Author Topic: TFF page not found in the web? (Read 1854 times)

Raulglezruiz · « **on:** January 24, 2021, 10:31:28 AM »

Since a few days ago when looking for tropical fruit forum on my cell phone in Google shows "page not found" the only way I can get it is looking for it since my records in favorites any one experimenting the same issue?

brian · « **Reply #1 on:** January 24, 2021, 10:42:56 AM »

I can reproduce it also.. if you come from a google search page it gets a 404, but going directly works. I think it isn't liking something about the headers in the referral request. It is trying to throw a custom apache error page which is also failing, possible that the original error is not 404 but the 404 is for the custom error page. Not sure.

http://tropicalfruitforum.com/
Host: tropicalfruitforum.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Referer: https://www.google.com/
DNT: 1
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: PHPSESSID=5qmvc1lroln5in0na1p9lqsl83; SMFCookie11=a%3A4%3A%7Bi%3A0%3Bs%3A4%3A%222332%22%3Bi%3A1%3Bs%3A40%3A%22f8951632e403bc8d3e4f55ba265a1f30d608a524%22%3Bi%3A2%3Bi%3A1800718334%3Bi%3A3%3Bi%3A0%3B%7D
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

GET: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2021 15:39:45 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 315
Keep-Alive: timeout=5
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Raulglezruiz · « **Reply #2 on:** January 27, 2021, 07:52:07 PM »

That is correct, will be harder for new people to find the group?

brian · « **Reply #3 on:** January 27, 2021, 08:39:29 PM »

Very likely, yes. Also, Google may delist it if it throws an error

Seanny · « **Reply #4 on:** January 28, 2021, 02:24:59 AM »

I couldn’t get on with Bing’s search either.

cen · « **Reply #5 on:** January 28, 2021, 03:20:28 AM »

My browser gives me the option of 5 search engines. As noted, Google, Bing, and Yahoo give the 404 error. DuckDuckGo and Ecosia links go to Tropical Fruit Forum. When I tested this, the DuckDuckGo link and Ecosia link went to pages I have never visited, so in their cases it does not seem to have been successful because of the browser history.

LycheeLust · « **Reply #6 on:** January 28, 2021, 04:32:03 AM »

An easy fix that works for me is clicking the url and visiting it again. Refreshing doesn’t work for some reason when coming from google, but visiting the same exact link works.

brian · « **Reply #7 on:** January 28, 2021, 09:55:14 AM »

I don't think this is something that would really affect existing users, but I could see how it might affect non-users trying to reach it for the first time

Kuhyay · « **Reply #8 on:** January 28, 2021, 03:29:16 PM »

I've noticed Google has begun to delist this forum because of all the broken links. Searches that regularly resulted in page 1 results for TFF now do not show the forum at all.

The built-in forum search functionality is pretty poor, so this further limits new and existing users ability to discover content on the site.

John B · « **Reply #9 on:** February 07, 2021, 02:41:35 PM »

This is a problem because the search engine here does not work well at all. I had better luck googling the question. But now we get the error message. Wonder if this also has to do with the site being unsecure?

brian · « **Reply #10 on:** February 07, 2021, 03:02:35 PM »

to search the forum, you can add 'site:tropicalfruitforum.com' to your google search to search within the site. This is far better than the built in search.

ex. kumquat site:tropicalfruitforum.com

https://www.google.com/search?q=kumquat+site%3Atropicalfruitforum.com

If you do it too often though they will make you fill out captchas.

John B · « **Reply #11 on:** February 07, 2021, 04:12:13 PM »

Quote from: brian on February 07, 2021, 03:02:35 PM

to search the forum, you can add 'site:tropicalfruitforum.com' to your google search to search within the site. This is far better than the built in search.

ex. kumquat site:tropicalfruitforum.com

https://www.google.com/search?q=kumquat+site%3Atropicalfruitforum.com

If you do it too often though they will make you fill out captchas.

Brian, that is what i always used to do. Results show up now but you get the 404 not found error. This is not good. Does it still work for you?

Seanny · « **Reply #12 on:** February 07, 2021, 04:14:45 PM »

Seanny · « **Reply #13 on:** February 07, 2021, 04:21:52 PM »

I’ve gotten a few MySQL errors from this site recently.

