Thread

So,
It took me about an hour to diagnose this issue. And I must admit that even after figuring it out…I’m still completely dumbfounded.

So I have a custom field in a channel entry form. It’s a text area fieldtype set to XHTML formatting. It just so happens that this channel is for Artist data entry, so along with images and contact info and all that, I also have a field for artist bios. Hence the textarea fieldtype.

Anyway, I was copying and pasting the text of this particular artist’s bio into my textarea field and it kept failing and failing. I was literally going word by word adding and saving then adding and saving, until I got to the word “selections”. Which for some reason, completely caused my CMS to crap out when I hit the update button.

Now…talk about a needle in a haystack.

I am DESPERATELY hoping someone else has this issue or some one at EE can help me figure out what’s going on. Because I pretty much can’t tell my client that they can’t use the word “selections” anywhere on the site.

Thanks in advance for the help.
~
Wes

Hi Wes,

I’m fairly certain that you might be hitting upon a mod_security issue here. Perhaps have a word with your web-host about it.

If you are able to use .htaccess files then you could try adding in this to your file :

SecFilterEngine Off

This will disable mod_security for your domain so that you can try and post again in the same way and see if that fixes things. If it does then I’d definitely advise taking that line out of your .htaccess file again (only leave it in whilst testing) and then have a word with your web-host who should hopefully be able to find a way around the problem.

Hope that helps a bit.

Best wishes,

Mark

...actually, the sentence causing the issue was this:

“The group split in 1997 after the release of two hugely influential albums—Sleep’s Holy Mountain and Dopesmoker—returning triumphantly in 2009 when it performed two UK shows as part of All Tomorrow’s Parties’ (ATP) The Fans Strike Back festival, playing Holy Mountain in its entirety along with selections from Dopesmoker.”

I’ve had issues with text using smart quotes as opposed to dumb quotes can fritz the system on parsing as they should be rendered as their numeric equivalent. Paste it in again and manually replace all quotes and dashes.

The example posted is using smart quotes which CAN cause an issue regardless of CMS,Browser - replace them with standard dumb quotes or their numeric entity

//Numeric Smart Quotes
"“" "”"

That was my first thought too. So I literally went word by word in the entry field until I arrived at “selections”. Then everything shit the bed.

I think the mod_security issue is on target. Have the hosting company checking it now.

As you’ve got “selections from” I would definitely bet my money on that as the mod_security filter is probably seeing that as a database call.

Hope you get it sorted soon.

Best wishes,

Mark

Turns out that was the issue, Mark. LiquidWeb was super helpful in getting it sorted out. Those are definitely NOT the type of problems I enjoy dealing with, but they stuck with it until we got it fixed.

Thanks all for the suggestions. Hopefully this will help someone down the line!
~
W

Now you’re going to have everyone typing in selection just to see what happens… lol (including me)

Turns out that was the issue, Mark. LiquidWeb was super helpful in getting it sorted out.

Excellent news. Glad you’ve got that sorted.

Best wishes,

Mark

Thanks for the assist, Mark!

Glad Mark helped, Wes. Don’t hesitate to post again.