Update on THE SITUATION (site errors!)

[HoTWire]

Okay it certainly hasn't escaped a lot of people's notice that there is a fairly hefty issue on the forum right now, namely that clicking notifications, latest thread short cuts or participated links will give you an error. The same error you get if you create or reply to a thread.

What is happening?
When you post or use any of the short links (eg recent/ participated/ etc.) in the back end the site creates a redirection to take you to that content, rather than it being a straight up normal link like you get once you are within a forum. That redirect is inserting /,/ in to the url which causes a page not found error.

In parallel to that there are some issues around image uploading and I'm not sure if they are related (they may have been caused by the change to url that I hadn't backed out actually, which could be fixed now).


Why is this happening?
No one seems to know. I thought it could be something to do with something I've been doing, something in the theme, or the new ads or something like that. The other day I took the site back to its default settings, sat on retrorides.proboards.com so it wasn't even touching my domain name settings, with all adverts off and it still did the same thing. Even weirder it started doing the same thing with support.proboards.com after that. Which has me convinced it isn't anything to do with us. However proboards aren't seeing any errors their end and their infrastructure guys can't seem to pinpoint any issues.

What happens now?
I'm still working with Proboards to see if we can work out what it is, I'm about to record and send them a more extensive detailed log of what the forum is going from login through to getting the error.

What if it isn't fixed?
This situation is untenable really, so there has to be some resolution. However I don't know what that would be right now. Simply lifting the content of the forum and moving it elsewhere is complicated for many reason, not least of which is getting access to the data to move without violating Proboards ToS, but also I've put a lot of work in to this site and whilst there is more to come it does feel like moving to a different forum provider would be a whole new set of issues. There may be options within the proboards universe that aren't explored yet either.



So that is where we are and what is going on. We're working hard to fix it, but currently it isn't fixed.

[stealthstylz]

After spending an entire week trying to diagnose a van that wouldn't start at work I'm of the opinion that computers suck balls and would it be possible to have some sort of carrier pigeon based forum system.

[misteralz]

I did wonder, if only because the site seems *really* dead compared to normal. No issues here other than a weird one where the text box disappears until I hit a key on my keyboard...

Hope it gets better soon, because I love this place.

[jimi]

I don't think moving to another forum provider is the answer, as you say it will more than likely be a can of worms (ask me how I know !)
Given the amount of work you've put in over the years and the fact that until recently it was working OK, I'd keep on trying to sort it out.
I don't know if this possible with your/Proboards setup, but in the past we have setup up a local version of our forum and restored backups (starting old and working newer) to pin down a problem. Mind you that's only helpful the problem is site related, won't help if it's somehow 'net related.
It's almost like some kind of caching problem, is the forum behind something like Cloudflare ?
Good luck with the problem and given that I'm still not seeing any problems, any checking/testing I can do, just ask 👍

[nickwheeler]

Dec 8, 2023 21:01:48 GMT stealthstylz said:

After spending an entire week trying to diagnose a van that wouldn't start at work I'm of the opinion that computers suck balls and would it be possible to have some sort of carrier pigeon based forum system.

That could save us a fortune in cat food
Yves loves pigeons, and only leaves the feet and wings...

I'm with you on the computers though

[braaap]

Dec 8, 2023 16:08:58 GMT HoTWire said:

That redirect is inserting /,/ in to the url which causes a page not found error.

I confess I have close to zero knowledge about programming etc., so it makes me wonder even more why that /,/ happens. Does it make sense in any other context than making a great forum not so great anymore?

Was it implemented by some hacker attack? Or how can this happen?

[Darkspeed]

Completely escaping my notice - Not seeing any issues at all ! On a PC and an old Samsung Galaxy A70 - Its all fine


If it makes any difference - everything goes through Wifi router and landline - No mobile G whatever as no signal out here.

[DarrenW]

I use the "Recent threads" all the time, and have been lurking pretty consistently for the past few days and haven't noticed a thing!

[HoTWire]

this is a small test

[Darkspeed]

Actually this is a small test

[tofufi]

Seems to be working correctly for me today. (had previously been having issues)

Edit: the links on the front page are working, I still get the error when submitting posts!)

