Attempting to connect with metamask and getting blocked by client

so I’ve been making an nft minting dapp, when I was hosting it on the netlify subdomain it worked fine and I thought I was ready to deploy. however when I went ahead and moved to the custom domain name all of a sudden I can’t connect to my wallet through the site.

trashpossums.io is the site.

error when I try to connect wallet POST http://localhost:8545/ net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT

I don’t know why the wallet is calling localhost at all, it should be going through metamask or the alchemy rpc endpoint as it did before I registered the domain.

is there some basic setup I’m missing?

I’m using vite-vue3 and web3modal for the wallet connection. any hints would be much appreciated.

hey there, while we’re talking I wanted to let you know ]that we ask all businesses in the NFT/Crypto space to speak with our sales and solutions team to purchase a contract to ensure that your site is on an appropriate account level for your usage.

You can reach them here:

Our High Performance Edge product is usually a necessity to be able to handle and administer successful launches.

We have seen many customers who have sites like these get attacked, and on our lower plans, such as Starter and Pro, these attacks tend to harm our main network. If that happens, we may not be able to keep your site online. Should an attack on your site harm our network or jeopardize the uptime of other customers, we will opt to take down your site. Further, many NFT/Crypto sites have generated bills for thousands of dollars worth of bandwidth used during launch, and we do take steps to ensure we are compensated for that use should that happen here too. Please make sure you are prepared to pay for eventual bandwidth charges which have been several thousands of dollars in the past.

If the above info changes whether or not you would like to proceed with hosting on Netlify, we encourage you to make the decision that is best for you, which might mean moving to a different provider, if the above seems unreasonable to you.

hey, if I can get the site working and launched I’m happy to pay whatever membership is required. however I’m expecting this launch to be pretty low key. I highly doubt there will be a huge bandwidth usage. it’s pretty much just me doing this solo.

@perry Can you provide more detail on how the “usage” of a static NFT site differs from a regular static site? and the “attacks” involved?

  • By “attacks” do you just mean high demand and/or DDOS?
  • Is it the “functions” use that is a problem?
  • Is it the capability of the base level “static hosting” that is the problem?
  • Is it that they generate overages charges (like the bandwidth) then somehow flee without paying?

I just mentioned this to my wife at breakfast, she’s not a developer nor familiar with the NFT space and her response was “Netlify see money and they want a cut”. I’d love to give you the benefit of the doubt that these sites really are a burden on the system, but without a little more transparency I’m inclined to side with her “hot take”.

Hi, @nathanmartin.

We are not trying to exploit the NFT people. We just want them to pay for what they use. We are preparing them for bills which they should expect and, unfortunately, they do not.

I have a question for you:

  • Do you really think NFT sites are just like any other site?

If so, I’m curious why you believe that. If you do me the favor of answering that, I’ll explain below why I think they differ.

First, this is the problem we are trying to avoid below:

  • Someone that isn’t particularly experienced managing websites makes a new NFT site on Netlify.
  • They announce a “drop”, which is a free give-away of some of their NFTs, to promote their NFT collection.
  • People seeking to get the free NFTs during the drop create automated scripts to flood the site during the drop time window.
  • To Netlify, this traffic is indistinguishable from a normal traffic spike (going viral on Twitter or appearing on Shark Tank on TV) so we keep serving the site.
  • The site uses many terabytes of data transfer during the drop.
  • The NFT site owner ends up with a bill that is many hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
  • The NFT site owner says, “Oh, my! I didn’t expect that large bill and I won’t pay it.”

It is 100% predictable that there will be a huge amount of traffic for any NFT drop. Anyone with the least bit of experience managing a site would understand this. Any NFT site owner should plan and predict that data transfer in advance. Many of them don’t and that is the problem.

This isn’t someone saying, “I’m going to make a blog about onions.” and then getting a huge bill unexpectedly.

It is someone saying “I’m going to try to get rich with an unregulated financial instrument and let other people get free tickets to my lottery on my site” and then getting a huge bill. I understand not expecting your blog about a vegetable to get high bandwidth and not wanting to pay that bill.

However, when the entire point of your website is “we’re printing free money - get yours today” and you get a high bandwidth bill, that should be expected. It should be expected … but it isn’t. That is why we warn them.

I hope it makes the answer to this clear:

Can you provide more detail on how the “usage” of a static NFT site differs from a regular static site? and the “attacks” involved?

The two qualities which make NFT sites different are:

  • There are many inexperienced, novice developers creating these sites.
  • The NFT drop concept (NFT giveaways) almost always result in an enormous traffic spike.

The two qualities combine to result in people not wanting to pay for their site’s bandwidth. This is such a common pattern for NFT sites that we warn people. The NFT sites have caused tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars in bandwidth bills that no one is paying for, that is, no one except Netlify.

This “how was I supposed to know I would use this much bandwidth?” negligence is such a problem that we now warn anyone mentioning NFTs about the bill in advance so they cannot act surprised when it happens.

Again, we treat NFT sites differently because they do have qualities which make them much more likely to have huge spike in bandwidth and much more likely for the site’s owner to refuse to pay.

