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[META] Forum returning lots of errors today (e.g. parens, links and images cause problems)

FlowState
2 months ago

Sorry, don't really know where to post this, but I've been seeing a lot of weird errors in the forum today.

"An error occurred. Please try again or contact your administrator" is returned when:

- parens are used in certain ways (it's hard to pin exactly what causes the error, but I've seen errors caused by open paren followed by closed paren, as well as parens surrounding multiple paragraphs)

- you post any kind of code (unless it doesn't have parens lol)

- you post any kind of link at all. Plain text URLs are fine - they will be converted to links after the post is submitted. But if you edit a post that has a link, you have to replace it with a plain text URL before submitting the edit

- you use the forum quote feature, bc it generates a link to the quoted post. text can be manually styled with the blockquote format, though

The weirdest thing is it doesn't seem to happen consistently on every thread. For example, I think this thread will be mostly fine (I've already made and deleted test threads.) (I can't use the quote feature in this thread tho)

But I think the following thread have the problems I described above:

[https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/discussion/389883/calling-srand-multiple-times]

[https://forums.garmin.com/apps-software/mobile-apps-web/f/garmin-connect-web/389792/measurement-units]

It's pretty easy to recreate - just reply with a link or edit an existing comment with a link, and the forum will return the same error as described above.

I'm not sure if the forum is applying some sort of "enhanced security" to certain threads?

EDIT: Also, I just tried to paste an image into this very post and I got the same error. Pasting an image in a reply also fails. Same with using an image URL.

So it seems that the problem with images is more widespread than the problems with links and parens.

  • 17 days ago in reply to flocsy🤠
    flocsy🤠 said:
    I'm not freaking out because of what the poster did.

    But actually:

    flocsy🤠 said:
    I'm saying: OMG, Garmin, look what you make people do... or Garmin, look how your forum looks

    By "freaking out", I mean typing like this "GARMIN, CAN YOU FIX THIS!???????!?!?!?!?!?"

    Maybe you disagree with my choice of words, but it's clear that you reacted the way you did precisely because of what the poster did. Hence your comment: "Garmin, look what you make people do".

    Again, someone chose to use base64 (perhaps partly to make a point), and that spurred you to comment. If they had not chosen to do so, clearly you would not have made that comment.

    I obviously share your frustration, but the fact that one person (and nobody else) chose to use base64 doesn't really change anything.

    If I chose to make a video of myself reading a rejected post out loud and post that in lieu of the original text, in order to prove a point, would you also react the same way? In that case, clearly it would've been my choice to use such a ridiculous workaround, and I really couldn't blame that on Garmin.

    Again, the real problem is that we can't post stuff in the first place. Garmin should fix these problems regardless of how we try to work around them. Do you think Garmin really cares how ridiculous (or not) our workarounds are? They obviously don't care about the problem in the first place. (Or they don't care enough for our liking, anyway)

    If we really wanted "to protest", maybe we could make all of our posts in the form of base64-encoded strings. Ofc, that would probably accomplish nothing except causing people to not read our posts in the first place.

  • 15 days ago in reply to flocsy🤠

    I'm working with the forum group to try to sort things out. I was able to reproduce the issue when trying to post a large code snippet. Is this what everyone is seeing?

  • 2 days ago

    Recently ran into the issue where a post can't be edited if it contains links (literal <A> tags). The solution is to replace the link with the corresponding bare URL and allow the forum to linkify it when the edit is submitted.

    Here’s a link to the affected post; forums.garmin.com/.../1888125

    This issue doesn't happen consistently, as the post you’re reading now can be edited even though it contains a link. Until just now, I hadn't seen this issue in months.

    To be clear:

    - a comment is submitted which contains a bare url (not a literal link) and it’s initially accepted by the forum (which immediately changes the bare url into a link)

    - if you edit the comment (without making any actual changes) and press the submit button, the forum rejects the existing text of the comment (which is the same as the original except for the link). If you edit the comment and change the link back to a bare url, the forum accepts the edit.

    This is extra frustrating because the forum accepted the original comment, but due to a built-in feature of the forum itself (auto-linkification of bare urls), the same comment cannot be edited without making a specific change to make the forum happy.

    iow, the forum itself is breaking content that it originally happily accepted.

    Imagine if the Monkey C compiler worked this way? Say you build an app with 0 bugs and warnings, then the compiler automatically beautifies your code and the next time you build, it declares that your code now has an unspecified problem — now it’s up to you to figure out what change you have to manually undo. That’s how this feels.

    I realize this is not intentional, but it’s extremely frustrating all the same.