Downloads no longer doing anything?

[lilychan]

So I'm hosted on Tommy, and I haven't changed anything with this coding (or even this page!) in weeks, if not months, so whatever is going on shouldn't be related to any mistake I recently made. A friend told me some of the downloads I put up for a niche game community I'm in aren't working. I went to see, and they aren't...under odd circumstances.

So my sister set my site up to have a sort of frame, and my site is mostly inside of the frame. (I have a hard time explaining this, so I'm adding an example picture.) If I try to download things this way, with the site being viewed normally...I click the download button and nothing ever happens. If I right-click a download link and do Open in New Tab, it takes me to a page that says "Bad Gateway nginx" but if I go back a page, and right-click the link that takes you to the download page, and open THAT in a new tab, breaking the entire thing out of its' frame and making it look bad...THEN I can download things normally.

I've even tried Ctrl F5ing my site, and even cleared all my cookies/history/etc to see if maybe something there was causing an issue. No change.

I'm utterly baffled, and I don't even know what this is. Again, I haven't altered the downloads page in a long time, and it was working before...so I don't know that I did anything? Does anyone know what might be happening or how to fix it? Did something with the host change, or break? Also my sister is hosted on Johnny, and her downloads are working fine!

Edited 14 hours ago by lilychan

[KazVee]

Please could you give us the website address of the site you're having trouble with, we can't really troubleshoot this issue from an image. I checked your message history and found URL https://wildabyss.heliohost.us/WAA.php and looked around in there, but didn't find a Downloads page to check.
Once we have more details we'll be able to try to replicate the issue from here and offer any advice we can.

The Bad Gateway messages sound related to Apache Restarts, you can read more about them here: https://wiki.helionet.org/502_Bad_Gateway

[lilychan]

1 hour ago, KazVee said:

Please could you give us the website address of the site you're having trouble with, we can't really troubleshoot this issue from an image. I checked your message history and found URL https://wildabyss.heliohost.us/WAA.php and looked around in there, but didn't find a Downloads page to check.
Once we have more details we'll be able to try to replicate the issue from here and offer any advice we can.

The Bad Gateway messages sound related to Apache Restarts, you can read more about them here: https://wiki.helionet.org/502_Bad_Gateway

This is the correct URL...go to For You, then Downloadables For Your Game, and any download there seems to not be taking. Sorry I didn't give a URL sooner, I was expecting it to be something on the server end of things, since I didn't make any changes!

OH okay, so there must have been an Apache restart when I checked that. Now, when I right-click a download link and do Open in New Tab, it does download. But you still can't left-click a link and just download, which will cause a lot of people to keep coming to me to tell me my downloads are broken...

[KazVee]

I did a bit more digging after my post, but thanks for confirming I was looking in the right place! 🙂

For the short answer: When you link to your files, instead of using "http://" in the link, use "https://" with the s in there, that seems to be where the issue is, because your site is running on https (which is always good to do) and so you should link to files also on https.

For the longer explanation about how we investigated this and why it's happening: 
When I tested out your download links, at first Chrome told me it blocked the download because the files could be "potentially dangerous, suspicious, unverified, or insecure". That doesn't single out your files specifically, just that zip files on the internet can sometimes be risky to download, so there's that built-in protection in the browser. After that happened a few times, when I clicked on the Download link... nothing happened, just like you reported.

When I pressed F12 in Chrome to bring up the DevTools (and F12 to close them again, if you tried it just now! 😄) that's a handy way to see what's happening inside the browser with requests. I've highlighted the relevant clue. 

Your website, on https, was linking to a (potentially) "insecure" file, since you only used "http" in the link for the file. So the browser's built-in protection kicked in and blocked the download, and then eventually just blocked it silently, so it looked like nothing was happening. If you change your links to start with "https://" and the rest of the filepath, you'll be linking from your secured website to a secured file, and the downloads should work again and not get blocked by the web browser.

Please give that a try and let us know if it still gives you trouble after that! 🙂

[lilychan]

3 hours ago, KazVee said:

I did a bit more digging after my post, but thanks for confirming I was looking in the right place! 🙂

For the short answer: When you link to your files, instead of using "http://" in the link, use "https://" with the s in there, that seems to be where the issue is, because your site is running on https (which is always good to do) and so you should link to files also on https.

For the longer explanation about how we investigated this and why it's happening: 
When I tested out your download links, at first Chrome told me it blocked the download because the files could be "potentially dangerous, suspicious, unverified, or insecure". That doesn't single out your files specifically, just that zip files on the internet can sometimes be risky to download, so there's that built-in protection in the browser. After that happened a few times, when I clicked on the Download link... nothing happened, just like you reported.

When I pressed F12 in Chrome to bring up the DevTools (and F12 to close them again, if you tried it just now! 😄) that's a handy way to see what's happening inside the browser with requests. I've highlighted the relevant clue. 

Your website, on https, was linking to a (potentially) "insecure" file, since you only used "http" in the link for the file. So the browser's built-in protection kicked in and blocked the download, and then eventually just blocked it silently, so it looked like nothing was happening. If you change your links to start with "https://" and the rest of the filepath, you'll be linking from your secured website to a secured file, and the downloads should work again and not get blocked by the web browser.

Please give that a try and let us know if it still gives you trouble after that! 🙂

Ooooh, thank you so much!! 😮 That's it!! I went in and switched it around to https instead, and it looks like downloads are working again!! Thank you SO MUCH.

I don't honestly know the difference between http and https :X I don't even know how I wound up using one over the other. I swear my site is barely held together by tape half the time, with my limited knowledge on this stuff, oh my gosh!

I appreciate the info on why it's happening too, and even the tip with F12! (Although, I use Firefox and am unsure if it still works the same?) All things I didn't know, and it helps to have a bit of a better grasp on things. Seriously, thank you a TON for the help!!