My question in regards viruses would be why it would only affect one website? My home computer is acting normally for everything else except TB access.
Regarding one website- the redirect is likely being caused by a javascript command which resides in webpage code...specific to our webpage. All it's doing is sending you to the other website. Thankfully that other website appears to be down so whatever it is for, does not appear to be working. The other website could be designed to trick you into downloading something harmful, we just don't know yet. Ignore any popups, don't click on them, not even the "X" - press ESC to close them or ALT-F4 or as a last resort open up a task manager and kill the browser if it won't let you close. Those clicks are what gets us in trouble. But like I said whatever that website is it does not appear to be working any longer. I'm inching towards a theory in tandom with @bremner - I'll probably post back with some things for folks to try if we don't get it fixed shortly...
I had the redirect problem on my laptop on Friday, but it worked just now, so it doesn’t seem like an individual device problem.
Still getting the site loading forever until I manually stop the load (Chrome iOS 12 iPad). Safari is now redirect free. Will kill all apps, and do a system reboot. See if Chrome gets back to normal.
Nope, Chrome still spins the “loading” icon until I stop it. Then page is good. Open a thread, icon spins (no redirection address) until stopped, then page loaded correctly.
Thanks for repairing the Trainboard website. I use the Google Chrome browser and Malwarebytes picked up the problem immediately. (This was on Friday, I think). I checked a few times over the weekend but kept getting the same problem. Checked this morning (in the UK) and back to normal, so now catching up on my usual topics, Z Scale, DCC & Electronics, and Layout Design Discussion. I really appreciate that you have managed to get things going again, as you are volunteers, and have spent the weekend on this. Rob Pearce (aka ViperBugloss)
Thanks @bremner for fixing up the weirdness with the js redirects. I would suggest a backup be taken of the static files for the site so that can be used in the future for restoring service etc. Also for those that wonder why it was working for some and not for others, some browsers will send an http request to check the staleness of the cached copies and if the server provides an expiration for the cache the browser should respect that. I can see some of the responses from the server include the "Expires" header and virtually all include a "Last-Modified" header. It is entirely up to the browser how it behaves with cached data and in most cases it would appear that the browser was not sending a request for updated data and instead used the local cache until we purged the cached data.
I cleared out all of my cookies, browsing data, etc. on MS Edge and all is well now. Thanks for the fix!
Before I checked Trainboard today, I had done a clean up on my computer, which uses Window 10 and Chrome. The clean up was not connected to the Trainboard problem but because the computer was running slowly. I closed all Chrome windows and then I reopened one, and ran History Eraser. I then powered down (shut down) and powered up again. This was rather than doing a restart. Once I was running again, I scanned using Malwarebytes, before trying Trainboard again. It may be worth trying the power off, power on sequence to clear any cached memory. Rob Pearce (aka Viper Bugloss)