Submitted by Joshua Telser / Roosevelt University on Wed, 09/30/2026 - 10:59
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I have for years been using both the Webelements web site and the Orbitron web site (both from Emeritus Prof. Mark J. Winter, U. of Sheffield, UK).

Webelements

The periodic table of the elements by WebElements = https://winter.group.shef.ac.uk/webelements/

Orbitron:

https://winter.group.shef.ac.uk/orbitron/

Just last night in class I got same dreadful message for both:

“Account Suspended

This Account has been suspended.

If you are the owner of this account, please contact the IT Service Desk for support.”

I have contacted a slew of professors (inorganic and physical/theoretical) at U. of Sheffield about this. The site webelements. com had already been killed in some way during the summer, but it was accessible through the University until just now.

Does anyone know about this? I have not yet used the Wayback machine to access these, but that is a less than satisfactory solution even in bets cases.

If anyone has substitutes, please let me know. I know that there are many PT's on the internet, but the above one was particularly good in terms of NMR nuclear information, nice electronic configuration diagrams, color code of blocks, "skyline" view of periodic properties, etc.

thanks for any help that you can give.

Josh Telser

Chip Nataro / Lafayette College

This has been a hot topic on our Discord Server. So far it seems like we have no answers but we do have a lot of worried people. It has been noted that this has happened in the past, perhaps due to a new server or IT configuration there. The community also hopes this is temporary. If you hear back from anyone at U. of Sheffield please let us know! 

Wed, 09/30/2026 - 11:07 Permalink
Joshua Telser / Roosevelt University

It looks like both Web Elements and the Orbitron are back (URL same a before) so the folks at U. of Sheffield seems to have sorted things out. Let's hope that this remains the case for a while. The removal of useful web sites (e.g., Milan Vasak's metallothioneine web site at U. of Zurich) is very foolsih and unfortunate.

Thu, 10/15/2026 - 13:06 Permalink
W. Stephen McNeil / University of British Columbia Okanagan

Can confirm that both sites were working two weeks ago, but today (Wed Oct 20 2026) they are not.

Wed, 10/21/2026 - 15:08 Permalink
Joshua Telser / Roosevelt University

I have very bad news. The following is from Prof. Graham Leggett at the U. of Sheffield.

"Dear Josh

Thank you for your message. I'm not sure that a resolution exists at present. Mark's resources were offered free of charge to users, but were financed through commercial advertising, a route that is not commensurate with the modus operandi of a publicly funded University. Thus the biggest obstacle is a funding shortfall. A few years ago we looked for a solution while I was head of department, and regrettably it was not possible to find one. However, it is certainly sad to contemplate the decline of this resource.
 
Regards,
 
Graham Leggett."
 
The ads were an annoying aspect of Webelements/Orbitron, but so it goes in the Internet age. There has got to be a way of moving the Webelements/Orbitron sites somewhere they can survive. Perhaps within VIPEr? I am an alumnus of the U. of Florida; they can spend (order of magnitude only) 1e8 $ (0.1 G$) on (professional) sports annually, for those of you at or are alumni of similar institutions it is the same. Yet a resource such as this seems to go down the drain. I know too little about web site hosting to offer any useful information, but perhaps US institutions are less fussy about "commercial" enterprises.
Thu, 10/22/2026 - 07:27 Permalink
W. Stephen McNeil / University of British Columbia Okanagan

A) Once the labour of setting it up is accomplished, resources like the Orbitron and WebElements don't have any ongoing cost beyond that of maintaining the server that the files are sitting on. A home could be found at any university that allows faculty members to create and maintain their own websites on servers already maintained by departmental or institutional IT staff, with no additional financial implications. It would just be a matter of asking Mark for the files for the sites and then mirroring them elsewhere. (The JSmol resources requires installation of some extra bits, so that set up labour involves more than just cutting and pasting a bunch of file directory contents and requires some technical expertise, but it's not awful.) So maybe we need to start looking around for a possible home.

B) WebElements and the Orbitron are working again as of 18h30 UTC Thu Oct 22. So....???

Thu, 10/22/2026 - 14:46 Permalink