Question thread #138

[pauamma]

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

If I take a short video on my phone, I can easily phost it on twitter. It would be nice to have the same feature on dream, eh?

[pauamma]

How large (in storage space) would short (in duration) be? See https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=4 for storage quota (images only for now).

[juan_gandhi]

Right; this may need more space - for premium accounts, of course.

[musyc]

Once upon a midnight dreary, the idea of having icon collections/sets was kicked around, somewhat meshed in with the idea of users being able to designate "keep THESE active if my paid time expires". Has this been extremely low priority backburnered? Dropped entirely as not viable? I think of it from time to time.

[pauamma]

I think it's been backburnered by default. That is, I remember it was discussed early on as something important or useful for UX - maybe as early as the Dreamwidth planning stages, on a mailing list - and I don't remember any "it's been abandoned" announcement.

[adrenalinerush]

I'm having a bit of an odd problem on a server I've got going to tinker with and I can't figure out where to start with troubleshooting it. Any time I post a comment or entry longer than maybe 20 words, it posts blank with just a blank ASCII. Running the most up to date software from Github, I've tried rolling it back thinking it might have something to do with UTF and that just breaks the whole darn thing, so back on a fresh install and still having it.

ETA: It seems like about 90 characters is where it goes wonky. I can inch it up a tiny bit more if I edit one character in at a time, but it doesn't like anything past that.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[pauamma]

Given the symptoms you describe, my first suspicion would be that something in the communication path between your browser and the Perl backend code that is Dreamwidth proper is closing the TCP connection too soon (that is, before all data has been transmitted), perhaps because of a short timeout or low limit on length of transmitted data. If any of the following are in that path, I would look at their configuration:
- mod_perl
- Apache
- Nginx, Varnish, Perlbal, or any equivalent Apache frontend
- Any stateful firewall running on your server or on a downstream router that you control
- Any stateful firewall or NAT running on your client's local network, perhaps on a router or a cable, DSL, or fiber box.
- Any stateful firewall running on the same computer as your browser
- Any plugins running in your browser itself.

Network traces taken at suitable locations on the above chain may help shed light on what is glitching and why, if you're comfortable running and interpreting them.

[adrenalinerush]

Thank you for the quick response!

I just checked all my disconnect times and they all seem pretty decent (a minute+, when the page is reloading in significantly less than that).

With troubleshooting, I've also attempted from other browsers and devices, both on and off my home network, we're not behind any kind of firewall, all to the same results.

What's weird is if I "preview" the comment or entry before posting, the preview looks fine; it's when I post it that it just spits out a  character as the only data, and if I go to edit it, the content is gone and that character's all that's there. I was poking around in the TextUtil.pm file, thinking perhaps there was something in there forcing it to truncate around the text_length function and was able to get it to throw the "your comment has exceeded the maximum character length" error, so I know it's reading those parameters, I just can't seem to find what's causing it to eat everything over 90 chars.

😭

[pauamma]

OK, this appears to rule out any problem in the communication path or your browser plugins. Now a few questions to narrow down the problem (or problems) so I can try duplicating.

First, to confirm: you're observing the same thing (initial content being discarded instead of being appended to when you edit after first creating) for both entries and comments? For instance, when you first create an entry or comment with about 90 characters, then edit that entry or comment and add some extra text at the end, that extra text ends up replacing the original text instead of being appended to it, like "foo(imagine 87 more characters)bar" becoming just "bar"?

Second, for entries, are you using the old update page on that server or the new "beta" one? You can check by looking at https://www.example.org/beta where "example.org" is the domain name of your server install.

Third, do you have Javascript disabled (for your server or in general) in the browsers you've tested this with?

Fourth, can you check (using bin/ljdb or bin/dev/entrydump.pl) whether the damaged content is actually stored in the database?

[adrenalinerush]

Using the old update page. example.org/update - no beta features here (yet).

And yeah, if I start at 90 characters (I've just been grabbing Lorem Ipsum text), it'll post entries or comments. If I edit, I can append a couple characters one at a time until it totally craps out and gives that blank character. If the initial is even 91 characters, it wipes the entry/comment and throws the blank character.

So like: OG post with 90 characters: "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has"
Edit 1: "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has b"
Edit 2: [totally gone]


And yeah, javascript is enabled all around.

ljdb shows the user's in the database:
user: journalfortesting / userid: 5 / clusterid: 1

entrydump.pl gives me:

entry =
Can't call method "props" on an undefined value at /home/dw/dw/bin/dev/entrydump.pl line 33

But I'm sure that's me just being a dodo and not plugging in the correct arguments to get the entry.

[adrenalinerush]

I can't tell if I'm dumb or WHAT but thought I'd circle back and let you know I figured it out! I backtracked and reinstalled a my packages one at a time and the 'glitch' was in memcached - for whatever reason, the installation of that went bugger up somewhere along the way. I reinstalled it and it's functioning now. 🙌🏻

Thank you for your help!

Thanks for the update.

[pauamma]

I can't tell if I'm dumb or WHAT

If you are, I am too. :-) I didn't think of memcached as a possible cause.

Re: Thanks for the update.

[adrenalinerush]

I just KNEW it was going to be something glaringly simple that would make me facepalm when it got tracked down. 🤣 Thanks again!