So, this is just wrong:

“Netlify see money and they want a cut”

It’s wrong both because that is not our motivation but also because NFTs are not a way to generate money.

If your wife thinks there is money in NFTs, I’d suggest she visit this website:

Also, this video titled " Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs" is 2 hours and 18 minutes long but also truly delightful in my opinion:

So, to summarize, NFTs site are being made and used in a way that often guarantees high bandwidth use. Many of the NFT site creators are novices (or pretend to be) that don’t expect or want to pay for the bandwidth when they use it.

The NFT people steal from us, not the other way around. We end up paying for their bandwidth and they just move their site to a different host. They use the resource and we end up footing the bill.

Now, @MrDeadCe11, I’m not saying that you are inexperienced or dishonest. However, some people operating in your industry are. That is why we have a boilerplate warning anytime a site is about NFTs.

Again, about this, @MrDeadCe11:

I highly doubt there will be a huge bandwidth usage.

We just warned you of the opposite. If you make an NFT site, popular or not, and if you have a coin/NFT “drop” or giveaway, there is almost certainly going to be large bills for bandwidth. Please don’t say we didn’t warn you because we have done so repeatedly.

@nathanmartin, I hope this makes it clear why we warn people. We warned @MrDeadCe11 and he still didn’t believe us. This just proves my point above that people making NFT sites don’t expect the bandwidth (but they should).

2 Likes

@luke This is a great answer and I really appreciate you putting so much time into it!
I couldn’t find an NFT related “support guide”, so it might be valuable to put one together with some of the detail here and the explicit warning that “NFT site owners are responsible for their bandwidth charges”.

Do you really think NFT sites are just like any other site?

I actually do, but I’m basing that only on:

  • The sites being built with the same underlying technologies as any other
  • The sites being hosted in the same way as all other sites on Netlify
  • The sites being basically “marketing sites” for non-material products, similar to other stores
  • That any site could (however unlikely) generate an excessive bandwidth usage by going viral
  • That any site could (however unlikely) come under attack or get flooded

I admit that I hadn’t considered the prospect of a “giveaway”, having presumed the NFT’s would be getting sold at a price like any other “product” and that demand would thus only be as high as the marketing/popularity and the supply/demand. It makes a lot of sense though that even a toy NFT could generate excessive demand if it was being given away.

My own opinion is that Netlify are owed their fees as per the hosting terms of the account, even if it is thousands of dollars, no matter the “target market of the site”. I’d expect much the same if a blog about onions inexplicably became the hottest thing on the internet.

That sucks! The way I see it, customers stealing from Netlify are stealing from all the other customers.

Hopefully the percentage of non-payment is much lower by all the people with super popular onion blogs.

This is really the crux of it, that the customers making these sites for whatever reason are a statistically risky cohort and now need to be treated as such.

She’s a primary school teacher and has no interest in tech, but my guess is that she has read a news article at some point that has told her NFT === get rich quick… which is really the entire problem in a nutshell.

Sorry for implying that Netlify were trying to take a cut of the sales!

1 Like

I’m really just putting this site together as a portfolio project, there’s not going to be any marketing or giveaways. If it does get randomly popular that would be great!

Thanks for the warning about the drops though. Right now it’s set up so that people will be able to “reserve” an nft during the reserve period (which should be a couple months at the least and to reserve the nft you have to pay full price for it) then when they claim the nft they will mint it and be assigned the final nft ID. Hopefully at no point in this process will bots spamming the website be helpful to anyone. Unless they spam to purchase all the nft’s, then hopefully, you will get a max of 7k requests. other than that I’ll be preminting 80 of these things and sending them out to the artists who worked on the project.

please let me know if there some holes in this plan because I’m definitely not trying to make problems or steal bandwidth.

again I’m totally happy to work with you guys, but I’m also not working with a giant budget (or in fact a budget at all).

thanks again.

1 Like

Wow, this discussion got really side-tracked.

In any case, @MrDeadCe11, sadly we don’t know why your code is connecting to localhost either, from what we can see this seems to be done by something in your code itself than us. I added a breakpoint to where your code was throwing an error:

it turns out, the variable e is having the localhost value. Why? We don’t know. We can’t really debug a code that’s so highly minified.

However, I can see some hardcoded values:

image

Hey, thanks a ton for taking a look! here’s a link to the code on github if you have time to check out some non-minified code :-).
Since I asked this question I’ve discovered that I have a memory leak that is preventing me from building locally or on netlify. Weeee!

1 Like

Hi, @MrDeadCe11. Questions about the code you write are welcome here but our support team doesn’t have the bandwidth to troubleshoot your custom code. (This covered in our support scope documentation.)

Again, you are welcome to ask this type of question here. Other people on the support forum may be able to assist you with it. For our support team though, we must focus on troubleshooting Netlify systems and services. In other words, we have resources to troubleshoot the code that Netlify writes only.

You might also try asking this question on a forum specifically targeted to javascript programming questions or even a general programming question site like Stack Overflow.

no problem, I figured it out with the help of the last response. it was indeed a variable I was passing in incorrectly. Thanks for the help guys! I am in touch with the sales team as well to make sure we get this bandwidth thing sorted out. :slight_smile: