Master-list can't reach servers

[.]

So lately I've been getting complaints that the master-list times-out while trying to reach the server. At first I thought it's something wrong on the VPS. But then verified with @Thijn 's checker and to my surprise it found the server to be online.

Then I continued further to understand how the whole thing works. I've even ended up making my own announcement plug-in. But as you can see, the same 408 status message is received.

So at this point I know that the browser and client can reach the server. The server checker tool can reach the server. Everyone can reach the server except the master-list.

Pretty much everything broke since the last Chinese drama. So can you guys inspect why this is happening? I will leave a dummy server running if necessary for you to try to reach it directly from where you host the master-list.

Or you can try on the  Doom_Kill3R's server since it's hosted on that machine.

[Stormeus]

I also noticed servers are now being added to the officials list (eg A/D) without anyone even knowing about it

That's a communications fault on my end. Personally I was planning to promote the CTF and A/D servers to official status since they're pretty well-respected and important for small competitive matches and clanwars, though I neglected to make any actual announcement posts about it.

As far as the masterlist goes, a 408 error isn't caused by any bans, and the only change that occurred recently is banning one server's IP for spamming the masterlist. If a server were banned from the masterlist, it'd receive a 403 Forbidden error. I'm looking into the increased rate of timeout errors. Argonath is also affected by it, and I have direct control over that server, so I should be able to investigate it independently.

[Stormeus]

There were some attacks targeted at the web server that required us to block UDP traffic. However, this also ended up breaking the query validation done on the masterlist server, since it queries the servers announcing to it to make sure it's up. This isn't really essential to operating the masterlist since the client can do the same, and we can still enforce masterlist bans without it, so it's been disabled to keep things running. Announcing should work normally for now.