For the last few days I have ben unable to reach Rationalwiki. There does not seem to be any commentary on the internet about this, and I suppose there may be an innocent explanation. However I have an uneasy feeling about this, in view of the attack on academic freedom by the Trump administration. I would expect Rationalwiki to be something of a target, as it focuses on debunking pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and misinformation. Snopes I see is still however functioning normally.

Does anyone have any information about this?

10 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Does anyone have any information about this?

I don't. I do visit RationalWiki often, though it's been a while since I last visited it. Thanks for letting me know, I'll keep an eye on it.

"During the 6 days of creation God placed the Earth inside a black hole to slow down time so the light from distant stars had time to reach us."

Given the site's satirical jabs at fundamentalism, anti-science, pseudoscience, authoritarianism, and so on, and it being AFAIK on a US platform, do you think the current regime could have gone after it? I know they had to settle on some defamation suit earlier this year, which coukd have impacted them budgetarily.

Also, given the site's role in a global conspiracy to kidnap children and brainwash them with pizza into Progressivism...just sayin'.

ETA: the lawsuits might fall into the category of SLAPP suits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation

And now I'm seeing a report of rolling 503s, due to bot attacks. SLAPP could have weakened them, in dealing with this now seemingly ubiquitous Net scourge.

Edited November 6Nov 6 by TheVat

6 hours ago, TheVat said:

"During the 6 days of creation God placed the Earth inside a black hole to slow down time so the light from distant stars had time to reach us."

Given the site's satirical jabs at fundamentalism, anti-science, pseudoscience, authoritarianism, and so on, and it being AFAIK on a US platform, do you think the current regime could have gone after it? I know they had to settle on some defamation suit earlier this year, which coukd have impacted them budgetarily.

Also, given the site's role in a global conspiracy to kidnap children and brainwash them with pizza into Progressivism...just sayin'.

ETA: the lawsuits might fall into the category of SLAPP suits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation

And now I'm seeing a report of rolling 503s, due to bot attacks. SLAPP could have weakened them, in dealing with this now seemingly ubiquitous Net scourge.

Yes I’ve had it return a 503 error as well, though I don’t know what that signifies. But I did wonder if there was a DDOS attack in progress to shut them down. If they were kaput because of the lawsuit I’d expect their Wikipedia entry to mention it.

I was however pleased to see Kennedy has an entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons: https://americanloons.blogspot.com/search?q=Kennedy. So dissent is still alive and kicking in some corners of the internet. And, as I say, Snopes is still working.

Rationalwiki seems to be accessible once more.

6 hours ago, exchemist said:

Rationalwiki seems to be accessible once more.

👍

12 hours ago, KJW said:

👍

But this p.m. (in Europe) it’s down again, now that the US is awake…..

My suspicions of enemy action are reawakened.

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

But this p.m. (in Europe) it’s down again, now that the US is awake…..

My suspicions of enemy action are reawakened.

I can confirm that, I ran a controlled experiment to test this. It's down.

2 hours ago, Otto Kretschmer said:

I can confirm that, I ran a controlled experiment to test this. It's down.

Maybe I should try early morning GMT and see if it works.

32 minutes ago, exchemist said:

Maybe I should try early morning GMT and see if it works.

I've tried accessing the site from a few different VPN locations, and some are giving Error 503: Backend fetch failed.

Googling this seems to suggest the website server may be experiencing unusually high traffic.

On 11/5/2025 at 7:33 PM, exchemist said:

For the last few days I have ben unable to reach Rationalwiki. There does not seem to be any commentary on the internet about this, and I suppose there may be an innocent explanation. However I have an uneasy feeling about this, in view of the attack on academic freedom by the Trump administration. I would expect Rationalwiki to be something of a target, as it focuses on debunking pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and misinformation. Snopes I see is still however functioning normally.

It would be difficult to imagine a more grotesque text than the one above. Creating a conspiracy theory to explain an attack on a website that fights conspiracy theories. Simply chapeau bas..

5 hours ago, Sensei said:

It would be difficult to imagine a more grotesque text than the one above. Creating a conspiracy theory to explain an attack on a website that fights conspiracy theories. Simply chapeau bas..

Haha. It’s just a possibility that I don’t rule out. As I say, there may be a perfectly innocent, banal explanation.

But tell me, as I’m not an IT whizz like you, what would be the typical reasons for a 503 error?

3 hours ago, exchemist said:

But tell me, as I’m not an IT whizz like you, what would be the typical reasons for a 503 error?

HTTP server can return any code they want. It could be a lie/fake. But suppose so it is true return code, we make things like these (you lucky *** I have this error at the moment):

This means that rationalwiki.org is in an Akamai cloud. I don't have any servers in this cloud, so it's hard to say, but I can talk about similar situations in other clouds. Cloudflare has an option to act as a proxy server between its server and the real server that is set in the configuration (therefor the name "cache..."). Ping IP domain.xyz gives the cloud address, the cloud forwards this data to the real server, and it responds, and the data comes back. If possible, the data is cached so that the same data does not have to be sent to multiple users.

"backed fetch failed" sounds like connecting to the original server that is proxied is impossible (from Akamai cloud server).

People use cloud servers such as Cloudflare to hide the addresses of their real IP servers. scienceforums.net also uses Cloudflare to hide its real server IP.

If hackers discover the real IP address of a server, they can attack it and prevent the cloud from connecting to it.

It could also be an attack on Akamai (or some other cloud) that would have a similar effect. But there is no indication of this, because downdetector shows nothing.

It also depends on what servers the real RationalWiki server uses, e.g., database. If it connects to other servers that are down or currently under attack, requests to it will fail, as they will e.g. timeout, and it will also be down from the user's point of view.

