Not quite sure as it runs on my local servers without problems.
I noticed that the URL actually is http://api.loyce.club/crowdsourcing/merit.all.txt. Try to change the $url variable in the script. ($url = "merit.all.txt"; should be enough because script and source data is stored in the same directory).

I also want to credit Initscri. He is going to work on a combined version of this script.
Maybe we should add some error handling aswell.