Wapsi Square Forum

Has anyone else notice that Topwebcomics has been malfunctioning a lot lately. Today it is giving a error message that anyone that tries to use it is on an address that has already been voted with.

I have nine voting links in a folder. I tell Iron to open everything in the folder, so I get nine tabs, and vote all nine in a few seconds. I suppose it is theoretically possible that the first few could fail and then the rest be okay, but otherwise there's no way that some should succeed while others fail.

I had six succeed and three fail. The three failures were not even adjacent, let alone the first three.

But there's a catch: my IP address as detected by TWC is a private-network address. Which means there could be many other people with the same address.

Mark N wrote:Has anyone else notice that Topwebcomics has been malfunctioning a lot lately. Today it is giving a error message that anyone that tries to use it is on an address that has already been voted with.

I noticed that earlier today; I thought it was kind of strange, since I was pretty sure it had been a day since my previous vote.

That is what I figured. I can see the address problem happening from my PC since it is networked but my phone is its own address and it is doing the same thing. They have been having glitches like this for several months now, about the time it was taken over by its new owners. Someone may have messed with their systems.

I suspect a membership drive scheme. "Oh, you can't vote unless you register with our site. We don't do anonymous voting anymore."

It looks as if its IP-address detector is borked. I just tried voting, and the "registered IP address" it said I was using was 10.187.244.14, which is a non-routable "private" network address that isn't unique and can't actually be reached on the public Internet.

I'm at home, my home LAN uses an entirely different addressing scheme, and their detector should have seen my home network's public IP address.

They may have put some sort of IP load balancer or firewall into their server network, and yngvied up its configuration, so that their servers now "see" the "server side" address of the load balancer rather than the public IP address of the incoming connection from the voter.

Problem may have been fixed. I was just able to vote, from here at home - no "You or somebody looking vaguely like you has already voted from this IP address today" error.

Vote early and often, friends! It's the beginning of the month, and Wapsi is reading lower in the 'stats than it deserves.