Thread

I seem to be running into a few very strange behaviors with the forum, here is an especially perplexing issue I’m having:

Okay so has anyone ever heard or seen something like the following: there are 50 members in a forum and 4 of them can’t post. Meaning they go to “Post Reply” and type a post then hit submit post, but it just “loads” but the page they are brought to are the same exact page with the same comment… and their post is not posted. I thought “Well it is just these users” so I logged in as them and sure enough I observed the same behavior. Soooo through trial and error I found that adding a period at the end of a post (or any character) will force the post to post. But if you don’t alter your post text and try to post again… same thing happens.

My question is… what in the world is going on? Has anyone ever heard of this? Seems so strange. Below are the instructions I’ve given to anyone (just a few members) whose accounts are giving this weird behavior:

“For anyone who isn’t able to post on the trading floor, try this:

1. Make a new post, let’s say you post this: “Hello this is a test”
2. You try to submit but it doesn’t work
3. Add a period (or any other letter) to your post like this: “Hello this is a test.”
4. Submit

That is (very strangely) what allowed me to post. I’m looking into this. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Strange is right.  It COULD be running into the duplicate content check the second time around.  By default, EE won’t take the exact same content the second time- but it should be showing a user message, not just sitting there being all confusing.  And… it doesn’t quite explain why the first one didn’t go through. 

Is it just those 4 users- and even when it’s YOU and logged in as one of the four?  And fairly consistent?  (If it was them- I’d be thinking AOL/firewall/proxy server type thing- but if it’s when you post AS them as well….)

What version/build of EE are you running?  I’d make sure you’re current and then…  I will think really, really hard.

Robin, Yeah it’s wildly strange to me, so thanks for your help. There are so many possibilites I’m trying to test out different steps to see if I can’t get a handle on it.

I’m running ExpressionEngine v 1.6.0

So here are the steps I’ve taken which I think reveal something interesting (but I don’t know how to talk about it, I’ll just list my steps)

1. Log in as user123
2. Go to thread “Trading Floor” and hit “Post Reply”
3. Type in as my post text “testing”
4. *Post Reply*
5. Fails. Type in “testing again”
6. *Post Reply*
7. Succeeds. Comment posts
8. Go to thread “Trading Floor” and hit “Post Reply”
9. Type in as my post “testing”
10. *Post Reply*
11. Fails. Type in “testing again”
12. *Post Reply*
13. Fails! this is interesting because this worked last time in step 7
14. Type in “testing again!”
15. *Post Reply*
16. Succeeds. Comment posts

If I had to take an uneducated guess it would be that “testing” failed because of duplication detection. When I change the posting text into something I haven’t posted before in this thread it works. However what doesn’t add up is that initial failure. Why is that happening I wonder.

I hope these steps aren’t too overwhelming. I can PM you a username and password so you can try it yourself and see firsthand what it is I’m talking about. Thanks Robin for your help through my incredibly weird issues haha.

When you say Fails - in what way? do you get an error?

And that definitely is the duplicate content filter.  You can turn that off, if you wish to.

sorry, I mean “Fails silently” instead of “Fails”... there is no indication that anything went wrong in terms of warning text or anything visual to say “uh oh” etc.

Thanks I think I’ll turn that duplicate content filter off. Thank you again, now all of these people will stop emailing me haha.

I tested this myself with my dummy account and it seems now the post is going through on first try each time. I await to hear back from the user base to see if your suggestion to turn off duplicate content filter is working for them to.

Thanks for the update, qman!