I’m trying to create a new account on Exercism for the first time, and the confirmation link doesn’t work - it gets stuck and eventually times out after a period of minutes. I’m reasonably sure that this isn’t anything to do with my own machine or network. I’m using up-to-date MacOS and tried both Chrome and Safari with no extensions. I’ve tried two different devices and both my working wifi and 4g.
(To register to the forums and post this topic I used a linked GitHub account, which doesn’t require email verification).
I was eventually able to resolve this by asking an LLM to strip out the tracking from the link and just using the URL - it might be a rare case but it seemed to occur on various devices and browsers so seems like there’s something wrong.
That we have to jump through that kind of hoops to register rather than it be a temporary issue of a down service long repaired by now, though, suggests that new registrations aren’t particularly wanted.
That ascribes intent to what’s clearly an unintentional software issue! Most people have no trouble registering. No one is intentionally making registration hard. If Exercism didn’t want registration, they could disable it.
This sounds like it could be an issue with a network provider and/or some sort of ad-block service that is blocking certain requests before they reach the Exercism servers.
Could you please share the failing URL? What exactly happens when you visit it? You can use, say, curl -vI "the_url" to get more details and see if it works outside of a browser.
Sorry I wasn’t clear enough.
At the moment I copy the link or when I open directly from the mail, it pastes with encoded slashes and question marks like that : https://mail-metrics.exercism.org/CL0/https:%2F%2Fexercism.org%2Fusers%2Fconfirmation%3Fconfirmation_token=iL2********C2fxyg/1/010b0***8a602-0**021-4**d-4**2-9**2-e**c-000000/Vgqa**Qld_0Ck**K9_rhI**D_X6v**KvFU5xA=231
So it’s exactly the same with curl (failed to connect)
The thing is that replacing %2F by / and %3F by ? is not enough to make the link OK
@IsaacG it is down. I’ve told Jeremy via different channels as well.
@kumesana if this was posted out of frustration: we feel you. But please refrain from these pointless kind of interjections that neither help the OP nor help the community. Let’s take things at face value only and give each other the benefit of the doubt.
Thanks for the reports. It’s fixed now (although it’s a DNS issue, so might take a few mins to propagate).
What happened: We recently migrated to Cloudflare for DNS. For some records (AWS alias records), that migration create an A record to an IP, rather than what was effectively a CNAME to a Cloudfront distribution. It seems that yesterday, the IP of the Cloudfront distribution changed, which then broke the link between the two. Changing that to be a CNAME fixed it.
@kumesana There are a total of one people in the world with the power to resolve this (me) and I do a lot of things. Right now, I’m deep in creating a new product next to Exericsm to help our community. That means I spend my hours deep in the world of building, not managing support. Thankfully, there’s a wonderful team of volunteers here who I can rely on to hold the fort down (if you’re interested - watch https://www.youtube.com/live/SbKXlzTqG3g). When @SleeplessByte saw this he was able to drop me a text and I was able to respond (within about 5 minutes). So please consider this a “fixed in 5 mins from the person who needs to fix it knowing” rather than “no-one cares after 18 hours”.
DNS has already propagated for me. Please be aware if you ran into this issue that it can take up to 48 hours in the worst case for DNS caches to work again, but usually (much!) shorter.
ping mail-metrics.exercism.org
Pinging d1g3e9p36yw910.cloudfront.net [2600:9000:238d:8c00:2:e027:ed00:93a1] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 2600:9000:238d:8c00:2:e027:ed00:93a1: time=18ms
Reply from 2600:9000:238d:8c00:2:e027:ed00:93a1: time=11ms
Reply from 2600:9000:238d:8c00:2:e027:ed00:93a1: time=10ms
Reply from 2600:9000:238d:8c00:2:e027:ed00:93a1: time=10ms
we feel you. But please refrain from these pointless kind of interjections that neither help the OP nor help the community. Let’s take things at face value only and give each other the benefit of the doubt.