Trouble loading the front page, and being redirected.

April 9, 2003 8:01 PM

I tried to load up metafilter earlier and it was taking a while. I noticed at the bottom of my explorer window it said something like "Opening page http://www.b4ta.com/metafilter" Then the page failed to load entirely. I'm confused.
posted by SimStupid to Bugs at 8:01 PM (12 comments total)

Me too.
Did you type "metafilter" into a browser?
Were you following a link to Metafilter?
Did you actually type "www.metafilter.com"?
posted by bshort at 8:10 PM on April 9, 2003

I typed in the address; www.metafilter.com - no more, no less.
It hasn't happened again. I'm glad you saw it, thought i was going insane.
posted by SimStupid at 8:27 PM on April 9, 2003

It was down a few hours ago for a little bit. Maybe your browser was "helping" you.
posted by skallas at 8:35 PM on April 9, 2003

I updated some stuff on the server, and it took over an hour. Dunno what b4ta.com had to do with anything though.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:37 PM on April 9, 2003

Or did we experience some kind of DNS attack? Looks like an ad redirect. I'm not going to bother unblocking bfast from my hosts file to see what the hell it is.
posted by skallas at 8:37 PM on April 9, 2003

A quick whois on b4ta.com reveals it's registered to an Andy Kelk, possibly aka mopoke. The page itself is a redirect to a Jeeves search on Metafilter.

Looks a mite suspicious...
posted by Johnny Assay at 8:56 PM on April 9, 2003

Maybe he hosted one of the dozens of metafilter parodies and it stuck in people's history lists so when the word 'metafilter' came up and failed to resolve or whatever happened it went to /metafilter on b3ta
posted by skallas at 9:25 PM on April 9, 2003

Actually, I didn't mean it happened to me too, I meant that I was also confused. I think you just typed something wrong and IE thought it could figure out what you were doing. Or something.
posted by bshort at 10:01 PM on April 9, 2003

It was b4ta, not b3ta, which i thought was pretty odd. It couldn't have been some kind of weird cache 'cause i've never heard of the site. I don't think i typed it incorrectly because, as Mr. Assay noted, that is an existing web address.
I'm gonna blame it on yahoo, who take over my browser every time i should get an error page - those punks.
Skallas: that new host file is great, thanks.
posted by SimStupid at 10:56 PM on April 9, 2003

Disabling MSN Address Bar Auto Search, which may have had something to do with this problem.
posted by dhartung at 1:24 AM on April 10, 2003

If you type in www.metafiler.com you get redirected to b4ta and their yahoo page.
posted by sebas at 5:35 AM on April 10, 2003

sebas wins.

And always take screenshots of this stuff, guys.
posted by Hildago at 4:13 PM on April 10, 2003