I am so very sorry that I once again come here with an issue that someone else also reported having on the old Reddit community, haha.

https://www.reddit.com/r/perchance/comments/16g9sml/perchance_literally_just_refuses_to_open_now/

I have a very similar issue, and they might be related.

Perchance’s homepage is loading for me, and when I go directly to my generators’ edit page (#edit) this loads as well, but the generator doesn’t. None of my generators do. The only thing that loads when trying to view a generator is the favicon. xD

The iframe embedded versions of the generators on their respective blogs aren’t loading either.

It’s not my internet connection. I’ve rebooted my router and my repeater. I’ve tried multiple browsers, private and logged mode, with and without a VPN, cleared my cache… basically the whole “have you tried switching it off and back on again” routine.

  • perchanceMEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    Thank you for reporting this! 🙏 Are you able to record your screen showing the issue (you can DM me the link if you prefer), and also let me know which device, OS version, and browser version? Sorry for the trouble - this will help me spin up an emulated device/browser to try to replicate this.

    Some extra questions to help me triangulate on this:

    1. The Reddit post mentions they see blank/white, and then upon refresh they see “connection got reset”. Do you see any error messages like that? Or something different? That said, the video will help me with this - small details around things like timing, slightly different messages can be useful clues. But just in case you can’t record a video right now, any details you can provide here will be useful.
    2. Does this happen on multiple devices - e.g. laptop vs phone vs friend’s phone?
    3. Does it happen on other internet connections - e.g. phone data vs wifi vs friend’s wifi?
    4. The reddit post mentions that it’s been going on for a couple of weeks - how about for you? If you remember the exact date it started that would be very useful because it may help me pinpoint code changes that I made which could be causing it.

    I’ll start hunting for this bug in the meantime anyway - I have a couple of hunches.

    Thanks!!

    • Diana47OPEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Of course!

      Here’s a Google Drive folder with four screen recordings (the videos are named after the browser and the browser version). I also wanted to throw a recording of TOR in just for shits and giggles, and that’s when I found out that the generators actually do load in TOR. They don’t when I just use a VPN (no matter which country) on my other browsers. The recordings are all without VPN, but the outcome is exactly the same.

      I am only logged into my Perchance account in Opera, all other browsers were trying to access the generator when logged out.

      No error messages, just the loading animation that never stops even if I let it sit for half an hour. (Edit: Forgot to add, refreshing the page does absolutely nothing. It just ends up with the same screen, no error message like the Redditor described)

      My machine is a PC running Win 11 Home, version 10.0.22621

      It does load on my phone (iOS 16.6.1, using Opera), on the same Wi-Fi as my PC.

      I honestly just noticed it today after seeing the post in the old community. (:

      Sorry if this is not helpful at all.

      • perchanceMEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Thanks! Not currently able to replicate with Windows 10 or 11 with Chrome 116 or Firefox 117, but can you try opening it with Chrome and then pressing Ctrl+Shift+J to open the browser debugger/console, and see if there are any red messages? If Ctrl+Shift+J doesn’t work, you can right click on the page and click “Inspect” and then go to the “Console” tab in the panel that comes up. If you could screenshot the console and share that’d be very handy.

        If there are red errors, please click the little triangle icon at the start of the error message which should expand it to show the full details of the error.

        Also, (especially if there are no red errors) if you can then switch to the “Network” tab and while it’s open refresh the page, and then screenshot that tab, that’d be handy too. What I’m looking for is if the “Status” column contains any “Pending” values, as opposed to “200” values like this: https://i.imgur.com/iUAWSep.png

        • Diana47OPEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I did have error messages there, but I took both screenshots and put them in the same Google Drive Folder. Sorry for not giving them useful file names, but I think they should be self-explanatory.

          • perchanceMEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            Ah okay, that top error is definitely the cause! Can you load the page and then open the console again with Ctrl+Shift+J in Chrome, and then paste this:

            document.querySelector(“#imported-generators”).innerText

            Then press enter.

            And now right click on the text that appears just below it and click “Copy string contents” and then put that in a text file and upload it to that Google Drive folder. Once I have that text I should be able to solve it, and I’ll make sure future problems of this category are much less tedious to debug (i.e. it should show a visible error message showing exactly what is going wrong).

            If no text appears and it just says “undefined” or something when you press enter, then just let me know.

            Thank you for your patience here!

            Edit: Oh and if it’s a small bit of text you can just put it in your reply, of course.

            • Diana47OPEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              Where am I supposed to paste this? Just in the console tab? (I tried that and got a syntax error back, so I suppose that was not the right place for it)

              • perchanceMEnglish
                1·
                2 years ago

                Oh dang, lemmy changed the quote characters in my comment to “fancy”/curled quotes. I should have put it in a code block:

                document.querySelector("#imported-generators").innerText

                So if you visit the page like normal, then press Ctrl+Shift+J to open the console, then paste the above code and run it, that should work, and give you some text to share with me (right click on text and click “Copy string contents”).

                Edit: Also, a couple of extra questions:

                1. does this generator work for you? https://perchance.org/1nubybozo4
                2. I’m guessing this doesn’t have to do with a browser extension, since you tried in lots of browsers, but just in case you have e.g. the same ad blocker extension or dark mode extension, etc. enabled in each browser, please let me know (and you can try Chrome in Guest mode to use it without extensions - just click the circle avatar thing next to the 3 vertical dots in the top-right corner of the browser)
                • Diana47OPEnglish
                  1·
                  2 years ago

                  Shit, sorry, I completely forgot about the curly quotes when pasting issue! Doing it correctly now only gave me two single quotes as a result.

                  The test generator does work…

                  I don’t have one shared extension or user script across all four browsers. Edge is completely vanilla without anything, not even an ad blocker. I only use it when I need to test things in a different browser. (:

                  Chrome in guest mode lets me load my own generators. The only extensions I have in Chrome are

                  • Ghostery
                  • Google Docs Offline
                  • IDM Integration Module
                  • Tampermonkey (but I have only one user script installed in Chrome and it’s only active on Dreamwidth)
                  • uBlock Origin

                  I would now suspect Ghostery to be the issue, because it wouldn’t be the first time it caused a site not to load or not to load completely, but I don’t have Ghostery installed in Edge.

                  Gonna deactivate my extensions one by one to find the culprit. If it actually is Ghostery, I apologise for wasting your time with this. D:

                  Edit: I’m genuinely relieved to see that deactivating my extensions didn’t fix the problem. xD