Thread

Hi,

I’d like to reopen this discussion—I’ve taken over the same Website the original poster, Stephen T, was running and here we are a year later and time for this form to be active again. We’re still seeing the same issue, and have had reports of it from about 8 users with around 80 successful submissions so far.

—I have turned on php debug, but haven’t heard of any errors yet.

—I have been able to recreate something like it, although I don’t think it’s exact. When I submit the form successfully, then hit the browser’s back button and submit the form again, it reloads the form page with all blank fields. (no php errors)

I’ve got Output Profiler and Template Debugging turned on and don’t see anything obviously unusual, although I’m certainly not too advanced with EE at this point. I do notice that there’s no post data present, as there is on successful submission.

—I have upgraded since this thread started and am now on 2.5.2 Build 20120606

I’d appreciate any new ideas or avenues to follow. Last year we ended up going back to a very cumbersome non-EE system for this and a couple of other similar forms that will be active later this year, and it would be wonderful to avoid that this time.

Thanks.

Another thought.

Given that I have user sessions set to “cookies only” which does not support multiple simultaneous logins, could this issue be triggered when we have multiple users loading or submitting the form simultaneously?

I know that technically Safecracker is not logging in the “logged_out_member_id” so perhaps not, but if this were triggered by users randomly submitting at the same time, it could explain how intermittent and hard to reproduce the problem is. Also, one of the other similar forms I mentioned gets less traffic and takes less time to fill out. It was active last month and I don’t think we received any reports of the error.

Hi Kelly- forgive me if I rehash some of this, but given how old the issue is, it’s a good idea to reiterate some things.

1. What version of EE are you running?  I’d definitely recommend updating to the latest, especially if you haven’t updated this past year.  There have been a number of changes related to IP, which may be in play here.
2. As mentioned- if someone ends up on a totally blank page?  It’s often indicative of a PHP error.  If you have php error logs, check them.  They may give us a hint.  Also- usually you only want PHP errors set to show for superadmins, which may be tricky if you can’t trigger these errors as a superadmin.  You sort of have to weigh not wanting guests to see system errors that may look bad and reveal path info against finding out what the error is.  In this case- error logs are a preferable source of data vs. showing PHP errors to everyone.  But you may not have that option.
3. The redirects in htaccess?  Can cause all post data to be lost and lead to the behavior you’re seeing.  That said- I can’t see why their effect wouldn’t be universal.  Still- if possible, removing them for a round of testing isn’t a bad idea.
4. The other thing that frequently causes behavior like this (well, not a completely blank screen- but losing form data) is secure forms catching folks with rotating IPS.  You may want to turn off secure forms and require IP for posting in your security settings and see if that makes a difference.

It is a real bear to nail down an intermittent problem.  But if you can find someone it’s consistently failing for and then try the above fixes, I suspect we can nail it down. 

Does that help?

Robin,

1. I’m running 2.5.2
2. I don’t believe we’ve had anyone get a totally blank page. All reports have been of the form reloading with all fields visible, but blank. I’ve left php debug on only for Superadmins and did not see any errors when I was able to reproduce the problem. However, as I describe above, I think I probably wasn’t truly reproducing it. I’ve asked our system administrator to turn on the php error logs for a bit though to see if we’re getting anything.
3. I’ll consider giving that a try next week.
4. This was high on my list. We’ve had issues in the past with rotating IPs. I’ll look into it next week.

Thanks for these—I’ll let you know if anything looks promising. And I’ll get a testing group together to see if we make it happen again in-house.

Kelly

Hey Kelly,

Thanks for letting us know. We will be on the lookout for an update from you.

Cheers,