Cannot access my 'visitor' messages - error below:

IdahoDoug · 04-07-08, 02:23 PM

When I check my PMs there's a new list of features that pops up when I have a 'personal visitor message' or something similar. Several times it has alerted that I have one of these new types of message and when the pop up list opens it shows one, I slide down to it and let go and get the error below. Immediately after, when I click on the same words "Private Messages" this list of features does not pop up, and it merely takes me to my PMs as it has for years. So. I assume people are leaving me these personal visitor messages or somesuch and the system keeps thinking that I have read them. I can also find no other way to look at these personal visitor messages as the list is apparently unavailable to the user when there is no unread one. So, I guess I don't understand the whole concept.

I am an Apple user, btw (Safari).

Safari can’t open the page “http://forum.ih8mud.com/members/idahodoug.html”. The error was: “bad server response” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1011) Please choose Report Bugs to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message.

NaterGator · 04-09-08, 09:03 AM

Doug,
When you click here:
http://forum.ih8mud.com/profile.php?do=editprofile

What does it say for your date of birth (or does it even load this page?)

woody · 04-09-08, 09:55 AM

hhhmm....appears your profile is 'broken'....check that birthdate, maybe it's causing the issue....

NaterGator · 04-09-08, 10:14 AM

His profile is one of the "broken" ones. I now know the reason, but I'm unclear on how to report it as a bug to the vB team.

The reason (for those of you that care

) is (roughly) down to a bug in the code that sends data to the browser incorrectly.

Some browsers can support simple compression algorithms which cut down on the size of the data transferred considerably. These browsers tell the webserver that they are capable of this and the webserver responds accordingly by compressing the data before it is sent. It is up to each browser to tell the webserver this, though. Users who cannot see ID's (and others) profiles are unable to do so because their browser tells the server that they can accept compressed webpages. The reason his profile is broken though, is because it seems PHP is reporting an error after the page is being compressed to be sent (or, more probably vB is using output buffering and automatically compressing the output, flushing the buffer, and then php is sending the error.)

To see what I mean, look at the following snippet of response from the mud servers when a browser does not specify to compress the page:

Quote:

Trying 204.10.140.65...
Connected to forum.ih8mud.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:10:17 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
X-UA-Compatible: IE=7
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

eea8
 Warning: mktime() expects parameter 4 to be long, string given in [path]/includes/class_userprofile.php on line 260 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

See that warning? Ok, now look at what you get when you specify to compress the page:

Quote:

Trying 204.10.140.65...
Connected to forum.ih8mud.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:57:24 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6
Cache-Control: private
Pragma: private
X-UA-Compatible: IE=7
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 16828
Vary: User-Agent
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

 Warning: mktime() expects parameter 4 to be long, string given in [path]/includes/class_userprofile.php on line 260 ‹ }ywG’çßÒ{þixÚ¤z€àMJ¤—¢Ó£Ë"e

Notice that funny looking stuff at the end? Thats binary data, yet the warning still appears before it in plaintext: it shouldn't. That warning should have gotten lumped into the output before it all got compressed, but it managed to get prepended to the already compressed output. This effectively invalidates the entire blob of compressed data (since it is binary, inserting plaintext effectively breaks all of the data that was sent because the browser can no longer decompress the corrupted output)

Still trying to pin down the roots of this problem a little more and figure out the best way to report it to the vB developers.

NaterGator · 04-09-08, 10:45 AM

Woody, you have the ability to run sql queries on the server, no? Judging by the fact that ID has been registered for a long time, I'm betting he got skipped somehow in a previous update that should have modified his birthday entry. I'd be curious to see what the result of:
SELECT `user`.`birthday` FROM `user` WHERE `user`.`userid` = 1565

Shows. Not sure if the vB db is setup with table prefixes though (if so, you'd have to modify that query a little)

IdahoDoug · 04-10-08, 01:33 PM

Yeah, when I go to User CP I cannot select the "Your Profile" choice as an error message pops up. When I instead choose "Edit Profile", all the fields come up blank.

So, I entered my birthdate and then was able to access visitor messages. Good call - looks like that was it for now, eh?

Thanks!!!!!!

PS - NatorGator you know WAY too much about this stuff.....heh

LoveTractor · 04-16-08, 09:10 PM

Doug, you've kept your secrecy for this long. Don't snap and fold to the self-interrogation.

You are just like Jason Bourne and you just don't know it.
http://forum.ih8mud.com/chit-chat-se...u-dead-me.html

Call me for your next assignment:
ksadrjioo36734896732ijh4u8y3489732442byuys`8913791 82373sab

Use the secret decoder ring you got from that Albanese hooker standing under the green hoof next to the lamb butcher factory to decipher the message.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.