talkmagic.co.uk

Not long ago - for a period of a few weeks - my browser had some difficulty in connecting to talkmagic.co.uk. This doesn't matter anymore because the problem is all in the past, but I want to talk about it anyway, because the circumstances surrounding it were so weird that they had a whiff of real magic about them. (Haunted server, perhaps?)

If it were merely the case that my browser couldn't find the server whenever it tried to connect to talkmagic, there would be nothing extraordinary about that. Slightly more interesting, but still far short of extraordinary, is the fact that the problem persisted for (as I recall) several weeks, affected only talkmagic and no other domain, and yet there was not the slightest indication that anyone taking part in discussions on talkmagic were affected, or even aware there was problem. (Did anyone notice anything?)

No, the extraordinary thing was the solution that I stumbled upon.

By accident I discovered that if I (1) went to Google, (2) typed a search query that returned talkmagic results (the search term site:www.talkmagic.co.uk is useful here), (3) clicked on the link to Google's cached version of a thread, (4) clicked on the link from there to another page in the same thread ... then my browser would successfully connect to talkmagic and I could then click anywhere I pleased (e.g. to the main index page). But I couldn't connect without going through that ritual. (Nor did it work to go straight from the cached version of a thread to the main index page.)

The problem doesn't exist anymore, but I just want to say that anyone who can explain the efficacy of the above ritual is wiser than me.

Adrian Morgan wrote:anyone who can explain the efficacy of the above ritual is wiser than me.

Simple - we just like to play hard to get at times !

everyone does, it makes us seem more desirable...