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posted by NCommander on Wednesday April 09 2014, @01:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the yay-for-old-slashcode-bugs dept.
We've been dealing with a long standing issue involving a significant percentage of users not seeing some articles posted on the homepage. After several rounds of debugging, paulej72 *finally* found the underlying cause. Inside slashcode, there's a function that writes user preferences to the database, but this function doesn't do a lot of sanity checking. As part of the normal options, you can disable specific authors from appearing on the index, but due to an unrelated misconfiguration, this list wasn't properly populated (due to Slashcode having seperate vars for "author" and "is_admin"). The upshot of this is if you edited your preferences at all, it would write out an incomplete list of authors to the database, which would cause a bunch of articles to simply not show up.

We've applied a workaround for now, but this entire bit of logic needs to be rewritten to be less crap. Since we can't easily determine the garbage from legit users settings, we have blown away the variable on all users for the time being; the upshot is if you were manually filtering out an author, you'll have to reset it. Once we have a proper fix in place, we'll drop it into a point release, reset the user table again, and drop another announcement.

I apologize for any inconvenience.
 
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  • (Score: 1) by petecox on Wednesday April 09 2014, @05:55AM

    by petecox (3228) on Wednesday April 09 2014, @05:55AM (#28627)

    Sorry if this is the wrong place to report a bug but...

    Pretty much every time I access the site (every 2nd day or so), I have to log in again.

    FF 28, kubuntu 14.04

  • (Score: 1) by paulej72 on Wednesday April 09 2014, @11:59AM

    by paulej72 (58) on Wednesday April 09 2014, @11:59AM (#28718) Journal

    Our site requires frequent fixes at this point. Many of these require apache to be restarted. Unfortunately this invalilidates current login cookies, and requires users to log in again.

    --
    Team Leader for SN Development
    • (Score: 1) by petecox on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:10AM

      by petecox (3228) on Thursday April 10 2014, @02:10AM (#29205)

      Okay, thanks.

      It's an annoyance but I can sleep easier knowing there's a technical reason and not just something 'broken'!