Hi, I've been trying for hours to post a message in the Software thread, and I keep getting an Internal Server Error. Any ideas why that might be?
That's an old bug we've been trying to pin down for a long time. It's super random, intermittent, and it seems to happen almost exclusively in the creation of a new thread (though I cannot rule out that it happens in the response to existing threads) and is related to some string of characters that the software is balking at. It's super random. I cannot tell you what the string of characters is because it's never the same twice. There is reason to believe that smilies and links are sometimes the culprit, but not always.
Be careful. If you upset the server too much it might lock you out for a while (usually a few hours).
Haha, yeah, I discovered that already I've been trying combinations, to see if I could make it accept the post, and after a while the entire site becomes unresponsive (for me).
I got the server to perma-ban my IP once because I was investigating an internal server error. So yeah, be careful.
I've been having this problem for the past couple of days. I was trying to post a short story to the Fan Fiction forum, about 8400 words, and it failed, both from home and work. This morning, I tried posting a thread in this forum describing my attempts to resolve the situation, and posting that failed too. My short story text had some formatting, primarily italics with a few centered asterisk sets to make section breaks, but nothing else. I tried to turn on the BBCode editor to track down wayward tags that may have gotten pasted in from Google Docs. My post to this forum had no such out-of-the-ordinary text in it.
As noted in my original response to this thread (wherein the OP turned out to have spamming as his/her intent), unfortunately, we have not been able to pin down just what string of text is giving the software trouble, or what common component is in play since the texts vary as much as one would expect for any two posts to vary. I've seen it happen with completely innocuous text containing no unusual formatting or tags and have gone so far as to take the text from members, sent to me via email, stripping it of any and all possible invisible formatting, and posting it myself only to receive the same error. The location whence you are posting is not to blame either, else it wouldn't happen to both the original poster and also to me from the other side of the world.
I don't envy you for having to troubleshoot this. I recently (successfully) posted something in Flash Fiction, and that had italics in it as well. I'll continue to try and post my larger piece and report back here if I'm successful. I've had a 25 year career in IT, much of it supporting finicky systems, so I will do what I can to observe and help.
I have tried to isolate parts of posts that cause issues, but it's always different things and often all text in a post works fine if I take out other parts. I'm honestly not sure if there is much we can do about this issue at the moment; hopefully it should go away completely in the future update to XF2/WF5.0.
I suspect the solution is to drink a lot of sangria then beat the computer with a mallet whilst screaming 'Hijo de Puta' - it won't fix the error either, but you'll feel better