[Bug on forum] Can't Submit topic because of error on forum

[Friksel]

There seem to be no forum here to post bugs of this forum, so by lack of another forum I had to post it here.

Last months it happens about 90% of the time the forum doesn't allow to Submit a topic / react to a post because of this error on the forum:

 

Most of the time this error means that a data object, for example received from the backend, isn't in the right format or a json stream is not valid JSON. Also Promises should always have a `catch()` to catch errors, which obviously are missing here.

I'm surprised this still isn't fixed. It's pretty annoying to not being able to post on the forum after taking the time to write a post, most of the time with video too. It would be helpful if somebody of Serif or it's external forum supplier could finally dive into this issue and fix this. A forum doesn't make much sense if posting is impossible 90% of the time.

Thanks in advance!

[walt.farrell]

33 minutes ago, Friksel said:

I'm surprised this still isn't fixed.

Have you reported it before, if it's been happening to you for awhile?

I have never gotten that error when creating topics or reacting to posts, and I don't recall seeing any reports from anyone. One of the Serif Staff will have more visibility into reports than I, of course, especially as they may get them via email, Twitter, etc. But if no one's reported it then it's not surprising that it hasn't been fixed.

 

[carl123]

@Friksel

Which browser do you use?

[Friksel]

@carl123 I'm using Ms Edge latest, which is basically Chrome. No weird settings, no plugins.

 After trying yet another thousand times to react to your post with and without cookies enabled: The forum just won't let me react to others on my own thread or others. Also tried to open another thread, but it didn't work either.

Now trying it from Firefox. But if this doesn't work I just cannot react to you.

This should obviously not be browser dependent, espectially because I'm using a Chromium based browser which is #1 in world usage and so the first browser to test on.

[carl123]

40 minutes ago, Friksel said:

Now trying it from Firefox. But if this doesn't work I just cannot react to you.

It appears to have worked using Firefox.

 

Just to clarify does Firefox work flawlessly for you and Ms Edge does not

I'm using Chrome which obviously works

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, carl123 said:

It appears to have worked using Firefox.

I do not see a reaction from Friksel, though (Like, Thanks, Sad, etc.). Just a post.

[Leigh]

2 hours ago, Friksel said:

There seem to be no forum here to post bugs of this forum, so by lack of another forum I had to post it here.

Last months it happens about 90% of the time the forum doesn't allow to Submit a topic / react to a post because of this error on the forum:

 

Most of the time this error means that a data object, for example received from the backend, isn't in the right format or a json stream is not valid JSON. Also Promises should always have a `catch()` to catch errors, which obviously are missing here.

I'm surprised this still isn't fixed. It's pretty annoying to not being able to post on the forum after taking the time to write a post, most of the time with video too. It would be helpful if somebody of Serif or it's external forum supplier could finally dive into this issue and fix this. A forum doesn't make much sense if posting is impossible 90% of the time.

Thanks in advance!

We've not seen any other reports of this issue but I will speak with our web team to see if they have any ideas what could be causing the issue.

[Leigh]

@Friksel Still looking into this but have been unable to replicate so far. You stated that you're not using any plugins but are you using any AdBlockers or a VPN? Do you have another device that can use to try logging into the site to see if you get the same issue? Is there any other information listed in the Console Error Logs?

[Friksel]

On 3/16/2022 at 10:41 AM, Leigh said:

@Friksel Still looking into this but have been unable to replicate so far. You stated that you're not using any plugins but are you using any AdBlockers or a VPN? Do you have another device that can use to try logging into the site to see if you get the same issue? Is there any other information listed in the Console Error Logs?

Hi @Leigh,  Thanks for looking into this.

I'm not using AdBlockers other than perhaps something which is build in. If an AdBlocker would cause the forum to stop working tho than there's something wrong in the forum as adBlockers have no reason to block traffic to the same domain. If they did that 99% of the website wouldn't function anymore so that would make no sense and adblockers useless.

The issue is also there when not using a VPN.

On 3/16/2022 at 10:41 AM, Leigh said:

@Friksel  Is there any other information listed in the Console Error Logs?

Perhaps you could re-read my opening post; I did put a screenshot of the error message of the console.log in there. There you can also see that a catch isn't handled of a Promise. That's not causing this error, but not an indication of great programming per se as the catch should be there. In the near future leaving catches behind would probably even make the forum to completely stop working as using Promises without a catch is deprecated for quite a while in browsers now so won't be tolerated in the near future. Having that won't solve this issue tho.

For the record: ms Edge is just Chromium, so pretty much exactly the same as Chrome. I never had any issues with other sites and neither did I with the Affinity forum before.

The following time I'll try if using Firefox has the same issues and/or look if I can see something in the developer tools. It looks like the frontend is requesting something from the backend, but the backend sends something empty or in the wrong format.

Hope to be able to use Ms Edge again soon!

Thanks again

[edit] Sending this now from firefox worked directly. But that's also the case with ms edge sometimes, while other times it's taking me a thousand tries to make it actually send.

[edit2] At the moment I'm behind a VPN, so that isn't an issue either. Also Firefox is automatically blocking things like Google Analytics, so that's way more strict than ms edge, which doesn't do that.

[Leigh]

@Friksel Thanks for replying. I know that Adblockers and VPN shouldn't cause this issue but i've had instances where they've affected specific websites and turning these types of plugins off have resolved said issues. I only use Chrome on both macOS and Windows and never had this issue. I've also searched the support forum for Invision Community and couldn't spot any related issues. 

However, I've sent a message to our engineer who looks after the forums to see if he has any idea what could be causing the issue. Will keep you updated.

 

[Leigh]

2 hours ago, Hens said:

Thanx,
I had the reported issue all morning, logged out and had my browser cleanout the data (cookies/cache,...)
Just now logged in again on my chromium browser and posted this thanx and it went through.
(oh ,with the ghostery extension enabled)

Thanks for the update - happy to hear that it's working for you now 👍

I've spoken to our web engineer and he's unsure what could be causing the issue. Your request could be getting blocked by the firewall but he's checked the logs and can't see any recent blocks that match this situation. Apparently we've had over million requests to the forum servers over the past 24 hours and only 255 requests were blocked. However, if you connect via a VPN these aren't blocked by the firewall but by AWS, where our forum servers are located, and they block IPs if they're deemed to be untrustworthy.

We're not sure what to suggest but we're planning to roll out an update to the forum next week, which may help. Alternatively, if you haven't tried similar steps to what Hens mentions above, it might be worth trying that too. The only other option is to keep trying when it happens to see if it eventually goes through but I suspect you've already been doing this.

[walt.farrell]

Clearing the browser cache can sometime clean up parts of websites that became corrupted during transmission, and subsequently cause odd problems.

[Friksel]

On 3/17/2022 at 5:28 PM, walt.farrell said:

Clearing the browser cache can sometime clean up parts of websites that became corrupted during transmission, and subsequently cause odd problems.

It's not fixing this issue tho.

[Leigh]

On 3/25/2022 at 11:27 AM, Friksel said:

It's not fixing this issue tho.

That's a shame. Perhaps the next update to the forum might help🤞