SoylentNews

Broken Homepage Issues Partially Resolved

posted by NCommander on Wednesday April 09 2014, @01:32AM   
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.

• 2 other annoying bugs2 other annoying bugs (Score: 1) by datapharmer on Wednesday April 09 2014, @12:51PM

  by datapharmer (2702) on Wednesday April 09 2014, @12:51PM (#28741)

  Not sure where the best place is to be reporting bugs (since I'm assuming this is a fork from the original slashcode which has been ignored for the last century) but there are two real annoyances I have and I know at least 1 is still true on soylent news:

  1. slashcode apparently does some sort of port scanning as an anti-spam tool. That's awesome and all except when you run a port scanner against my network it looks like an attack and your IP is then blocked for a few days or until I manually remove it. Who thought that was acceptable behavior for a tech site? PLEASE stop running port scanners on your users!

  2. I haven't seen this happen yet on soylent news thankfully but it has infuriated me to no end on the other site - there appears to be a bug with the comment system that leaves you with a comment reply notification that simply can't be deleted or viewed. Clicking on it says it doesn't exist and deleting it makes it go away until you reload the page, then it is back again. There must have been at least a dozen bug reports of this on slashcode from various users over the years and they've all been deleted from the bug report database... more get filed and more get deleted. There is no interest in fixing it for whatever reason.

• Re:2 other annoying bugs(Score: 1) by datapharmer on Wednesday April 09 2014, @01:30PM

  by datapharmer (2702) on Wednesday April 09 2014, @01:30PM (#28762)

  Ok, I apparently missed the giant "Bug List" button on the upper left... I'll go ahead and submit the first one and hope the 2nd doesn't ever show up!

  Parent

• Re:2 other annoying bugs(Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday April 09 2014, @02:16PM

  by NCommander (2) <michael@casadevall.pro> on Wednesday April 09 2014, @02:16PM (#28788) Homepage Journal

  On 1, there is proxy scanning code in slash, but to my knowledge, it is disabled. If you're seeing scans, can you provide a log from snort or whatever you are using so I can try and hunt the issue down.

  2. Obviously I can't debug what isn't broken :-)

  --
  Still always moving

  Parent