500 is an error code that means "Internal Server Error." That means that when you see an error page with code 500, there is a bug in the website.
That means one of two things:
Yes, right now. While you are reading this.
It might be Emily. Emily is a software engineer who works at CodeHS. Say hi to Emily.
Hi, I'm Emily
You know how sometimes when you're writing a program and you click the run button and it doesn't run because something pops up and says there is an error in your code?
Well, sometimes that happens to us too. We have our own code that runs the whole website, and we have our own, bigger run button. And this means we clicked it and it's telling you, the user of the website, that there's a bug in our code.
Sorry about that.
Hopefully, we have fixed the issue by now, so if you try reloading the page, you'll get to where you were trying to go.
If we haven't made the fix yet, you can try a different page on the site to see if that one works. Sometimes the bug affects our entire website, but other times, it only affect some of the pages, so it might be just the one you're trying to look at.
You can monitor and subscribe to status updates at codehs.statuspage.io
If all of the pages are showing you a 500 error, then we're still working on the issue. Feel free to email our support team at support@codehs.com.
Also, we have a bunch of backup sites you can use temporarily just in case something like this happens: Go to codehslite.com or lite.codehs.com and you can keep working on writing code. You just won't be able to save your progress, so make sure to copy/paste your work back to codehs.com once it's back up.
If domain services are down, you can just visit the IP address here: http://104.236.101.88/Or, if you want to do an Hour of Code, this Hour of Code page is a backup to make sure you can still finish your Hour of Code
Sure! There's lots more to learn about error codes and all sorts of status codes. The people who made the internet realized that people who make websites are going to make mistakes. Since there are so many different kinds of mistakes you can make, they invented codes to categorize the kinds of mistakes, so you could explain what kind of mistake it is based on an error code.
We're already talked about 500 errors, but there are several more kinds of errors. A 404 error means that you typed a URL and tried to visit a website that doesn't exist. 403 means that you aren't authorized to view a certain page, and 503 means that the server for the website is overloaded, since too many people are trying to access it.
There are also other kinds of status codes that aren't for errors. For example, the code 200 means that everything is ok.
If you want to learn even more about all the status codes, check out this wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes