Recent Forum problems

8 years 5 months ago #1 by geoffc
Recent Forum problems was created by geoffc
As some of you are no doubt aware we have been having a very strange problem with the Forum software during recent weeks so I thought it would be informative to let you know some more details.

Basically the problem was that any forms used by the forum software (Kunena) were being ignored and effectively all input rejected. This mean that login/logout (using the Kunena forum screen), creation and editing of forum posts etc all silently failed. There were no error or warning messages, of any form be it PHP or Javascript. All system logs were completely clear of any message of any form indicating a problem actually existed. Running debug produced nothing to investigate. It just silently 'failed'.

All other software running on the site was working completely successfully with no problems being seen and all other (non-Kunena) forms continuing to function normally..

We discovered that if we took a backup of the site and restored it one the same or another system the problem did not occur. This indicated that our backups and hence the database and all files were 'perfectly fine' which tended to rule out any 'outside' hack having been applied.

It all seemed to point to the Kunena software itself but it ran fine on a restored system why not on the source?

Out original thought (after much brain scratching) was perhaps we were seeing some form of disk corruption, but this would imply that the backups might be corrupt which was plainly not true since the restored system ran fine.

We did discover one very old Kunena 'feature' that locking an empty category caused it to become a 'section'. The suggested solution was to unlock it and then change the 'parent' so that it became a category again. This unfortunately didn't work for use, and we had to delete and recreate the category. Our current thought is that this particular 'feature' might well have a few side effects. The restore itself, specifically of the database might possibly have reset some field, which was why a 'restored system' ran fine, where as the original failed. [One obvious candidate was the caches but we tried clearing these with no difference being observed.]

We eventually restored our live system from a backup and have not yet seen the problem return but we are watching it closely. Agreed category management is not a regular occurrence so we will be particularly watchful when that occurs. .

Regards
Geoff

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8 years 5 months ago - 8 years 5 months ago #2 by chrisc
Replied by chrisc on topic Recent Forum problems
We were a little hasty it appears as the problem started to reoccur two days ago. Inspecting the recent site changes did not give any indication that these were the cause. We had also not made any forum changes so that can a clear bill of health to our suspected cause.

One other observation we made was that an 'older' copy of the site, which had been experiencing the problem was suddenly not doing so any more. Very puzzling, since we had disabled the site and only enabled it as a test.

After some more testing we noticed what might be a possible cause, which is that there appeared to be some redirection occurring.which might account for the problem. We haven't however made any redirection link changes recently, but inspecting the Joomla 'redirection manager' we observed a couple of possible redirects which we have now disabled, These we all dated as having been created in 2014, so did not immediately seem the likely cause. We only first observed problem a couple of weeks ago! However this does seem to have had an impact and for the first time since the problem was first seen, the site is processing the login/logout and form submissions correctly. This is the first time we have managed to get the impacted site working again without resorting to a restore scenario, so the indication is that we are on the correct track. It doesn't explain it completely to our satisfaction yet.

We continue to monitor the situation.

Regards

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8 years 5 months ago #3 by chrisc
Replied by chrisc on topic Recent Forum problems
Happy to confirm that the problem does now seem to be completely resolved.

Regards

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