TheChrisD - Rant Central

500 - It’s so not the magic number

500 is now officially the most annoying, most useless, and more stressful number of them all. Why? Because when you get a 500 HTTP status code, it screws up everything… Which is made even worse when you try to take a weekend off, and that’s when it pops up…

I think we all know by now that 500 means an Internal Server Error (given how much I’ve had to mention it recently). Usually it’s caused by the server you’re on being annoying and not working properly. In those cases it’s nothing you can do, so you need to get over it quickly. However, most other times it appears because the server doesn’t seem to like the way you lay out one of your system files, and then decides not to try and serve anything. Annoying!

A few months ago, Donncha shared with me his tactic of getting rid of site scraper bots for good with a little bait and trap. It all worked well back on GoDaddy, but ever since moving to Blacknight all of my .htaccess allow and deny records have thrown up 500 errors… Removing them solved the 500 problem, but alas not the scraper problem.

So, this morning, checking my quite large inbox of new mails (90% of which are new comment notifications) - I notice a little e-mail from Apache. Not the pizza place, but an Apache web server. Another site scraper banned. Didn’t phase me all too much, given how many of them had been caught over time. Onto Twitter, and I notice a little @reply from Reflex, sent Friday evening:

@TheChrisD What up with your site?

My first reaction was WTH? But as I open my admin panel, sure enough there’s a 500 error there. A little digging around later shows that my trap was doing its job in catching the spider and adding it’s deny order to my .htaccess.

Only problem is, not only did I remove the allow and deny base syntax, but either way it caused a 500 error no matter what! So, since Friday my site had been down all because of my attempts to stop my site being scraped…

The whole 500 issue is one of only two things that do annoy me quite a bit about Blacknight. The other being the problems with open_basedir, which prevent WordPress from auto-updating itself because it can’t seem to locate the installation folder…

Either way, once I get the weekend’s backlog of feeds out of the way, I can shoot off a little e-mail to the BN support team with my concerns. Unlike GoDaddy, they’ll get back to me on average within the hour - absolutely thrashing GoDaddy’s previous record of… 29 hours.

PS: Before I forget, GoDaddy tried to auto-renew my hosting with them over the weekend, which thankfully failed Had they got away with renewing without any notification that they were going to charge my card, I would have reported them to my bank for Internet fraud!

PPS: Looks like Wordbook fucked up when I tried to post this… Oh well, Facebook will import the “note” eventually anyway.