GeoNames Forum

hi,

I have been testing geonames webservice and it seems the website is broken. For instance this links returns 404 not found error
http://ws.geonames.org/neighbourhood?lat=40.78343&lng=-73.96625

The above links is provided in Neighbourhood webservice description page. I tried other webservices and they are also failing. And If I go to http://ws.geonames.org/ the page is redirected to some other website. Just concerned whether the website has been hacked or what ?

Because of a problem with a iphone application apparently causing issues, the webservices have been moved temporally to ws5.geonames.org

http://ws5.geonames.org/neighbourhood?lat=40.78343&lng=-73.96625

BUT its very suspicious that ws.geonames.org redirects to the the iPhone apps webpage!

The only reason I can think is its a retaliatory effort, to send all the traffic that is currently hitting geonames servers and instead overwelm imob's webservers.

Btw see these threads

http://groups.google.com/group/geonames/browse_thread/thread/b8e0917b13240264?hl=en

http://groups.google.com/group/geonames/browse_thread/thread/775e8b6c518b8bcb?hl=en

Another iphone application using the commercial services have realized that they were having a call to the ws.geonames.org domain in their code and disabling the domain stopped their application. As a quick and dirty stopgap solution we have had to point the domain to any server for a couple of hours. The server causing the troubles was the best solution without causing damage to someone not involved.
Sorry about all this confusion.

Marc

Thanks for the information.