Fedia Discussions

Searching magazines for “Ada” yields every magazine about Canada; nothing about Ada. That’s a #bug. There should be a syntax or option to specify whether it’s a regex or not.

#kbin #kbinBug

#fedia

This response to my attempt to reply is quite annoying:

“You are only browsing one thread in the discussion! All comments are available on the post page.”

Wherever that code is throws that rediculous error message, please remove it and just let us post. If a text box is unsuitable for a reply then please don’t give me the text box in the first place. Makes no sense.

#fedia

Great ad for Work from home fans.
https://mas.to/@BlackAzizAnansi/110667321544821860

#fedia

I’m getting random spontaneous errors when trying to upvote others. The precise error message is… (drum roll…) “Error”. Indeed, that’s it. I navigate back & upvote again, and sometimes it sticks eventually.

#fedia

I wrote a lengthy reply to someone. Clicked “add comment” to submit it. A wheel spun then quit spinning. Nothing else happened. The text box remained there with my msg. Clicked “add comment” again. Same thing.

I got lucky in discovering the problem: I was silently logged out. How do I know? A: only because I happened to open a new tab to visit fedia.io, which showed a login button. All the other tabs continued showing the sidebar as if I were logged in. So I was lucky that I discovered the issue so I could re-login and submit the msg. Most people will probably walk away & throw away their work in disgust in this situation.

I know some PHPbb boards are quite fragile and logout users after X amount of time. I doubt that’s the case with kbin. I wonder if it’s a case where a Tor circuit gets periodically torn down & kbin does not consider the cookie alone good enough. Perhaps kbin associates cookie to IP address. In any case, it’s a problem.

possible remedies:

A. file a bug report against kbin (I would do this myself if the bug tracker were not on a Microsoft asset)
B. an onion service might solve this

w.r.t “A”, this could actually be 4 or so bugs here:

1. IP-cookie forced association
2. when a user is logged out (for any reason), the sidebar should reflect that so they are not mislead
3. when a submission is refused, there should be an error. It should have said “please login to post”
4. (?) being logged out should not block posting. Perhaps anonymous posts should be allowed. Definately wishlist kind of stuff here.. but in principle anyone should be able to reply without an account so long as the reply goes through a heavier moderation process.

After really hosing things up yesterday, I seem to have solved at least some of the image problems. Not all of them. I rebuilt the mercure and messenger configs from the ground up using the most recent bare metal config templates and that seems to have helped. Also, I continue to live on the edge with the development channel of the kbin repo - there were a number of fixes contributed that looked like issues we had, so I applied those.

Throughout the day today, the site probably was up and down and all around - that was me trying to get things right.

Let's see what I can get done tomorrow while I'm off work and the rest of my family is out of the house.

The issue with broken images seems to be getting far worse, and that is the cause of the error 500's. kbin doesn't just skip a missing image, it just dies when trying to render a page. If I don't null out the incorrect database entries often enough, darn near everything starts breaking. I have yet to figure out why this is happening. Tomorrow, my family will be back to work and I'll have some alone time and this is what I intend to track down.

Also, I upgraded to the latest development code, so there may yet be new and exciting bugs.

How can external content be copied locally?

On Mastodon, you would simply paste the URL of the external post into the search field, then interact with the local copy. This does not work in fedia.

#kbinBug?

#fedia

Where can I see a list of other instances this one federates with? Couldn't find one yet but on the other hand I'm still pretty new to kbin

#fedia

I have been seeing a lot of Double Postings showing up in Threads from the Same sources. These are definitely not CrossPosts. They are in the Same Magazines, so I am assuming that they are either being fed in Double to this instance, or the Database has duped them for some reason.

Can anyone confirm this ?!

Primer prueba de escritura.

#fedia

What’s the difference in #kbin between #tags & #hashtags? In the microblog tab, we can only add hashtags, which is simple enough. But when starting “threads” both options are there. There’s a field for tags & we still have the option of adding hashtags. Are they both equally searchable? If yes, should we search with or without the hash (“#”)? Why don’t the tags show up after posting?

#fedia

This is new. I'm getting 500 errors in my notifications now. I don't think that shows magazine icons, so it's not that. @jerry

#fedia

I appreciate your continued patience. Today I applied a few additional fixes, including to nginx, which were contributing to the error 500’s. The good news is that the only errors I see in the kbin app logs are related to inbound post federation from lemmy-based instances. I am sure there are many more issues to, but I’m knocking them down one at a time.

