping earlier.

[Ameena]

Just tried it myself and it seems to be down.

[slickrcbd]

It appears to be down again. I get an
"Erreur 500 - Erreur interne du serveur"

[ChristopheF]

Probably a transient issue, it works fine for me now.

[Ameena]

Weird, yesterday it was the forum that didn't load for me. At least in the morning - I tried again a few hours later and it was back up again. Temporary DM-focused Internet glitch?

[ChristopheF]

Encyclopaedia
I also got the same error message today. The home page of the site is a PHP script that handles redirections to the appropriate page in case you clicked on an old link (the ones with "/?q=" in the URL). I keep this in place to avoid breaking all links to the site created in the past 20 years.
The error message appears when PHP is broken at my ISP, which seems to occur randomly (and I can't do anything myself to fix it).
As a workaround, you can always use http://dmweb.free.fr/index2.html which is the static home page (no PHP), this one should always be working fine.

Forum
I also had issues accessing the forum a few times over the past weeks, but each time it was also transient and was fixed after a moment without me doing anything, so I did not bother to look more into it. Maybe I should look for a better hosting plan, but this will cost more money.
And the "Donate" button that I added at the top of the forum did not have much success I must say.

[Gambit37]

I'm out of the loop regarding PHP hosting in 2025. What sort of traffic do we get? I'd be happy to pay for hosting for a couple of years if it's not too expensive.

[TechnoPagan]

Is it down for anyone else the last couple of days? I'm trying to see if it's my ipblock/vpn/whatever. I'm getting 403 hosting errors. Even the index2.html link above doesn't work.

[ChristopheF]

I was not aware but the site was blocked. I'll see what I can do.

[Gambit37]

Looks like they took the whole site down Christophe!? Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

[Ameena]

Oh yeah, wow, it's just a server hosting page now, no Encyclopaedia :O. That's ominous...

[ChristopheF]

I'm waiting for an answer to unblock the site... If that fails I may have to move to another host, meaning a new domain name and all links to the site broken

[Gambit37]

Oh goodness me, that's very sad news. After all this time and all your energies building such an amazing free resource. I sincerely hope it doesn't come to that. Very keen that you're able to resolve this. What can we do as a community to help?

[EdgarGrim]

Nooooooooooooooooooooo!!! That's horrible! I have been trying for a few days and wondered what had happened. I hope it gets resolved soon. Thank you very much for your efforts Christopher.

[ChristopheF]

There's not much to do for now other than wait and see.
If I can't bring the site back online then finding a new host will be my next step. Not too expensive, at least 10GB storage, unlimited bandwidth if possible (I don't know how much is needed). The site has static content only, so no need for PHP & a database.
Might be time to host both the forum here and the Encyclopaedia on the same host. And on the same www.dungeon-master.com domain.

[Gambit37]

I hope you can continue to use dmweb.free.fr -- it must have a lot of inbound links after all these years and breaking those would be so frustrating! If that's not possible, then I think you're right, this would seem like a good time to combine both websites into one and host them together. I'd be happy to put money behind that.

If we *don't* combine the sites, you could consider using CloudFlare Pages free teir, although I'm not sure if you'd be able to host a big site like that entirely for free. Of course, those static site providers don't support PHP (for the forum) so we'd still need two different hosts. Oh I'm reminded why I hate the hosting part of web dev: it's such an annoying pain in the butt!

[ChristopheF]

Funny, I was just reading about Cloudflare Pages & Cloudflare R2.
Using R2 only seems a viable option that would be free for less than 10 GB of data (the site is a bit less than 7GB large) and provide free unlimited bandwidth.

[ChristopheF]

The site is back online.
It was blocked because of "Spam in the database", but the database was totally empty since the site is fully static...
I hope this won't occur again...

[Gambit37]

Woohoo! Nice, congrats on getting it back online. That's quite a strange reason for it to have been blocked...!

[Ameena]

Oh nice, glad you got it fixed. Phew!

[EdgarGrim]

Thank the lord

[jayrshaw]

Great job getting the site back up, Christophe!


--Jay

[TechnoPagan]

So glad it’s back up! For the future, in case this happens again… since it’s just a static site, you could use GitHub pages. I do for a couple of static sites I generate with Hugo.

Anyway, thank you!

[Gambit37]

Yep, Github Pages is a good option, except in this case there's 7GB of scans, music and other assets involved. Git does support large file storage for sites of this nature, but it's a bit trickier to setup: https://git-lfs.com/

[TechnoPagan]

I don't think setting up git-lfs is necessary. I had forked a repo for a static site a few years back that had at least 5-6gb (if not more) of images. The images were in a separate repo, and simply referenced in the github workflow file of the original site hosting repo. It does involve using github actions to build docker images, but a lot of that is boilerplate. It should be easily doable.

The point is moot for the moment, which is good. But, I always like having a backup plan, personally.