Thread

Hi all,

Although there are a number of discussions on this topic, I cannot find one with a fix for my situation.

I had this issue with an EE 2 site (built 3 years apart) and this fix worked but I can’t see how to apply it to EE1 as the files that need altering are different.

I get the ‘Disallowed key characters’ message whenever I go to the site. I can get the site back by clearing browser cookies (2 browsers in question are Chrome and Firefox (Mac)) but the issues comes back after a few days.

At first I thought it may be an issue on my machine, but colleagues are getting the error now so this is of serious concern.

ExpressionEngine 1.6.7
Build:  20090122

Any suggestions will be welcomed

Thanks
Mike

Have you seen http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/182338/#968929

Hi! Yes, I’d seen and sifted through that post. Perhaps I’m missing something as I don’t see a solution. I know Darren Miller mentioned that he amended a function and cbad mentioned that he tracked it down to a badly formed cookie in index.php but neither of those make any sense to me.

Hi Mike,

This sure is a strange one. Since it appears like this has previously been caused by a poorly formed cookie, the next time it comes up let me get you to try something: remove the site’s cookies one by one until you can access the site again. Try to narrow down the specific cookie that might be malformed, then investigate that one. Try to determine whether a third-party add-on might be setting the cookie. If you’ll paste the name of the cookie here, we’ll let you know whether its set by EE or not.

Hi Kevin, I will do that the next time it happens. I cleared my cookies recently.

Cheers

Hi guys,

The site came back on when I removed the _#vdf cookie. Any ideas?

Cheers

*groan* now (on another machine, still Chrome) I removed this cookie to get the site back…

Name: _#uid
Content: 1328106760343.2057045080.1959.382644631
Domain: [removed]
Path: /
Send For: Any kind of connection
Accessible to Script: Yes
Created: Thursday, February 2, 2012 9:39:22 AM
Expires: Wednesday, October 29, 2014 9:39:22 AM

Hmm… that is odd. Those definitely aren’t ExpressionEngine cookies. EE sets 4 cookies, each of which are prefixed with “exp_”:

exp_expiration
exp_last_activity
exp_last_visit
exp_sessionid

I would do some investigation to see what else might be setting those cookies. Places to check: add-ons within EE, other applications running on your server, etc.

Let me know what you discover!

Ok, could anyone give me some pointers on how to find out the origin of cookies? I have no idea!

TheBlackHole,

Cookies come from different sources, like Kevin mentioned a good place to start would be with your add-ons.

I found this to be a good resource for learning about cookies and where each browser stores them.

I hope this helps. If you have any more questions, please let me know.

Thanks,

Hi,

I know where to find cookies I just have no idea how to find out how/which add-ons set cookies.

// Modules installed

Deeploy Helper 1.1.3
Mailing list 2.0
Pages 1.0.1
Referrer 1.3

// Extensions

jQuery for control panel 1.1.1
Fieldframe 4.1.3

// Plugins

Weird one here - I get a 500 error when I try to get to the plugin manager

But plugins on the server are…

char_limit
img_sizer
list_maker
magpie
randomizer
replace
widont
word_limit
xml_encode

Any ideas?

Hello TheBlackHole,

You are probably going to have to use trial and error to find the cookie. Trying using other applications at the same time, recreate different scenarios. When you have the issue again, note the time and what you were doing. Look through the cookies for the right time frame and systematically delete them until the error no longer shows. It make a take a time or two in order to isolate it, but once you do you can either block the offending application’s cookies or pursue support from that application’s vendor.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any more questions.

Cheers,

Hi Shane,

Apologies if I’m misunderstanding… I’ve found the offending cookie(s), are you suggesting that I use a combination of native (OS X) applications and wait for the issue to appear? So this is going to involve me checking the site every time I do something on my Mac?

There must be a fix available like the one for EE2? (mentioned in my first post)

Thanks

Hello TheBlackHole,

I am sorry if I was not clear. I am not suggesting that at all. That would be unacceptable in any situation.

What I am saying is that when you find the offending cookie, using the procedure that I described above, then you will have found the offending application or plugin. At that point you can either disable the application or plugin or report back here and we can take things from there.

We just need to find what’s causing the malformed cookie so we know what direction to head in.

Does that makes sense? I am following up with Kevin’s suggestion and trying to clarify how to do that. Before we look at a fix we need to figure out what’s causing these cookies.

Cheers,

Hi Shane,

Yes that makes sense now. I removed cookies one by one on a machine it was showing the error.

The offending cookies is..

Name: _#vdf
Content: 12432|1|20120303143426
Domain: [removed]
Path: /
Send For: Any kind of connection
Accessible to Script: Yes
Created: Thursday, 2 February 2012 13:40:23
Expires: Wednesday, 29 October 2014 13:40:23

Is that enough to go on?

Many thanks