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Bug #6094

closed

Save as Draft, Publish, and Preview buttons occasionally inactive

Added by Lisa Rhody about 8 years ago. Updated about 7 years ago.

Status:
Rejected
Priority name:
Normal
Assignee:
-
Category name:
WordPress (misc)
Target version:
Start date:
2016-09-27
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Deployment actions:

Description

Over the course of the day today, we are confronting problems with the GCDI (cuny.is/gcdi) and digitalfellows.commons.gc.cuny.edu sites when attempting to save a draft, publish, or preview. This has happened on the add post, page, and slider content pages as well as when we are making revisions or updates to existing posts/pages/slides. What seems to happen is that we begin the new page/post/slide or begin editing existing content, and the "save as draft", "publish" or "preview" buttons look inactive. If we attempt to navigate away from the page, the site throws the "do you want to leave this page before saving" error.

To some degree, it is as if the page has not fully loaded or is not somehow connecting with the database. As a result, the buttons remain in their "inactive" state. Actions can still happen in the post/page/slide window while the page theoretically finishes loading in the background... but after an extended period of time waiting the page never fully loads.

In the meantime, we have been copying the entire text of the post/page/slide, navigating away from the page, and clicking on "add new page" again (when content is new) or navigating back to the existing page after refreshing it and pasting in the revised content when we are finally able to pull up a page with active "publish" "save as draft" and "preview" options.

I have not experienced this problem in the past... even when the Commons was very slow to respond.


Files

Screen Shot 2016-10-03 at 6.33.09 PM.png (90.6 KB) Screen Shot 2016-10-03 at 6.33.09 PM.png update button inactive Lisa Rhody, 2016-10-03 06:38 PM
Screen Shot 2016-10-03 at 6.35.21 PM.png (326 KB) Screen Shot 2016-10-03 at 6.35.21 PM.png editable fields still accessible. no loading message in browser Lisa Rhody, 2016-10-03 06:38 PM
Screen Shot 2016-10-03 at 6.36.53 PM.png (29.4 KB) Screen Shot 2016-10-03 at 6.36.53 PM.png screenshot of the log Lisa Rhody, 2016-10-03 06:38 PM
Actions #1

Updated by Boone Gorges about 8 years ago

Can you check your browser console when this is happening? It's possible that this is a symptom of the general 502 problem.

Actions #2

Updated by Lisa Rhody about 8 years ago

Apparently I wasn't capturing a log in my console of past events and haven't been able to replicate the problem in the past few minutes. I'll keep trying and let you know what I get.

Actions #3

Updated by Boone Gorges about 8 years ago

  • Status changed from New to Reporter Feedback

Hi Lisa - Lihua in IT made some changes to our server configuration late last week that should (in theory) have addressed the 50x issues. Have you been able to reproduce the issue described in this ticket since then? If not, we might consider closing it as part of that general fix.

Actions #4

Updated by Lisa Rhody about 8 years ago

Hi Boone,
I just ran into a similar problem on the GCDI page. This time it's the "Update" button that is dimmed and inoperable. It doesn't look like the site is loading in the background. I could make the desired revisions to the page. I'm clearly logged in and interacting with the content of the page, but I can't save any of the changes that I've just made.

URL: https://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/post.php?post=3911&action=edit

The message that is captured by my Chrome Console is: Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected end of JSON input.

Best,
Lisa

Actions #5

Updated by Lisa Rhody about 8 years ago

This time, when I "refreshed" the page in the browser, it brought up the "another more recent version of this page exists, would you like to restore from backup?" message. I selected "restore from backup" and the revisions that I had made were retained and the "update" button was active.

Actions #6

Updated by Boone Gorges about 8 years ago

Thanks for the additional details, Lisa. I'm able to reproduce the SyntaxError console notice, but not the button behavior.

I'm not certain that they're related to each other. The buttons you've listed (Draft, Preview, etc) are disabled during asynchronous save routines, which may be manual (clicking Update, for example) or, more frequently, automatic (autosave). They should be reenabled when WP reports that the autosave has been successful. It's possible that the JS error you've pointed out would prevent the autosave from completing. But, given that the SyntaxError happens on every pageload, but the button issue recurs only irregularly, I'm guessing that they're unrelated to each other.