[j0hn]

I'm getting mixed behaviour from this bug...

On my work laptop (Win 11 x64 fully updated), using Vivaldi browser (fully updated), I don't get any issues with notifications or last post etc. it just behaves as it should.

I've just logged in on my work laptop using Edge - I've never used Edge for RR before on this laptop. I get the "/," error on latest posts, notifications etc. and even when I logged out and it tried to redirect to the base url it still appended the "/," and errored out.

Using my phone (iPhone 11 fully updated), with Chrome (fully updated), I get the redirect error on notification links and latest posts. One thing I've noticed today, while trying to note the errors, is that I no longer get the logout confusion. Last week, when I would get a redirect error, when I continued (by either going back or using the link to return to the main page) it would appear to have logged me out. I would then get a "too many redirects" (caused by the "/," append issue error when trying to log back in. However, if I clicked back from the "too many redirects" error page and then used the side bar to navigate the forum, I was still logged in. This would also happen if it appeared I was logged out, and used the sidebar menu instead of trying to log in.

Final test today was using Safari on my phone - again a browser that's never been used for RR. I got to the login page, but that was as far as I could. After entering my username and password and hitting "login" it took me straight to the "too many redirects" error page.

I'll try logging out on Vivaldi and see what happens when I try to login again.

EDIT 1:
No redirect errors when I posted this.

EDIT 2:
No issues when logging out and back in again. Logged straight in and latest post links work fine.

[HoTWire]

That for all the testing j0hn it really is an odd issue, I do want to try some other browsers I seem to always get it eventually, but not always at first with a new browser.

[misteralz]

FWIW, Samsung S20FE and Firefox and no problems.

[wodge]

Same problems on latest chrome today. But I did manage to login without redirect issues. But I did land on page not found.

[wodge]

Its the extra ,/ in the query string. Remove that and press return and all is fine.

[joem83]

Mine is now working, I was prompted about cookie preferences which isnt something I usually get - accepted all and I can click around no issue. W10 Firefox

[j0hn]

Updated testing prompted by joem83's post.

On W11 work laptop, Edge browser.

- logged out of RR and tried to log in again thinking there might have been a fix
- sadly not and was presented with the usual "page not found" redirect error
- clicked the return to main page link and was shown as logged in
- tried a latest post link to confirm redirect issue still present
- logged out of forum
- went into Edge settings and manually deleted the cookies left by both proboards and RR
- back to RR forum homepage and got the cookies warning message - rejected all
- logged in - got logged in with no redirect issues etc
- tried latest post links to prove - again, no redirect issues and latest post links work as they should

So clearing the cookies seems to have fixed it in this browser - in hindsight I should've been a bit less gung ho and only deleted only the RR or PB cookies and tested. I'll see if I can navigate my phone to manually delete cookies in either Chrome or Safari and be more methodical in cookie removal!

EDIT 1:
No redirect error from posting this either.

EDIT 2: HoTWire

On my phone using Safari I can get two different errors...

In standard browsing mode if I go to the forum homepage and try to login from there it takes me to the proboards login page. Once I've filled in my details and hit login it hangs for a few seconds and the times out due to too many redirects (when you copy the content of the url box into notes you can see that it's tried to redirect 20 times as the url is a string of the proboards url with the appended ",/" repeated 20 times with the final, and correct, forum redirect url stuck on the end.

In private browsing mode I get a different error. Going to the same main forum url and clicking the login link takes me to the same proboards login page. After entering my details again and hitting login, rather than the hang/timeout/proboards url mashing, I get to the actual RR forum and the page not found error as it's still appending the ",/" but for some reason it's not getting in a loop with proboards itself.

[HoTWire]

Hmm a small reply test


*edit
Nope that isn't fixed.

[j0hn]

Further update

I manually removed the RR and PB cookies in Safari and now get the same "page not found" error in both private and standard browsing modes when trying to login or use latest post links etc. It doesn't seem to be getting into the redirect loop/timeout with PB when logging in in standard browsing mode anymore.

EDIT 1:

Out of curiosity I manually removed the cookies in Safari and now in standard browsing I get the PB redirect loop timeout again. Private browsing still errors with the page not found redirect but will actually log me into the forum.