[Solved] 500 Internal Server Error for private messages

[aus9]

Hi

attempted multiple times to send a pm. The contents of a pm do not need to be known to anyone but the receiptant unless we give mutual consent.
But I attempting to send a pm to avoid public exposure, mainly of me and my brain cells eh.

error reads

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@forum.tinycorelinux.net to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Is this something that occurs when the forum is up, but messaging is being cleaned or something?

thanks for reading

Code: [Select]

Tue Jun 20 02:40:06 UTC 2023  Last attempt to send a pm

[Rich]

Hi aus9
That is an error that pops up sporadically. See:
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,25148.msg161629.html#msg161629

[aus9]

Hi Rich

thanks for reply and link. I am not sure I like the idea it could be random based on words in my pm. hmmm
Unfortunately most of the words are commonly found on this forum. But I accept your answer so please mark as solved.

[Rich]

Hi aus9

... Is this something that occurs when the forum is up, but messaging is being cleaned or something?

No, this is something that can pop up when sending a PM or when
posting a reply to the forum.

I ran into this error again a few months ago. I tracked it down to
a sentence that ended in  "leaving the original file intact.".
Deleting the word  intact  made the error go away. I wound up
having to rewrite that section of my post with different wording.

When composing a longer post, I will periodically click the  Preview
button to make it easier to track down the source of this kind of error.
If the error pops up, just click the browsers  Back  button  to re-display
what you were composing.

[jazzbiker]

Hi Rich, aus9

Of course I was gazing the wicked 500 figure too. I recommend to follow Rich's advice to press Preview each time the hazitation arose. When forum was residing on the previous hosting the issue was really boring. But it survived when the hosting was changed! How? I was sure that it is the hoster's tricks. Is it Big Brother watching all of us??? Let me consume my shot of paranoia )

[Rich]

Hi jazzbiker
I do have to admit the situation has gotten a lot better since
the forum was moved to a new host. This error now very rarely
occurs for me. Especially troublesome were scripting examples
containing syntax such as  $(Command blah blah)  or a  | (pipe)
symbol. These no longer seem to cause problems.

[jazzbiker]

HI Rich
This and the past years I was not posting much so absolutely rely on Your estimations. But the issue is not gone at all, that's surprising. Are there a lot of Little Brothers instead of the Big one? Forum engine itself contains the drop of Artificial Insanity?

[jazzbiker]

Or I am unfair blaming the forum engine? 500 means gateway and server error, means hoster's portal, right? I am absolutely dumb in the network internals understanding.

[Rich]

Hi jazzbiker
According to Mozilla:

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 500 Internal Server Error server error response code indicates that the server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request. This error response is a generic "catch-all" response.

So it sounds like the server, but I don't know enough about it to
pinpoint the cause.

[Greg Erskine]

I still find this forum unreliable. I haven't noticed much of an improvement.

I *feel* like something times out. I take a long time to write a post and they normally generate an error. I usually copy to buffer so I can resend. If I forget the post is lost.

This message failed - Error 403

[CNK]

According to Mozilla:

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 500 Internal Server Error server error response code indicates that the server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request. This error response is a generic "catch-all" response.

So it sounds like the server, but I don't know enough about it to
pinpoint the cause.

Not that I know anything specific about SMF myself either, but I found this thread on their support forums which seems to describe the same problem. They blame mod_security, which is something that is enabled in the web server configuration. Given that the forum uses a shared host, it might be difficult to turn that off as suggested in that thread.

There's also a Having problems with mod security page on their wiki (based on this old thread). They suggest a .httaccess (remove a "t") modification to try and disable mod_security on a shared host running Apache, which is what the forum is running on right now according to the HTTP headers.

I even got an "Internal server error" while previewing this post before changing a bracket used above (EDIT: actually it's where I fixed a mis-spelling of htaccess and then accidentally reverted when I copied from the text editor where I composed the post, this gets confusing fast) - mod_security fights back!

[gadget42]

@CNK, thanks for taking the time to research and post those links! informative/interesting!

[jazzbiker]

@CNK, thank You very much for sharing!

[h2]

Forums are still essentially unusable. Search is broken, nearly every time I try using it. Only way to use them is to check daily for what I'm looking for manually, but that's not practical;

A 500 error is generally not caused by the web server or hoster itself, it's almost always caused by coding errors in the software that runs the site, or in the configurations, like .htaccess/httpd.conf etc.

If the page initially loaded, it's not caused by the configuration files, but by the programming.

Also, the notion that "it's getting better and happens less often" is not a real thing in programming, the bug is clearly there and active, or rather, the bugs, since I just triggered them myself just now attempting to do a forum search. Zero success.

Note: I just retried forum search, and it suddenly worked.

Also, I tried emailing to the email contact listed in the 500 error message, and that returned as a bounced email.

This kind of randomness means badly broken code and logic.

What's odd is the total randomness of it, I had not tried to do a search for a while, maybe a month, then I did one just now, both resulted in 500 errors, then while typing this, I opened a new tab (the others had also been a new tab), and the advanced search, including the most recent option, suddenly worked. That latter one almost never works, though sometimes the general search does work.

These are all huge red flags, which I tried to alert the forum people about in private, but given not even the contact email listed is valid in the error page, it's apparently a lost cause, but I'll keep poking in hopes that the situation can be rectified before something much worse happens, probably again I would guess, though I don't know the history.

Sometimes odd behaviors like this are the result of misconfigured apache or other web server security rules, but those don't result in a server 500 error, they just result in the post vanishing. As far as I can tell, you can't post any real code or data in the posts with any hope of success.

I suggested this before, and I'll suggest it again, talk to linuxquestions.org, ask for a distro sub forum, and give up on this effort. Having a forum that doesn't work consistently might be almost worse than having no forum at all I think. It's hard to even start to guess what happened to these, my guess was, and continues to be, the ill-advised attempt to mix a wiki software package and the forum software packages, but that's just a guess.

[h2]

By the way, the reason I package inxi for TinyCore is I think the concept and execution of tinycore is awesome.

I also think the state of these forums is actively hurting the project, both with lost users giving up when they can't create an account, or give up trying to read the unreadable captcha images, or give up due to various bugs.

I think being on lq.org would significantly help your project, if it's been good enough for slackware since forever, it's good enough for most any cool independent distro project as far as I'm concerned.

i think there's a lot of good linux users on lq that would enjoy the entire thing that tinycore does, and it might expand your developer base, but I suspect I'm not the only developer out there who gets impatient with ongoing software failures, and just gives up on it as a general rule.

If you close and archive these forums, they remain as a resource for solutions, so there's nothing really lost long term.