I have a VPS that, after restarting the server (physical), does not start the Apache servers (application/service) it has on it. You have to start them manually. If Cloudflare acts as a proxy for it, you will have connection errors with that server (VPS). Some pages load (because some have been cached by cloud proxy service), but others do not (giving the illusion that it works partially)..

Edited November 10Nov 10 by Sensei

19 minutes ago, Sensei said:

HTTP server can return any code they want. It could be a lie/fake. But suppose so it is true return code, we make things like these (you lucky *** I have this error at the moment):

This means that rationalwiki.org is in an Akamai cloud. I don't have any servers in this cloud, so it's hard to say, but I can talk about similar situations in other clouds. Cloudflare has an option to act as a proxy server between its server and the real server that is set in the configuration (therefor the name "cache..."). Ping IP domain.xyz gives the cloud address, the cloud forwards this data to the real server, and it responds, and the data comes back. If possible, the data is cached so that the same data does not have to be sent to multiple users.

"backed fetch failed" sounds like connecting to the original server that is proxied is impossible (from Akamai cloud server).

People use cloud servers such as Cloudflare to hide the addresses of their real IP servers. scienceforums.net also uses Cloudflare to hide its real server IP.

If hackers discover the real IP address of a server, they can attack it and prevent the cloud from connecting to it.

It could also be an attack on Akamai (or some other cloud) that would have a similar effect. But there is no indication of this, because downdetector shows nothing.

It also depends on what servers the real RationalWiki server uses, e.g., database. If it connects to other servers that are down or currently under attack, requests to it will fail, as they will e.g. timeout, and it will also be down from the user's point of view.

I have a VPS that, after restarting the server (physical), does not start the Apache servers (application/service) it has on it. You have to start them manually. If Cloudflare acts as a proxy for it, you will have connection errors with that server (VPS). Some pages load (because some have been cached by cloud proxy service), but others do not (giving the illusion that it works partially)..

Thanks. This would seem not to rule out the possibility that Rationalwiki may be under some sort of attack, then.

Edited November 10Nov 10 by exchemist

Using crap like the cloud to protect against DoS/DDoS attacks or bots results in such a website is not archived:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/rationalwiki.org

At this point, we should have a complete backup of all posts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/scienceforums.net

It's total crap.

Who in their right mind cares that there is no spam now, and in 20 years, not to mention hundreds of years, no one will know what we were talking about here?

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

Thanks. This would seem not to rule out the possibility that Rationalwiki may be under some sort of attack, then.

A day like any other. I had tens of thousands of hacker attacks on my servers every day.

Edited November 10Nov 10 by Sensei

Bump. It's still down for me in Poland so I guess it's something much worse than a temporary server outage.

Edit: What's up with those huge emoticons?

Edited November 12Nov 12 by Otto Kretschmer

On 11/12/2025 at 10:19 PM, Otto Kretschmer said:

Bump. It's still down for me in Poland so I guess it's something much worse than a temporary server outage.

Edit: What's up with those huge emoticons?

Yes still down today. Looks like a serious issue.

It's now up and running.

I have just tried to access the Rationalwiki website and was alarmed to see that by clicking on it something instantly downloaded itself onto my laptop. When I checked the downloads file all I saw was a 175kb file called Main Page. I deleted it and tried again with the same result.

Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening? My first slightly paranoid thought was of spyware.

34 minutes ago, exchemist said:

I have just tried to access the Rationalwiki website and was alarmed to see that by clicking on it something instantly downloaded itself onto my laptop. When I checked the downloads file all I saw was a 175kb file called Main Page. I deleted it and tried again with the same result.

Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening? My first slightly paranoid thought was of spyware.

How did you know this happened, and to where did the file download?

3 minutes ago, KJW said:

How did you know this happened, and to where did the file download?

On a mac , whenever a download from a website takes place, you see a little thingie move rapidly across the screen to the top right and vanish. And when I checked the downloads file, a new file had indeed appeared, with a time stamp that corresponded. As I say , 175kb in size. This does not happen when you just click on a website.

3 minutes ago, exchemist said:

On a mac , whenever a download from a website takes place, you see a little thingie move rapidly across the screen to the top right and vanish. And when I checked the downloads file, a new file had indeed appeared, with a time stamp that corresponded. As I say , 175kb in size. This does not happen when you just click on a website.

Thanks. I'm on a Windows 10 desktop PC. I opened the RationalWiki website and nothing untoward happened, including anything downloaded to my "Downloads" folder.

1 minute ago, KJW said:

Thanks. I'm on a Windows 10 desktop PC. I opened the RationalWiki website and nothing untoward happened, including anything downloaded to my "Downloads" folder.

Hmm, that’s good. Perhaps it’s my laptop that is on the blink. I’ll investigate with other sites and check.

Just now, exchemist said:

Hmm, that’s good. Perhaps it’s my laptop that is on the blink. I’ll investigate with other sites and check.

Well, I just managed to solve a problem on my computer where the Bandcamp website didn't work properly. It turned out the problem was that I had NordVPN running in the background (I wasn't actually using the VPN, just the app was running in the background). It's not the first time I had a problem with NordVPN running in the background. I mention this to point out that problems can have unexpected causes.

23 minutes ago, KJW said:

Well, I just managed to solve a problem on my computer where the Bandcamp website didn't work properly. It turned out the problem was that I had NordVPN running in the background (I wasn't actually using the VPN, just the app was running in the background). It's not the first time I had a problem with NordVPN running in the background. I mention this to point out that problems can have unexpected causes.

Yeah, it's curious. I find that nothing "downloads" when I access the site via the iPad. It's only on the laptop. And if I enter the web address manually on the laptop, it asks me if I want to authorise a download from the site. I don't get this with other websites. Maybe I should clear the cookies and see if that gets rid of it.