OpenWetWare:Software/Bugs

• Austin Che 14:01, 25 August 2007 (EDT): typing __a into the search box and then waiting for a bit brings up a 500 internal error
  • Bill Flanagan 13:53, 26 August 2007 (EDT): I have tracked down the bug to the way search works.
    • There's a 3 character min for all keyword searches in MediaWiki.
    • Since Ajax Search is enabled, the search box is always live.
    • Every few hundred milliseconds, it grabs the contents of the search tag and tosses it in a packet to the OpenWetWare.org (OWW) server.
    • OWW preprocesses the input string.
      • All space characters are translated to underscore.
      • Since the minimum keyword search is 3 characters, the string length is calculated.
      • All leading and trailing space (underscore) characters are removed.
    • If the final string length is less than 3, nothing is done.
      • No error is returned.
    • The string '__A' would map to 'A', less than 3 characters.
    • The correct thing for OWW to do would be to return a message telling the Ajax script that there's nothing to do.
    • Instead, the wait loop for search terms on the client times out.
    • The result is the '500' internal error message.
  • Next steps
    • I'm looking at the MediaWiki bug tracking system.
    • I'll update this if I find anything
    • There is no data loss as a result of this bug.
• Austin Che 15:03, 8 September 2007 (EDT): This gives me: Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /data/web/mediawiki-1.9/includes/DifferenceEngine.php on line 968. Sure it's a big diff but I would think a nicer error message or something else would be more friendly. Also, line 968 in DifferenceEngine.php doesn't seem to have anything to do with this error message.
• Vincent 04:49, 14 January 2008 (CST): Hi, don't know if it is due to the latest MediaWiki upgrade, but it seems that some extensions are 'broken' see WikiTex