By HollywoodChicago.com on

We've been running HollywoodChicago.com for three years and I've never seen this problem. As of last night, site comments were posting fine. Suddenly today, when you try to leave a site comment from anyone (anonymous, logged-in user or an admin), it doesn't publish the comment and it just sends you to the main page.

I've rebooted the server and nothing has changed with the site recently. If you try to leave a comment in the on-page form at http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/news/13922/hollywoodchicagocom-hookup-10..., you'll see the problem as I'm describing it here.

And strangely, the link http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/images/13933/michael-rooker-photo-by-pat... also sends you to the main page instead of showing you a thumbnail of that image on a separate page as it should. Even trying to edit a comment right now at http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/comment/edit/24906 also takes you to the main page.

Replying at http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/comment/reply/13925/24905 also takes you to the main page. And the "new" isn't going away from http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/tracker when I view updated content. Interesting, you can post comments just fine at my dev site at http://dev.hollywoodchicago.com, which is mostly the same as my live site.

I've never seen any of these issues before today. Help! How do I fix this?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

gforce301’s picture

gforce301 commented

Is this site on a shared hosting provider? If so find out what they changed.

HollywoodChicago.com’s picture

HollywoodChicago.com commented

No. It's on a virtual dedicated server with GoDaddy. Nothing has changed with our hosting. I spoke to them and they said everything looks normal. This is a Drupal problem.

gforce301’s picture

gforce301 commented

I'm not exactly a "guru" but I know enough about Drupal, web servers and computers in general to be dangerous.

I don't have an exact answer for you but I can start.

First (and I know up front you won't like this answer) code systems don't "re-code" themselves, web servers don't "re-configure" themselves, Drupal doesn't change itself. Something changed in a system that has been running for 3 years and I can tell you for certain SOMEONE made that change.

I'm hoping a guru will show up in this thread to help you with the more technical issues of this but if nobody at your end has made any changes then GoDaddy must have. Virtual Dedicated hosting still shares the same hardware with other Virtual Dedicated servers and at times the actual server (the computer running all those "virtual servers") has to have something done to it by the people who own it. When this happens sometimes it does change things within the virtual servers.

If you are absolutely sure that nobody at your end changed anything and I mean anything at all then your hosting provider is the only other viable source of a change that can cause this type of break.

hey_germano’s picture

hey_germano
she/her
Primary language English
Location Minneapolis, MN, USA
commented

Or.... there are lots of external JS files that are getting pulled in for your ads and stuff. Could something have changed on that end? Maybe try disabling those and see if the issue persists?

Or... hopefully not, but could there have been some sort of security breach or hack? Are your modules all up-to-date and your file directories configured securely? Are you filtering all your user-submitted content for malicious PHP/JS code?

HollywoodChicago.com’s picture

HollywoodChicago.com commented

I've disabled comments at the initial http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/news/13922/hollywoodchicagocom-hookup-10... post and we're using a Web-based form there instead, but you can still see the comments problem anywhere else. For example, here: http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/news/13937/blu-ray-review-gorgeous-visua...

HollywoodChicago.com’s picture

HollywoodChicago.com commented

It doesn't make sense that it'd be GoDaddy's fault because we have a password-protected dev site on the same server and comments are working there fine.

I have tried unpublishing all content and comments since comments stopped working and comments are still broken, so I don't see how malicious code from content or comments could be causing this.

Our site is old. It's Drupal 5.5 with 5.x modules. We know Drupal core and the modules need to be upgraded, but we haven't been able to afford the upgrade.

We have tried to have our programmer turn on all sorts of error reporting to print on screen what's happening when comments are failing to post, but he says he's getting no error information. And we've had him temporarily disable all non-core modules (comments is a core module) and bring them back one by one in case one of them has broken and is causing comments to fail. But that also didn't work.

So, we're still baffled...

HollywoodChicago.com’s picture

HollywoodChicago.com commented

As a last-ditch effort, is there a different solution we could use right now for a comments system (i.e. either another Drupal 5.x module or some other choice)?

gforce301’s picture

gforce301 commented

There is not really a "drop in" replacement for comments as they are a core module that has been around forever. Your problem seems to be serious but it is difficult for us to help from this distance.

I have few things you might wish to try in order to start tracing down the root cause of the problem. I really don't feel this is a Drupal problem if no new modules have been added or anything of that magnitude has been done to your site. I know you are frustrated but the only way to get this working is to figure out exactly what is breaking it.

  • Check the server logs and check them carefully. We need to figure out what exactly happens at the server when a comment is submitted. This will work best by trying to submit a comment and then immediately seeing what appears in the logs.
  • Set up a new subdomain similar to your dev.hollywoodchicago.com and copy the entire live site there. If you can get it up and running properly there, then (this is the scary part) delete your entire live site (database and all) and move a fresh copy from your newly created working copy to the live. If this does not work then you have isolated the problem to a server configuration problem dealing only with that domain and it will most likely be an apache virtual hosts problem or something along those lines.

Without more information, like I said, your problem is very hard to debug from this distance. I am willing to help as much as I can. Let me know what you find out if you choose to try my suggestions.

HollywoodChicago.com’s picture

HollywoodChicago.com commented

I fixed it.

Our comments system stopped working. And when we published images as their own nodes, they weren't displaying. When you left a comment or tried to view an image at its own node, both took you to the main page instead.

I just checked our server error logs in Apache right when these actions took place. And presto (some areas have been changed to "xxx" for the purposes of this public post)...

[Sat Apr 16 01:20:21 2011] [error] [client xxx] File does not exist: /xxx/xxx/xxx/comment/reply/13985, referer: http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/news/13985/film-review-susanne-bier-s-oscar-winning-in-a-better-world
[Sat Apr 16 01:20:23 2011] [error] [client xxx] File does not exist: /xxx/xxx/xxx/comment/reply/13985
[Sat Apr 16 01:20:24 2011] [error] [client xxx] File does not exist: /xxx/xxx/xxx/comment/reply/13985
[Sat Apr 16 01:20:24 2011] [error] [client xxx] File does not exist: /xxx/xxx/xxx/images/1913
[Sat Apr 16 01:20:25 2011] [error] [client xxx] File does not exist: /xxx/xxx/xxx/comment/reply/13985, referer: http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/comment/reply/13985
[Sat Apr 16 01:20:26 2011] [error] [client xxx] File does not exist: /xxx/xxx/xxx/comment/reply/13985, referer: http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/comment/reply/13985
[Sat Apr 16 01:20:28 2011] [error] [client xxx] File does not exist: /xxx/xxx/xxx/comment/reply/13985
[Sat Apr 16 01:20:40 2011] [error] [client xxx] File does not exist: /xxx/xxx/xxx/images/6771

What "file does not exist"? I tried the same action on my /dev server, got no such errors and the actions worked. What's the difference from our live server (where these errors were appearing) and the /dev server (where this was working)?

There are /comment and /images directories at the root of the live server where they were not at the /dev server. They were mostly blank directories. They had a few files in them that I added a long time ago. I didn't think this would be a problem. They were not part of Drupal. To fix things, I simply changed the /comment directory to /_comment and /images to /_images and both problems were immediately fixed.

The remaining mystery is why the /comment directory (dated 2/10/09) and the /images directory (dated 10/21/10) have been there so long and these issues only popped up now and not immediately before. Who knows on that one, but at least the problem is fixed. Thank you, everyone, for your assistance. Another bug squashed.