Problems with using W3c Validation

BlackThorn

Verified User
Joined
Feb 24, 2013
Messages
34
Location
Istanbul
I'm trying to validate any of our websites on W3c Validator and getting this errors called:

Code:
IO Error: www.example.com: Name or service not known.

Code:
And I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve <https://www.example.com/>:

403 Forbidden

I don't know what is causing this error. W3c explains here: https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/error/IOError.html but websites are all working fine. What could be problem? I would appreciate it greatly if you could help me. Meanwhile we have a dedicated server that up and running, and it contains a lot of websites. Also, we're using Nginx as the web server.
 
Would be cool tho, but i think he hided his real domain (hope so at least) but maybe he uses something like CpGuard that blocks a lot of these things.

When people hide their domain it makes it more difficult to help. Most people want to advertise their domain not hide it. That is silly.
 
I don't think www.example.com is your domain.

Well, you are right about that. It was just an example because I just didn't want to share, that's all. Anyway here's the address of a website: https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=...(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0

Would be cool tho, but i think he hided his real domain (hope so at least) but maybe he uses something like CpGuard that blocks a lot of these things.

Yeah it's true, I just didn't want to share as I said. You know, some people may not want to share their websites due to personal reasons. We don't use it or any plugin/software of security by the way.

Either W3 was down or your website was blocking it

I really don't know what caused it out of nowhere. Otherwise there were no problems until last week. We've updated DA from v1.659 to v1.660 right now, but problem still exist.
 
@floyd @Richard G @ericosman problem solved.

I was blocking aggressive/attacker bots as follows:

Code:
if ($http_user_agent ~ (libwww|libwww-perl|Wget|BLEXBot|Baiduspider))
{
    return 403;
}

In this specific case, I got the error here as I said. So the whole site cannot be accessed by W3c. After more trouble shooting I found out my issue was that I was block the wrong ones.

To solve:
Remove libwww and libwww-perl strings from the list.

I mean, it-it's like this:

Code:
if ($http_user_agent ~ (Wget|BLEXBot|Baiduspider))
{
    return 403;
}

That's all. Meanwhile I learned one more thing thanks to this. If you identify libwww, libwww-perl and curl, it means W3c and Let's Encrypt will be blocked from accessing your website.
 
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