TonyinCC · « **Reply #14 on:** February 07, 2021, 04:55:46 PM »

If someone cannot undo this, and make searches appear on Google, then this valuable forum will become useless. Now even when I go to Firefox it opens a google search page and gives me the same error. Also getting the captcha things when I try my phone on other browsers. The de-listing of the forum needs to be reversed somehow. I can still get on using a bookmark on my computer but we are gonna get ZERO new users if they can't search using google.
Can someone with the right computer skills please volunteer to help the Admin fix it please? There must be a few IT people out there....

Viking Guy · « **Reply #15 on:** February 07, 2021, 10:09:10 PM »

This same error occurs when trying to make new posts or edit posts in too close of intervals.

Have to wait 5 minutes for it to clear and then it works again.

brian · « **Reply #16 on:** February 08, 2021, 09:41:13 AM »

Quote from: John B on February 07, 2021, 04:12:13 PM

Quote from: brian on February 07, 2021, 03:02:35 PM
to search the forum, you can add 'site:tropicalfruitforum.com' to your google search to search within the site. This is far better than the built in search.

ex. kumquat site:tropicalfruitforum.com

https://www.google.com/search?q=kumquat+site%3Atropicalfruitforum.com

Brian, that is what i always used to do. Results show up now but you get the 404 not found error. This is not good. Does it still work for you?

Oh, hah yes it does still give 404s for the actual links on google. Even if you refresh the page. I normally use DuckDuckGo search engine, and it seems to have the same site: feature and it *does* work just fine:

ex. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kumquat+site%3Atropicalfruitforum.com&t=ffab&ia=web

However, that doesn't help the vast majority of people who use google.

brian · « **Reply #17 on:** February 08, 2021, 09:43:13 AM »

Quote from: TonyinCC on February 07, 2021, 04:55:46 PM

If someone cannot undo this, and make searches appear on Google, then this valuable forum will become useless. Now even when I go to Firefox it opens a google search page and gives me the same error. Also getting the captcha things when I try my phone on other browsers. The de-listing of the forum needs to be reversed somehow. I can still get on using a bookmark on my computer but we are gonna get ZERO new users if they can't search using google.
Can someone with the right computer skills please volunteer to help the Admin fix it please? There must be a few IT people out there....

I don't think the admins want any help though.

brian · « **Reply #18 on:** February 08, 2021, 09:55:33 AM »

There is something parsing the Referrer header that triggers when it find 'google'. I tried various tests, if set your referring url to nothing, or some junk, it works fine. If you put google.com you get 404. If you put FOOBARgoogleBLAHBLAH it fails. If you misspell google it works again. Definitely something looking for special handling of google ref urls and breaking.

JakeFruit · « **Reply #19 on:** February 08, 2021, 11:50:23 AM »

I admin several dedicated servers and run an SEO business, the issue is a little perplexing, but it shouldn't be too hard to fix. Switching hosts/re-indexing the pages is definitely NOT the issue. Either the forum software or the web server (Apache or NGINX) is. That's what's throwing/returning the 404. Simple Machines Forum (SMF) software is several versions from current/stable, I'd update that first and see if it fixed the issue. I believe there's an active exploit in the version of the software TFF is using, so even if updating didn't fix it, it wouldn't be wasted time. Clues to the problem surely lie in the error logs.

I'd be happy to help, someone can send me a PM to discuss. Google is definitely penalizing TFF in the SERPs now. Since the last big update came through in December, TFF topics have disappeared. This site also needs to get an SSL cert asap and start serving content securely. They are free these days and easy to implement.

bob_tu · « **Reply #20 on:** February 09, 2021, 03:05:00 AM »

Quote

This site also needs to get an SSL cert asap and start serving content securely.

1000x this

BonsaiBeast · « **Reply #21 on:** February 09, 2021, 05:21:59 AM »

Quote from: JakeFruit on February 08, 2021, 11:50:23 AM

I admin several dedicated servers and run an SEO business, the issue is a little perplexing, but it shouldn't be too hard to fix. Switching hosts/re-indexing the pages is definitely NOT the issue. Either the forum software or the web server (Apache or NGINX) is. That's what's throwing/returning the 404. Simple Machines Forum (SMF) software is several versions from current/stable, I'd update that first and see if it fixed the issue. I believe there's an active exploit in the version of the software TFF is using, so even if updating didn't fix it, it wouldn't be wasted time. Clues to the problem surely lie in the error logs.

I'd be happy to help, someone can send me a PM to discuss. Google is definitely penalizing TFF in the SERPs now. Since the last big update came through in December, TFF topics have disappeared. This site also needs to get an SSL cert asap and start serving content securely. They are free these days and easy to implement.

I second this

News:

Author Topic: TFF page not found in the web? (Read 1854 times)