I recently began reading the Whatley Academy stories on the http://www.crystalhall.org/stories.html site. Somehow I missed the universe when it came out and have read the first dozen stories. I'd like to read the rest.
Unfortunately since Friday I've been unable to access the site getting WEBPAGE CAN NOT BE FOUND.
Does anyone know if the site is down?
Does anyone know an alternate site!
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Comments
I am pretty sure they clearly mentioned they've moved
They are now at: http://whateleyacademy.net/
CrystalHall.Org
While Crystal Hall has apparently been moved to http://WhatleyAcademy.Net the http://CrystalHall.Org website was still running on one of our webservers until last night. Last night I was forced to "suspend" the account, and have since re-directed the domain name due to the fact that More and More and More attackers had broken into the old Crystal Hall Forums and been using the site for phishing scams. Backups have been made, but CrystalHall.Org as it was will no longer be hosted on our servers. This move was motivated by action taken on our server by our upstream provider which caused the entire server to be unavailable for a period of over 24 hours.
-Piper
Using our sites name as phishing scams
Know that feeling real well. I had to close down BarbieLee.com as we seemed to have a problem with phishing ghosting us and representing themselves as us. When it got bad enough we were starting to show up in the "black listed web sites" I shut it down. There isn't any defense against something like that.
Paypal, Wells Fargo, thousands of big name corporations have had to deal with scammers too. They can't afford to shut down.
Hang tuff Piper, we'll make it. Although I'm adding bandaids along the way.
always,
Barb
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
And that site is broken in safari!
Noooo! Crystalhall.org had functionality in iOS safari whereas whateleyacademy.net has broken meny. You can not choose to read stories in iOS safari. You have to go look up a blog post on some side window to get a blue link hopefully that takes you to Canon stories. This is not something we readers do. We skip the site and laugh. Well perhaps tomorrow a site manager check the site. Exit to next site!
It has been like this forever. Does no one check http://whateleyacademy.net/ for compability with one of the biggest mobile browsers?
yup
but, Kirsten is NOT changing anything until the migration of content is completed, and the mobile visitor is not her primary concern.
this has been discussed ad-nauseum on the whateley academy forums.
Stupidity is a capital offense. A summary not indictable.
Clearly mentioned where?
sure they may have clearly mentioned that... in some blog or post somewhere burried on the net, or maybe even on the now shut down site.
Glad someone else asked this question, in a month or two i may have decided to visit it only to be met with 404 Not Found
Whenever I had gone to the crystal hall the last two months
They clearly said on the front page that crystalhall is now only an archive and that they are moving and provided a link to whateley.net right on the front page of crystalhall.org.
The move was discussed in their forums and posted prominently by the site administrators.
Yes BC probably should have updated the link.
Just to avoid confusion
I speak of the crystalhall site admins, NOT BC.
ummm, wondering if it's a server problem....
Because Storysite is offline and the temp. Chat link isn't working either... Talia
The link in the BCTS head
I hope that the web-elves of BCTS will get around to updating the link in the page head of BCTS with the correct URL.
Crystal Hall link
Crystal Hall is no longer hosted on our servers and so has been removed from that listing. If someone wants to supply us with the exact URL they want used for the new Whately Academy site, we can add that to Other Links in the topmost links menu.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
new url is http://whateleyacademy.net
Erin,
The new post-Crystalhall.org site url is http://whateleyacademy.net
The New Crystal Hall - WhateleyAcademy.net
I'd like to point out a few corrections in things here that may clarify some misunderstandings.
For the past two years, I stepped into the senior admin role for the Whateley story site... and did what I could to maintain/sustain the site with the tools I had available to me. That included only two things, really... an administrator account in a broken FUDforums, and an FTP login to the site. This allowed me to do a little clean up work in the forums and to upload new html for the site, so I cleaned up the story lists and menus and posted new stories and news as had been done in the past.
When things broke, I didn't have a means to fix them. I had no way to run regular backups, no way to implement new security precautions (even assuming FUDforum itself was updating to fix them). And there were individuals targeting the server for attacks all along the way and I had nothing to do for that but call on Piper when things crashed down around my ears. When hackers brought the site down for a month last fall, it was clear to everyone involved that status quo wasn't really an option.
At that point, knowing things were unstable, I established an entirely offsite status panel: http://whateleystatus.wisdomsprice.com
It's just a small text web page on my google account that tells anyone who checks it the current status of the site and, if anything is known to be wrong, I update it with details as I learn them. It also has contact info so people can reach me if something IS wrong and I haven't already noted that its down. With the new site, we also added a redirect for even easier remembering of the status page: http://status.whateleyacademy.net
As far as lack of announcements go... we've actively advertised the new site on both the status page, in posts and discussions here on BCTS, and on the old web site. For example, the last news post (and thus the TOP news post) on the crystalhall.org site front page until the site went offline was:
Well, it lost some formatting... like really large lettering on the new site URL... but, that's what it said!
Not long after we stopped updating the old site (note: at that point the forums were down for good and all we had functioning was the html menu structure and the stories), hackers got their hooks into the remaining php from the forum and were able to rewrite some of the front page and were phishing for login data. I disabled what I could (remember, all I had available to me at that point was an ftp login) of existing php and put back in clean html. But that was all I could do... except make sure Piper knew what was going on. It was around that point that we realized that the original forums crashes and outage were due to hacking and not just being old poorly maintained forums.
