Forum Moderators: phranque
I did a google search on this problem and found two other people that had the same problem, all about the time mine started. On a hunch, I looked up the URL they were trying to validate and by golly, we're all using the same hosting company! What a coincidence.
What happens is that the w3c server tries to fetch the URL you typed in, but my web server returns a reidrect to localhost instead. So the validation service ends up analyzing it's own web page instead of mine.
On the w3c mailing list some guy said that it's caused by the hosting company blocking certian bots and the w3c validator service is inadvertently being blocked.
I sent a ticket to my hosting company and they basically told me to buzz off. They said this falls under web design and they don't do web design. Now I'm mad as... well I can't say that word.
Does anybody know where in apache this sort of block would be placed? Or would this be a firewall issue? If this really is an apache problem, I'm going to have to solve it for them.
If you have access to your own archived raw server logs, you could get the information there from your last successful validation run.
Then you can ask your host to create an exception for that IP and/or that user-agent in their block list.
If your host is returning an actual redirect response rather than simply black-holing the W3C request, it sounds like they're doing this in Apache httpd.conf using mod_rewrite.
Jim
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