Massive Site Issues: Help?

Entire site is a disaster

from WinCustomize Forums
Hey all.

What is happening with Wincustomize?

For about a week now, I cant even navigate this site... every time I come here, the entire site is "broken-up", images not showing up or loading, load times (for whatever does load, just text, mainly) is totally lagged-out, and if I'm able to even open a page for a WB skin, the image wont load at all when clicked.

The entire site is a horrible disaster, obviously the CSS used for the site isn't working (layout and large text tell that tale) and it's completely unusable! Gah!

I'm using IE6, am having no problems anywhere/any way else and have seen this happen once or twice briefly, but never last this long. I could barely get here to create this post.

Are you guys aware this is happening? And will it be fixed soon?

Dying to get some new skins!

Thanks.
13,724 views 54 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Are you guys aware this is happening?


They might be now. Haven't see any other posts as of late with the problem described.
I can access with IE or FF with no problems.
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Sounds like the Zone Alarm problem. You need to have both Wincustomize.com AND Stardock.com in your trusted site list for your firewall.
CursorFX - Customize your Windows cursor
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I don't have anything in my Trusted Sites list, as I've never had to before. I've been coming here for ages, and unless something changed that I'm not aware of, it doesn't make any sense to me.

That being said, I tried what you suggested, and added Wincustomize to the list (had to make the extension "https://" instead of just "http://") and it still didn't work.

Any ideas as to what the problem could be and what to do about it?

This is wacky =/
It's literally the only site on the net I cant navigate! Haha.
There's nothing in my system settings blocking it either. It just started out of nowhere. I cant be the only one experiencing this, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Thanks.
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top

It's definitely a problem at your end....as others are having no problems at all.

First guess would be a firewall issue.

And it won't be 'https' [secure], just your standard 'http'....

Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top

From our stand point the only thing we can think that it may be is our DNS Servers.  Because of our recent move to the new office our secondary DNS server has moved too.  And unfortunately we forgot to update the new IP address with Network Solutions.  So because of this DNS lookups may not have been working properly which could have possibly caused some of these issues. 

We have updated our our DNS records to point the secondary DNS servers to the correct location.  However, this can take time to propogate the internet depending on how frequently your DNS servers picks up updates.

One possible thing to try is run the following command from a command/dos prompt:

ipconfig /flushdns

This may or maynot help but may be worth the try.

Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Actually, he is not the only one...I'm getting all these symptoms. I have wincusto and stardock in my trusted sites. I've cleared all caches, deleted all cookies, all that stuff and nothing has helped. I haven't been able to get on here, normally, in days.
Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I'm having problems as well. Long load times (if the pages load) and if I try to download a file, the operation simply times out. I have tried using IE, Firefox and Stardock Central and get the same results from each. Like werewolf, both Stardock and Wincustomize are in my trusted zones and I have cleared cookies and cache also. I believe that this started for me yesterday (or maybe the day before).
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
oh, and by the way, it should be stating the obvious, but if folks are having problems getting here, how are they going to report they are having problems getting here?
Reply #9 from WinCustomize Forums Top

oh, and by the way, it should be stating the obvious, but if folks are having problems getting here, how are they going to report they are having problems getting here?

Email...

[email protected] ....

Reply #10 from WinCustomize Forums Top
As of yesterday I temporarily started using AVG & ZoneAlarm and haven't had any any site issues or problems getting to the site as of yet.
Reply #11 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Ok, so there are others having this problem then.

Well, the DNS "flush" didn't work (though it's something good to do anyway), and since there are others who are having the same mysterious problems and have done all we can, then it would appear that there is nothing we can do on our end. There are no other settings or system configs that will solve this problem on the user-end.

There are other DNS commands that can be used, but none that will effect this problem, that I know of, anyway.

I'll send off an email to the addy above, but that's about all we can do.

If anyone does figure something else out though, please let us all know!

Thanks much.
Reply #12 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Well, everything seems to be working fine now, out of nowhere... for me, anyway. Hope for the rest of you as well.
Reply #13 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Having issues here as well. Oddly enough I can access it from my home pc just fine, but cannot access SDC a tall and Wincustomize comes up with broken images from the office. Looks like DNS to me.

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
Reply #14 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Whatever the issues were, they appear to have been corrected (for me at least). I am now able to pull up pages and download files again.
Reply #15 from WinCustomize Forums Top
well, the issues have not improved here at all. it took 20 minutes just to get the bare bones of this page to load.

I shut down all protections on my computer...no firewall, no av, no adaware, ms antispyware, nothing. it didn't help.

deviantart loads up in 3 seconds

I'll try the support email, but...

I've got one other thing to try. there is one other program (dll actually) which has been giving me fits lately.
Reply #16 from WinCustomize Forums Top
hi im new to the website .....liek i read i have these same simtoms but i have see progress (1st time on the web it ditn load and know i can see links and pic but i am still unable to download nothing .....i flush and i turn off my firewall n add the link but still nothing ) hopfully by tomorow i will be able to see more pictures on teh website or even download somethign "i still have hope "
Reply #17 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Well, everything seems to be working just fine now. Thanks so much to whomever

Got a LOT to catch up on.
Reply #18 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Update:  Looks like we have two major issues that we are dealing with this week.

1st Issue: DNS configuration.  Because of our move to the new office one of our DNS servers moved and now is using a new IP address.  We failed to update this information initially which was causing some DNS lookups to fail.  And then this would cause failures to get to the site or load site images and such.  Please we found a couple of misconfigurations with our DNS so that didn't help.  We believe we have all the major issues with our DNS resolved now so this should help getting to our site.

2nd Issue: We made a major update in our code on Monday.  Unfortunately a bug has creeped in somewhere that appears to be causing a leak of sorts.  This has been causing intermitent problems/hangs/slowdowns in getting to the site all week.    We have been chasing this bug around and unfortunately have yet to be able to pinpoint exactly where the problem is coming from.  We have a couple areas of code that we suspsect and have tried some different solutions with no luck yet.  With extra load balancing we have decreased the frequency of problems but the problem still appears to be hanging around.  Hopefully we will find this nasty bug soon!

 

 

Reply #19 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Pat...would this 'bug' have the capability of locking up IExplore.exe?

I've had to kill the darn process on a regular basis lately and reload it...and on balance I think it's only when on WC...

Reply #20 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Just got this trying to access any of libraries.

An Error Occurred
There was a problem opening this page. Please refresh the page and try again.
Whatever you were trying to do, it didn't work out the way you expected.
You could always return to the Home Page.

Also...I've been having problems all morning trying to access the site. The main page loads fine...but thats it. I'm surprised I was able to get this even far.
Reply #21 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Pat...would this 'bug' have the capability of locking up IExplore.exe?

Well, I don't think any site bug should be able to lockup IE.  However, it may expose a bug in IE where IE does lockup   But with that said, I have seen IE hang when WC is having problems.  So it is possible that this problem we are having may be related to IE locking up.

Reply #22 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Libraries are working again T-Man!
Reply #23 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Strangely....what seems to happen is when it's locked up it becomes unskinned [loses WB] ...non responsive....then when I open taskmanager there's 2 instances of it both 'not responding'.

I kill them and reload and it's fine....till the next time....

Reply #24 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I am getting frequent "server too busy" error messages along with several other intermitent errors. Navigating this site has been a nightmare for the last two days.
Reply #25 from WinCustomize Forums Top
...same here