- Samuel's Blog - https://samuelgordonstewart.com -

The RiotACT Offline Two Days In A Row

As I write this, relatively popular local website The RiotACT [1] is offline. Normally a website going down for a while wouldn’t be even remotely worthy of me posting it here as a news story of any significance unless there were special circumstances applying to the site, however in this case it is newsworthy because a similar thing happened yesterday.

I didn’t actually notice RiotACT go offline yesterday as I spent a few hours in the morning getting Samuel’s Persiflage online, slept most of the day, woke up, had something to eat, and went to work. However when I went to check RiotACT I noticed that there was a short message from site admin Johnboy mentioning that the site had been offline for a while due to a database issue, the site had been restored from a backup, and most things from that day had been lost.

This morning RiotACT is down again, and whilst I didn’t see what happened yesterday and therefore can’t compare the two incidents, I can say that it really doesn’t look like a database issue this time, as visiting the RiotACT home page prompts me to download a file, which turns out to be the WordPress standard index.php file:

<?php
/* Short and sweet */
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true);
require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
?>

Visiting any direct links to articles, which in theory should direct your request to index.php for processing via an Apache mod_rewrite rule, is returning a completely blank page…no headers, no nothing!

It will be interesting to see what explanation is provided if and when RiotACT is brought back to life this time.

Update: Apparently this time they were offline due to a botched upgrade. End Update

Samuel