Hey Fedia-folk, I’ve recently published my take on the “threadiverse” in the form of a quasi-guide but with some other commentary. Appreciate any feedback, good or bad!

I am hesitant to say that I have good news or that I have fixed anything... I honestly don't know if there is anyone left still using this site after all the problems we've had.

That said, I noticed that there were some very recent (as in yesterday/today) commits to the development branch of kbin that look like they address the issues that fedia has been experiencing. I moved fedia to the development branch and reloaded some things, and so far, no error 500's.

But, caveat emptor, we are on the development branch of early-in-its-lifecycle open source software.

Due to an unplanned sinkectomy today, I didn't have time to spend on fedia as I planned. Tomorrow, I will carve out some time to look through recent code commits to see if any would address the issues we're experiencing.

Just about that. I know there's been important updates lately but I'm wondering if they are being pre-checked and how. I notice that there's various features around the site that throw HTTP 500 error pages randomly, or on certain generic inputs. To name a few examples:

• If I set my homepage to "all" it always 500-errors out; if I set it to "sub" it doesn't.
• Thread lists (eg.: /m/media) sometimes 500-errors, but microblog seems to never do.
• Going to my user profile to check my email 500-errors, but checking my avatar doesn't.
• Exploring magazines with the "All" (federation) filter and going to page 2 onwards of listing 500-errors randomly.
• Search seems to 500-error depending on the search terms. In this instance for example, "cats" and "support" always 500-errors out for me, but "dogs" and "games" never do.

I guess there's lots of things that are going on behind the scenes, but anything I can do to help diagnose from the browser side?

(Already tried clearing browser cache. Doesn't seem to have an effect on the "always" reproducible cases, no idea how to check if it has an effect on the others)

So does Fedia have a relay connection to the same sources as infosec.exchange?

#fedia

While there have been obvious problems with posts leaving/arriving on fedia.io I haven't bothered to ask but it seems slightly more reliable for posts from outside to arrive on fedia.io so maybe it's time to ask.
I haven't seen a fedia.io sourced post make it to my accounts on ohai.social, misskey.io or calckey.social so I'm wondering if that direction has a blockage or configuration error? They sometimes make it to lemmy.world but I'm trying to read the magazine there rather than relying on a hashtag that I follow.

Crossposting can be controversial. Maybe this is a @jerry question:

Any moral issue with crossposting on #Fedia?

If not, then the next question is: how? I posted to m/Law a question about Belgian law. There was a pulldown for magazine & I chose “Law”, but I wasn’t sure if I could add more magazines separated by commas or something. So I just posted it in law. Then in m/Brussels I created an article»URL type of post & simply used the URL of the m/Law article. Seemed to work.. just not sure if that’s proper.

So here's the deal with kbin: kbin uses of symphony messenger processes, which are roughly equivalent to sidekiq in mastodon.

After I moved fedia from the docker hosted environment to a bare metal instance, I had all manner of database issues - the dump and reload didn't work well, creating many duplicate records. That caused the messenger services to die and the queue of activitypub records to process grew huge. Restarting the messenger service worked, however it would never finish, so I increased the number of messenger workers to 16. That kept the queue nice and clean.

HOWEVER, it appears that running multiple messenger processes creates race conditions where things like images ids are created and assigned to different entity records (like posts) but there is no actual image record created, so when kbin goes to draw a page, it runs a complex query to pull magazine info, post info, comments info, user info and all of their respective images. Those records LOOK like they have an image, but there is no actual image, and so kbin says 💩​ I ain't working and gives the wonderful 500 error.

Setting the messenger services back to 1 seems to be at least not be making the problem worse, but now I have to go find all the broken database record linkages.

The site is mostly functioning and respectably fast again.

There are two lingering issues: periodically, federation stops and has to be manually restarted. I have yet to find a good way to automate that or fix the cause.

Some magazines return error 500. I believe this to be a referential integrity issue in the database, so trying to sort that out.

I hope to have these issues fixed over the next few days. Thank you for understanding and for your patience.

If you like fedia.io and want to support it, you can donate using one of the links here:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/infosecexchange
Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/infosecexchange
in addition to the existing means:
Librepay: https://liberapay.com/Infosec.exchange/
PayPal: jerry@infosec.exchange

Reddit users have been protesting proposed changes to the site’s API.

Is there a way to hide all of the random stuff on the sidebar? I find it very distracting, and so far not a single thing has been to my interests. I'd prefer to just not see it. I searched around for a setting, and I did a search on Google and DuckDuckGo but found nothing useful.

#fedia