ERROR: Fetching the page failed because the request timed out

[andrewadawson]

I’m hoping someone can help me with this one. I’ve seen this topic posted in a few other Twitter support requests, but none of them recent. Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve noticed there has been an issue with my Twitter Cards working properly on a consistent basis.

The only use I have for Twitter at the present time is for my WordPress blog postings. Every day around 6 to 7pm or so I have an automatic posting over to Twitter that has my title of my blog, the URL link, and USUALLY the “View Summary” link which gives a small excerpt of my blog writing for the day. But a few weeks ago this started having problems on a regular basis, with that View Summary link now showing up. And even when I went in manually and tried to put the title of my blog and the URL, it still didn’t consistency show up.

I utilized the Twitter Developers validator tool for cards and have gotten that message “ERROR: Fetching the page failed because the request timed out.” more than not. The only way I can get the “View Summary” link to show up is if I keep deleting my tweet and reposting it again and again until at some point, I get it to work. And when it does, it’s fine, the cards have come across just fine.

I do not know why my site has an issue with this. Any help would be appreciated.

My site is www.thetwelfthstep.com.

Thanks!
Andrew

[andrewadawson]

Oh, and I forgot to mention, my domain/host provider is GoDaddy.

[misfitmimes]

Similar issue here and it’s driving me crazy. Twitter Cards have been working seamlessly for two of my sites for nearly a year. Suddenly this week, I only randomly (and rarely) get cards when I tweet, and when I use the validator, all I get over and over and over is the “timed-out” error. Both sites are hosted by GoDaddy. What has changed??

My sites:

Official Johnny G. Weir Website

Binky's Johnny Weir Blog

Any help would be appreciated!

[andrewadawson]

I tried to talk about this to GoDaddy. They had no idea what I was talking about and I got no where. Sometimes I use to retweet a hundred times to get my card to show up. I wish a Twitter developer could help us figure this out.

[misfitmimes]

OMG yes the GoDaddy techs have NO IDEA what Twitter Cards are! I have explained this to at least five different techs there and they just are clueless. Pleasant, but clueless. Would LOVE some support from Twitter developers ASAP…

[misfitmimes]

@andypiper Please, could you help us with this issue?

[andypiper]

It looks like a performance / network connection issue. I’m not sure why our crawler isn’t able to access your sites in a timely manner, but I can only speculate that there’s something up with the routing. Our crawler operates from known IPs, if that helps you or GoDaddy diagnose on their side.

[misfitmimes]

@andypiper Thank you for responding! Have already had the known IPs discussion with GoDaddy. They say nothing on their side, including this, is happening. I am at a loss. Oddly, last night all of a sudden a number of cards worked fine. Twelve hours later, we’re back to zero cards again. Same problem in three different browers: Chrome, IE, and Opera. Links that properly generated cards last night are getting the same time-out error today.

Any other ideas? I cannot fathom what is causing this.

[andrewadawson]

@andypiper Is it possible that you could talk with Godaddy support because I have tried myself to communicate with them on this and they still don’t understand anything. Also, I noticed tonight on the twitter developer test page that any link I’m putting in there says “Error: Internal Server Error.” Is there a problem on Twitter’s end tonight just even testing the summary cards?

[andrewadawson]

@jbulava I wanted to ask you specifically because I saw you had worked on this about a year or more ago… but I’m noticing now that I’m getting an “Error: Internal Server Error” when I try to check even for my twitter card. My site is www.thetwelfthstep.com. And up until two days ago, I could at least check my cards. Normally, I would get a timeout issue which is more on GoDaddy’s side. But I’m tending to think that this internal server error issue is on Twitter’s end? Help please.

[misfitmimes]

A new wrinkle: I realized last week that most of the Twitter cards for both of my sites have been actually been working on mobile, but mostly NOT working on desktop browsers: Chrome, IT, and Opera. IDK if that helps to debug this problem, but it’s interesting.

@andypiper @jbulava: Would really appreciate any help you can give here.

[jbulava]

Hey @andrewadawson, when I use your meta tags on my own domain, everything works as expected. I’m wondering if it has to do with your robot.txt file. I’m not sure what effect there is when a crawl-delay is defined. Would it be possible to remove that line to see if that resolves the issue?

[andrewadawson]

@jbulava I’m not exactly sure what the robot.txt file is unfortunately. How do I locate that and what exactly does that line do? I use GoDaddy Supported Wordpress so they do most of the basics and really I don’t know much beyond creating posts and mucking around the template format. In other words I probably have a third grade level experience of Wordpress. So fuller details would help a lot.

[jbulava]

No worries! For more context, we use a web crawler to gather your Twitter Card information when a link to your website is Tweeted. We adhere to something known as the robots exclusion standard, which is an optional file (robots.txt) that anyone can place at the root of their website and instructs a web crawler how to interact with the website.

The user agent when we make a request to your site is “twitterbot.” If you are not familiar with user agents, this is usually set to the name of a browser to indicate how someone is viewing your site. Knowing this, you could add instructions specifically for how Twitter interacts with your site in the robots.txt file. You can find your file at http://www.thetwelfthstep.com/robots.txt. You’ll notice an * defining the user agent, meaning all robot user agents should follow the following rules.

As you can see, we are not allowed to make requests into wp-admin or plugins (and that’s fine). The crawl-delay line is the one that I haven’t seen much of and I’m not sure how it affects Cards. You should be able to edit this file directly and remove this temporarily to see if it makes a difference.

[TonyCraig14]

@jbulava, we had the same issue with https://emotionalrescue.info which is hosted with goDaddy ‘Wordpress Managed’ plan and we are trying to make the twitter card work on this URL https://emotionalrescue.info/2016/01/30/be-kind-to-yourself/ but no luck. I had taken your suggestion and removed crawl-delay in our robots.txt file

I spoke to goDaddy support and they had no clue.

Vidya

[andrewadawson]

Vidya, did removing that line do anything to help or still the same issue? Your response on that wasn’t clear? I also reduced what I have as my main page for data wondering if it was taking too long to load because of that but that wasn’t it either. I’m inclined to believe that GoDaddy is just too slow on their servers to load our sites, especially for those of us on Managed WordPress…

[diselodev]

I’m getting same error:

Tribalia Danza - Ponte en forma en nuestra academia con Armony Fitness

And the server is Hostinger.es

Any suggestion?