This happens on Drupal.org as well. Normally when you go to a non-existent node, you get a 404 error page, either the default or custom if you have set one up. What happens when you go to a non existent node that shares the first digits with a container is another matter. When you do this, you get an empty forum. So if the path to a container is: /node/615 , any node that begins with the numbers 615 will come up with an empty forum instead of the 404 page it should display.
node/6152
node/6157
node/61567399458
all these will show an empty forum.

CommentFileSizeAuthor
#3 forum-send-404-instead-of-generating-empty-pages.patch981 bytesBart Jansens
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Comments

Liam McDermott’s picture

Liam McDermott CreditAttribution: Liam McDermott commented

I wasn't able to reproduce this with Drupal 5 (I get a 404 error, as expected). Have you tried this on a new install of Drupal with no contributed modules? It could be some wayward module that's causing the problem.

diabloview’s picture

diabloview CreditAttribution: diabloview commented

I have tried it on a fresh install. It happens on this very web site too, and Gallery 2's web site. I added all the 5's after clicking on a forum container. Try these links to see what you get, it's an empty forum, not a 404 page.

gallery.menalto.com/forum/1155555555

drupal.org/forum/85555555555555

Bart Jansens’s picture

Bart Jansens CreditAttribution: Bart Jansens commented
FileSize
forum-send-404-instead-of-generating-empty-pages.patch981 bytes

I think the URLs in the original example are wrong. Forum module generates empty forum pages for anything below forum/. This is indeed a bug. This happens a lot if you use pathauto and then delete a node.

Attached is a patch which i am using on my site. But this problem seems to exist in D6 as well, so maybe we should have it fixed in head first and then backport?

keith.smith’s picture

keith.smith CreditAttribution: keith.smith commented
Status: Active » Needs work

Small coding style issue: comments should begin with a capital letter, and end in a period.

Michelle’s picture

Michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
CreditAttribution: Michelle commented
Version: 5.5 » 7.x-dev

Bumping the version. If it's still a problem, the patch probably needs a reroll.

Michelle

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
CreditAttribution: greggles commented

DamZ has a fix for this in the patch in #520736: SA-CORE-2009-007 forum module XSS. I'm tempted to mark this a duplicate of that but based on my last comment there the reverse might make more sense...