I spent a little time trying to debug the SyntaxError. But the error comes from a minified script that's hosted on wordpress.com and hoisted into the Commons by Jetpack. It appears (though it's very hard to verify, because the script is obfuscated) that there's a bug in wordpress.com's JavaScript that causes a parse error when wp.com reports a 403 Unauthorized error. This appears to happen when Jetpack is not registered with wordpress.com. As noted above, I doubt that this is directly connected to the button behavior. But, by way of eliminating possibilities, you might consider either: registering your copy of Jetpack with wordpress.com (https://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack) or, if you're not using it, disabling Jetpack altogether.

As for the buttons. My guess is, as before, that there's a network error that's causing the AJAX autosave routine from finishing. On Chrome, this error might not appear in the regular console, but would only show up when viewing the Network tab in the developer tools (click the XHR filter to view only AJAX-related network activity). If you're still able to reproduce, please open that tab and see what activity is recorded when your buttons do not reenable themselves.

Actions #7

Updated by Boone Gorges about 8 years ago

  • Target version set to Not tracked

Hi Lisa! A quick follow-up to see if you've noticed these issues lately. Thanks in advance for any more debugging!

Actions #8

Updated by Lisa Rhody about 8 years ago

We have not experienced the problems in the past week.... I think we should be able to close the ticket. I'll let you know if it crops up again. Thanks!

Boone Gorges wrote:

Hi Lisa! A quick follow-up to see if you've noticed these issues lately. Thanks in advance for any more debugging!

Actions #9

Updated by Lisa Rhody about 8 years ago

HI Boone,
I just experienced this problem again. Here's the error that I got: {"wp-refresh-post-lock":{"new_lock":"1477586616:7270"},"wp_autosave":{"success":true,"message":"Draft saved at 11:43:36 am."},"wp-auth-check":true,"server_time":1477586616}
<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Adc&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Focoins.info%3Agenerator&rft.title=GC+Digital+Initiatives+to+Co-Sponsor+%26%238220%3BEnacting+a+Different+STEM%3A+Building+Equitable+Futures+Beyond+%E2%80%9CDiversity%E2%80%9D&rft.aulast=&rft.aufirst=&rft.source=Digital+Initiatives+at+the+Grad+Center&rft.date=2016-10-27&rft.type=blogPost&rft.format=text&rft.identifier=&rft.language=English"></span>

Actions #10

Updated by Lisa Rhody about 8 years ago

After for of the errors above, then I get this:

{"code":403,"headers":[{"name":"Content-Type","value":"application\/json"}],"body":{"error":"authorization_required","message":"An active access token must be used to retrieve notifications."}}

Actions #11

Updated by Boone Gorges about 8 years ago

Thank you for following up, Lisa! It does sound like some weird confluence of JS issues might be cascading to cause failures in unrelated areas.

Can you clarify for me where you've copied these responses from? Is it the full text of the Response tab of an admin-ajax.php request? The span class="Z3988" element in the response looks suspicious to me. It's generated by the COinS Metadata Exposer plugin, and is intended to be appended to post content. To see it appended to a JSON response payload looks quite wrong, and I wonder whether this is causing a parse error and killing JS on the page.

Actions #12

Updated by Lisa Rhody about 8 years ago

Yes, what I copied into comment #9 was the full text of the Response tab of the admin-ajax.php request.

The error message in comment #10 is the text from the Response tab to another error. The content under the name tab that goes with that error is as follows:

https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1.1/notifications/?http_envelope=1&fields=id%2Ctype%2Cunread%2Cbody%2Csubject%2Ctimestamp%2Cmeta%2Cnote_hash&number=10

Actions #13

Updated by Boone Gorges about 8 years ago

Thanks, Lisa.

I'm totally at a loss. On a lark, I forced the heartbeat API call (the admin-ajax.php request) into appending the <span> element to the end, just to see if it would break the page for me. It didn't. So that was a red herring.

Ray, do you have any ideas?

Actions #14

Updated by Boone Gorges about 7 years ago

  • Status changed from Reporter Feedback to Rejected

I haven't heard more reports of this, so I'm going to cross my fingers that it was an isolated incident. Please provide details if you continue to have problems.

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