Error in preview pages for all themes

Hello All
i thinks the sales has been stopped because there are Error in preview pages for all themes

Example in Avada Theme :
https://preview.themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-theme/full_screen_preview/2833226

Hi @Nile-Theme!

Can you tell me where you got that link? The protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) in the preview link is based on the protocol used by the author in their actual preview URL. If they use HTTP, as Theme Fusion does here for the Avada preview, the preview link will use HTTP. If they use HTTPS, the preview link will use HTTPS.

You can verify this by searching ThemeForest for avada and looking at the preview URL links there. If you click on the link, you’ll see that you get redirected to:

http://preview.themeforest.net/item/avada-responsive-multipurpose-theme/full_screen_preview/2833226

Note the http protocol here. If you go to their link using the HTTPS protocol, your browser won’t load the preview because it’s trying to load insecure content into a secure page, which is disallowed.

I’m interested to know where the URL came from in your message, as we shouldn’t be generating HTTPS links for this item anywhere. If there’s an issue I’ll be happy to hear the details so we can fix it.

Hello & Thanks 4 replay
I’ve got it from:

click in [Live Preview]

I have the same problem with my theme:

Do you have any browser extensions enabled? If so, can you try without browser extensions enabled?

I’ve taken a look on our end and I can’t see anywhere that we’ve generated a link (for Avada live preview) with HTTPS so I suspect there is something else going on here.

Problem in Firefox browser.
Buyers also complain about the inaccessibility of themes demos.

Hello All …
In google chrome can’t apple to see ( theme preview ) only white page …

image

Hi @Nile-Theme and @v_kulesh,

Our sites check the protocol in the author’s preview URL and serve up the preview page using the same protocol. In Avada’s case, their preview URL is over plain HTTP, so the preview page is served over plain HTTP. Other authors use HTTPS for their previews, and the preview page is served over HTTPS.

The problem you’re describing above happens when you use HTTPS to load the preview page of a theme that uses a plain HTTP preview URL – you see a white screen, and a warning from the browser that it blocked the insecure content from loading. This is a safety feature, and a good thing.

The question we have is, how are you getting to those HTTPS pages? As I said, the sites serve up the preview page over the correct URL. Using the Avada example, their preview is served over HTTP, so you should never get an HTTPS link like @Nile-Theme mentioned in the first post.

Can both of you please explain, step-by-step, exactly how you’re getting to the broken preview page? Start from the Themeforest homepage and tell me each link you click or form you submit until you get to the broken preview page.

I believe there’s something wrong here, but we just can’t duplicate it. The other possibility is as @jacobbednarz suggested above – if you had a browser plugin that automatically upgraded all requests to HTTPS, that could cause it as well.

Looking forward to your sharing the steps to reproduce with us so we can understand exactly what’s happening.

Thanks!

I’m just open item’s page and click the button “Live Preview” or click on thumbnail: 2018-09-20_19-20-43 .

This problem appeared just yesterday and touched all my works and the works of other authors. Yesterday one of the users informed me about the problem of demo availability in the commentaries to the theme - https://themeforest.net/comments/20416388. Until that time, everything worked without problems.

My demos don’t use HTTPS. A couple of days ago I sent a new job for review, as usual, I inserted a link to the demo: 2018-09-20_19-18-03 .
At first everything was fine, but then the user wrote about the problem.

I spoke with other authors and they confirmed that they had the same problem. The white screen appears in Firefox and Opera browsers and shows the demo page only when you click the “Remove Frame” button.

  1. Click “Live Preview” button on the item’s page:

2018-09-20_19-25-43

  1. Click “Remove Frame”:

2018-09-20_19-26-23

1 Like

I often get the same error too. Maybe this is the reason why sales are falling.

After some head scratching and log spelunking we’ve shipped some changes that should alleviate the issues seen here. The crux of the issue was people navigating around the preview subdomain (where these item previews are hosted) and getting the picking up incorrect HSTS values that were being carried to this section of the site.

It’s still not clear how/why people had navigated this part of the application (nothing else responds on this subdomain) but we’re confident this should address the issue for all users.

Do give it another try and let us if you’re still having issues!

3 Likes

Thank you! Everything works now. :grin:

Told you guys there was an issue with this! I managed to solve it by working with the Envato banner, not the most elegant solution, since that banner is long overdue for a redesign or a removal, but hey, at least it’s working. Lost over $500 this month due to these bugs which is quite annoying!

Hope Google doesn’t bring more lock-ups to the table any time soon.

1 Like

Didn’t notice it by myself or been warned by customers, but I noticed this huge sales drop from last week. Could it be related ?

Had the same insane fall in sales last for the past 2 weeks, fixed this and now all’s good. That banner caused a lot of headaches…

Hey,

If you’re referring to the live preview banner, it wasn’t anything related to that. As I mentioned above, it was related to a setting we have on other parts of the site that is not in the normal preview codepath that people have had to go out of their way, manually clicked through and had the option set due to visiting those pages. If customers just clicked the item preview from the search results or the item page, they would not have seen this issue.

Hope this clarifies things.

1 Like

Hey Jacob,

Thanks for clarifying. However, I would like to know if you have an idea of how many people were affected by this problem? Thanks

1 Like

As HSTS is something that is enforced by the client, we aren’t able to instrument it so we can’t get exact numbers from there. However, outside of this thread we have only received a single support ticket regarding the issue.

Looking at the traffic and request trends isn’t showing any deviation from our usual expected patterns so I’d be hesitant to blame it for any changes in author sales.

Since we’ve addressed the issue here, I’m closing this one off but don’t hesitate to open a support ticket should you have any further issues.