In the interim, we have built up the new site and been migrating the story collection over to it. We nearly finished with that... and the plans were to , once all the stories were over and we had a chance to do one last look and make sure we were losing something that would be unrecoverable, we'd have Piper cut the strings on the old site and redirect (or just sell us the old domain). The server shutdown came as a bit of a surprise to us as well as those of you reading there... because, as I noted, we were still a couple weeks from being finished with migrating everything (we have it all on backups, it was just quicker for some of the people helping out to be able to grab the files directly from the web). But I 100% support Erin and Piper... if hackers were still causing problems with the site/account, they needed to shut it down and do what they did.
For those of you who ARE reading the stories, we have MOST things migrated into the new site. Sir Lee and the WIKI team have a tracking page in place that lists which stories we still have to get to... but several people have copies of everything and we are happy to email you a copy of something if we haven't migrated it yet and its next on your reading list. Or you can just post in the forums and we'll prioritize those as the next stories to migrate.
Someone mentioned that there are problems with Safari - I'd have to say that that is inaccurate. There may be with some specific combination of Safari and a specific hardware or something... but Safari is actually (according to my Analytics data) the third most commonly used browser used on the site, accounting for about 6200 hits in the past month. I'm also currently working on solutions to several menu issues that cause problems on small screens but top priority is still in migrating everything from the old site and keeping new content moving in the pipeline. Once we finish up migration later this month, I'll have some more time to play around with browser and small screen/mobile specific issues. Ultimately, though, no site can perfectly serve every device with just html... and we have no plans to create a whateley App at any point in the near future. :)
Anyway.. one final time... the new site is at http://whateleyacademy.net
Questions? :P
Thanks :)
Things have been a bit hectic, frankly, since Bob died. I think Bob was not only my goto tech guy but the one for Crystal Hall, too. We (Piper, Cat and I) inherited Bob's domains and machines but were not inner circle at WA/CH like he was. So, we weren't always immediately in the loop with problems and information. And we all still miss Bob.
Let's see what we can do to straighten things out. :) Someone contact me privately and we can make arrangements to get the domain transferred so you can point it where you will. And Piper has added WA to the Other Links menu topside. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
iOS safari is broken - content drop down does not work
OS X safari works. iOS safari with all iPad and iPhones in the world are broken. The drop down meny for example content does not work at all. I would do a browsercheck with headers. If safari is the third most common browser I would stipulated that a big part of those also use iOS safari due to many stay in the Apple world also on mobile devices if they use a desktop with OS X. I would think you get more viewers if the dropdown meny issue is sorted later on. We are many that almost never use anything else than the iPad or some other mobile device to read content.
Addendum: thank you for taking the time to make a great site. Noticed the change made to way you use the drop down meny and it should make the site easier to navigate for all. Again thank you.
Everything takes time :)
Unfortunately, many people take certain choices and prioritization as dismissal or an unwelcoming attitude.. or ego that I/we know the best way and aren't willing to adapt to make things work better. Mostly, that's untrue. Simply, it's about time. I only have so much of it to commit and for the past year (or two), I've given up a lot of my 'me time' that I use to recharge and survive (usually by gaming or writing) to doing administrative stuff for the site.
And don't get me wrong, I'll spend that time in a heartbeat if the choice is between getting a little sleep or having the site fail/close. But most of the things people want done aren't quite that critical. So given the choice between rebuilding a menu structure or getting a couple good nights sleep so I can do my paid job well (I get about as crusty as an old chief petty officer when I'm too tired... not conducive to keeping a job in the arts where everyone things you have to be happy and best friends with the whole team to get anything done)... I have to choose the sleep. Sometimes the choice is between two or more things for the site. Do I spend a couple hours transferring old stories over? Or implement a means of sorting stories by some element or another? Or figure out how to block out a set of IP addresses who are posting spam/advertisement comments on stories? Or work on my next story? Or work on recruiting/coaching another new author to add to the team?
That's my usual list of choices. :)
I'm sure I'm far from alone ... its not like any of us running community sites are Amazon, with thousands of people working in our IT departments constantly working on building a better interface. We know there's thousands of little things we 'could' do to make the sites better, easier to use, etc... and given another five hundred years to work on them, we might just get through that list. :)
iOS Is not broken on whateleyacadamy.net
Just a clarification, http://whateleyacademy.net is not, and never has been, "broken" with iOS / Safari. Its not designed for small screens, and on an iPhone in portrait mode it probably is not going to display the stories in anything like a readable way, but in landscape mode it should be fine, and it is perfectly usable on an iPad (I use an iPad Air as my preferred device when accessing the site, and have since day one it migrated to the new server).
What did cause issues was ad-blockers set to block Javascript, they blocked the old drop-down menu system from working (re-loading the page with the ad-blockers temporarily disabled allowed the menu to work fine).
Anyway, Kristin redid the menus and the drop down is no longer used, so ad blockers should stop being such an issue, though I would point out that you are denying the site the money in needs to serve you the webpages you so desire to read. If you like the stories, setting http://whateleyacademy.net on your ad-blockers whitelist would be a nice gesture of support for the site so it can continue to run and provide the stories.