Hi website admins,

Lately I have been trying to follow links from the #cemetech channel on Discord to the Forums and wind up staring at a blank window when using Chrome. If I paste that link into Safari it works just fine.

I mentioned this on #cemetech and others also reported having the same issue

FWIW: I am using a Macbook Air M2 running Tahoe 26.6.2 with Chrome Version 152.0.7977.82 (Official Build) (arm64). I run Discord in a browser as well.

Another user reported having the issue on an Android phone with Chrome.

The website works fine if you navigate directly to it and then proceed normally. I posted this using Chrome on the same machine that is failing to follow links.

Hope this helps.

I actually also get this on Brave on my Android phone, from clicking links on the frontpage. Pages not only don't load, it seems to soft-freeze my browser until I close that tab.

I've also encountered this on Firefox on android. I figured it was the bot detection acting up since I use a VPN. Refreshing a few minutes later loads the page.

I've also noticed this but it's hard to tell if it's just been short-term connectivity issues caused by my packets needing to travel to the other side of the planet; it's useful to hear that it's not just me.

I have been doing various experiments for a while trying to pin down the cause, although I believe it may have been caused by issues with HTTP/3 connectivity. I've set the server to not advertise support for HTTP/3 (your browser might remember the old setting for up to a day) so I'd be interested to hear if you keep seeing this.

In slightly more detail, I found that under typical conditions only a small fraction of HTTP3 connections would succeed, while some would time out in connecting and others would connect enough to send a request after verifying the server's TLS certificate but would never receive a response. If your browser succeeded with an HTTP3 connection it would then try to use HTTP3 in the future, which would probably look like the observed behavior of a browser being stuck trying to connect unless you got lucky with another connection that worked. This seems like a known issue in the web server (that I don't believe should affect our configuration, although my experiments sure do look like the same issue), so hopefully just not advertising HTTP/3 support will fix it.

Thanks for looking into this Tari. I'll be sure to report back if it happens again and what I experience over the next week or two.

Much appreciated!

Hi Tari,

Just a quick follow-up to say I think whatever you did fixed the problem.I have not had any issues following forum links for the past three days and I've made it a point to follow them all.

Thanks again!

Yeah, everything's felt responsive to me too. Clearly it was a mistake to run a stream-oriented protocol over UDP (HTTP3). 😛