SuperfeinCreative

Good thinking! I just checked and after a few minutes I get the error in the console:

“Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 504 ()” and the file that can’t be loaded is admin-ajax.php located in wp-admin.

What does this mean? Is it just corrupted you think? Perhaps I should clear all the caches?

Thanks for the excellent tip by the way. ??

Thanks so much for taking the time to write back. I have sent this info to the theme developer.

Cheers,

Zach

The latest news:

It’s connecting now! Danny I installed the updated version of the plugin a few days ago but it didn’t do anything, as you know. I checked earlier today and it said NOT CONNECTED but there was no error message or link to the connectivity issues page…so it seemed even less helpful than the previous version of the plugin. I uninstalled the plugin completely, then installed the latest version from the WordPress plugin repository, the moment it re-installed it connected. It seems like it was possibly the plugin after all. I am not a developer so I’m not even going to begin to try to understand this bizarre fix. Regardless, for now the problem is solved. May I recommend Danny that you add email notification support for when the plugin stops connecting, might make the whole experience more automated? The email notification could contain more info on why it’s not connecting, as well as a link to that connectivity issues page, plus link to the plugin support page, link to Mailchimp support page…just some suggestions. Other wise users are in the dark, they may not notice for weeks or even months if the plugin has stopped connecting.

Thanks for the time you took to help me. I hope it is fixed now. Any idea what might have caused the connectivity problem?

Cheers.

Hi Danny, the info from the latest result has too much sensitive info, I’m emailing you @ the email address listed on your personal website.

Cheers,

Zach

I replaced the plugin as you requested. Still getting same error: “The MailChimp API server returned the following response: 403 Forbidden.” No reference number in sight.

I’m now getting help from a technician at Mailchimp who contacted me out of the blue. I guess they realize this situation is somewhat ridiculous. After sending him all the data I have compiled thus far he responded with this:

****************

If you want to verify connectivity with MailChimp’s servers, I would suggest running the following command from the terminal of the server that the WordPress plugin is hosted on using your APIKey in place of APIKEY.

curl -H “Authorization: basic APIKEY” -v https://us10.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/

A successful response for this request should present you with the details of the account associated with that APIkey. Should you receive a different response I would be more than happy to look into what you received. So please feel free to write me back with the entire response from that curl request should it not succeed.

*********************

I am now on hold with Godaddy, they are running that command for me and I will post that info soon.

Just to clarify, I tried us1.api.mailchimp.com and us11.api.mailchimp.com but got the same results. I don’t know if I made that clear in the previous post.

I mentioned at the beginning of this that it connects fine on the staging site, well the staging site’s IP is: 184.168.47.225. Again, not sure if this will help in any way.

Results from server test: ‘Trying 23.212.33.79…
* Connected to us1.api.mailchimp.com (23.212.33.79) port 443 (#0)
* Cipher selection: ALL:!EXPORT:!EXPORT40:!EXPORT56:!aNULL:!LOW:!RC4:@STRENGTH
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
* CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
CApath: none
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server hello (2):
* NPN, negotiated HTTP1.1
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Certificate (11):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server key exchange (12):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Server finished (14):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Client key exchange (16):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Unknown (67):
* TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS change cipher, Client hello (1):
* TLSv1.2 (IN), TLS handshake, Finished (20):
* SSL connection using TLSv1.2 / ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
* Server certificate:
* subject: C=US; ST=GA; L=Atlanta; O=ROCKET SCIENCE GROUP; OU=Rocket Science Group; CN=*.api.mailchimp.com
* start date: Sep 22 14:39:14 2015 GMT
* expire date: Sep 22 14:39:13 2016 GMT
* subjectAltName: us1.api.mailchimp.com matched
* issuer: C=NL; L=Amsterdam; O=Verizon Enterprise Solutions; OU=Cybertrust; CN=Verizon Akamai SureServer CA G14-SHA2
* SSL certificate verify ok.
> GET /3.0/?apikey=API_KEY (I put in my actual API key for the test) HTTP/1.1
> Host: us1.api.mailchimp.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.45.0
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
< Server: nginx
< Content-Type: application/problem+json; charset=utf-8
< Content-Length: 210
< X-Request-Id: 0bd0024e-daf1-4802-896a-9ca6b4e96f42
< Link: <https://us1.api.mailchimp.com/schema/3.0/ProblemDetailDocument.json&gt;; rel=”describedBy”
< Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2016 10:58:53 GMT
< Connection: keep-alive
< Set-Cookie: _AVESTA_ENVIRONMENT=prod; path=/
<
* Connection #0 to host us1.api.mailchimp.com left intact
{“type”:”https://developer.mailchimp.com/documentation/mailchimp/guides/error-glossary/&#8221;,”title”:”Wrong Datacenter”,”status”:403,”detail”:”The API key provided is linked to a different datacenter”,”instance”:””}-bash-4.2$’

I tried using “us11.api.mailchimp.com” because I read somewhere that when they tested a different data center it worked, but I got the same exact results.

Do these results give you any insights?

Mailchimp has some seriously useless support. Kate @ Mailchimp support says: “I went ahead and had one of my techs look up your IP on a client reputation score. It does not appear to have a bad client reputation and is not being blocked for that reason. However, there are many reasons for an IP to be blocked and we do not have a way to look up all blacklists. The only way for me to verify and fully test if your IP address is blocked is if we got a specific error code including a reference number from you. If you were getting a 403: forbidden error, and the IP is on a specific blocklist, then you would have received a Reference Number for us to look up. Furthermore, because we don’t yet know why or if this IP is being blocked by Akamai, we can’t provide any advice about how to unblock it. If you think the IP is being blocked, the only real advice I can give you is to request a new IP from your hosting provider.”

She said this after I explained that I had already spent over 10 hours on support with Mailchimp and Godaddy, and that this is my 4th chat with Mailchimp support. I also explained that this is the second dedicated IP from Godaddy that Mailchimp is having issues with in the past week. Totally useless support.

Danny van Kooten do you know how or if I can see that “Reference Number” referred to above?

I am on chat right now with Mailchimp and this is a quote taken from the support person I’m chatting with: “There have been issues lately with Akamai, blocking several IP addresses from using it, which has interfered with MailChimp’s API and other services that use Akamai as well.”

Sounds like this is possibly from Mailchimp’s side and not Godaddy’s. It could also be a combination of the two, which would make it even harder to debug.

I didn’t run the command, Godaddy did, and I’m sure they ran it from the same server as the plugin is running on. I’ll run another command with the valid API key in place of “YOUR_VALID_KEY”. I’ll confirm with Mailchimp if the IP is being blocked, I’m pretty sure they said it wasn’t this time around, but I’ll double check.

Thanks for responding so swiftly.

Tried that just now, new API key but getting same error.