Error after upgrade to 1.1.0

Jenxi

Hi, users are unable to log into the forum after the upgrade.

They get the following message:

Oops! Something went wrong. Please reload the page and try again.

I’ve cleared cache for Flarum, browser and server but the problem persists. There are no third party extensions.

I turned on debug and this is the error that shows up in the logs:

flarum.ERROR: InvalidArgumentException: Cannot load XML: Opening and ending tag mismatch: p line 3 and r in /public_html/forum/vendor/s9e/text-formatter/src/Renderer.php:46

luceos

Jenxi can you please provide the output of php flarum info.

Jenxi

Flarum core 1.1.1 PHP version: 7.4.26 MySQL version: 5.5.5-10.4.20-MariaDB-1:10.4.20+maria~stretch-log Loaded extensions: Core, date, libxml, openssl, pcre, zlib, filter, hash, pcntl, Reflection, SPL, session, standard, sodium, mysqlnd, PDO, xml, apcu, bcmath, bz2, calendar, ctype, curl, dba, dom, enchant, mbstring, FFI, fileinfo, ftp, gd, gettext, gmp, iconv, igbinary, imagick, imap, intl, json, exif, mongodb, msgpack, mysqli, odbc, pdo_dblib, PDO_Firebird, pdo_mysql, PDO_ODBC, pdo_pgsql, pdo_sqlite, pgsql, apc, posix, readline, shmop, SimpleXML, soap, sockets, sqlite3, sysvmsg, sysvsem, sysvshm, tidy, tokenizer, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, xsl, zip, Phar, memcached, Zend OPcache +----------------------+---------+--------+ | Flarum Extensions | | | +----------------------+---------+--------+ | ID | Version | Commit | +----------------------+---------+--------+ | flarum-flags | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-tags | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-suspend | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-subscriptions | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-sticky | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-statistics | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-mentions | v1.1.3 | | | flarum-markdown | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-lock | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-likes | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-lang-english | v1.1.0 | | | flarum-emoji | v1.1.1 | | | flarum-approval | v1.1.0 | | +----------------------+---------+--------+ Base URL: https://domain.com/forum Installation path: /public_html/forum Queue driver: sync Mail driver: smtp Debug mode: off

askvortsov

Jenxi That's very weird, looks like something may be corrupted in your database. Does this happen for all discussions?

Jenxi

askvortsov Users can’t log in at all right now. Any ideas how I can fix this?

luceos

That textformatter error is usually caused by a malformed posts.content field somewhere. You can scour those, if you have only a few posts, or (after having backed up your database) remove some of your posts to narrow which one is causing the error. There might be multiple though.

Why this happens, I'm unsure. Maybe the length of the content column was reduced or a migration failed. Did you use the web upgrade tool? If so restore your database backup from before the upgrade and use php flarum migrate from the command line instead.

Jenxi

luceos We have almost 800 posts. What do I look for in a malformed posts.content field? I upgrade via command line, so I don’t think I can do a restore. I don’t mind going through the database if I know what to look out for.

askvortsov

Jenxi Try going to YOUR_FORUM_SITE/?page=2. If that loads, it means that the error is somewhere in the last 20 posts, which would be a lot less work to track down.

Generally speaking, it seems like the XML stored in the database is invalid. If you paste it into an XML validator, that could help you check.

Jenxi

askvortsov It might be a more complex problem than I thought.

I’m getting XML validation errors with all the <quote> tags.

Errors in the XML document: 
	1:	55	The element type "QUOTE" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</QUOTE>".

However, this is an example of the code I tested:

<r><r><QUOTE author=\"Jenxi\"><s><QUOTE>></s><QUOTE author=\”Member\"><s></s>Lorem ipsum.<e></QUOTE></e></QUOTE>\n\nLorem ipsum.<e></e></QUOTE>\n\nLorem ipsum.</r></r>

Also, I’m doing a database comparison with an older database backup and there are quite a number of missing entries in the latest database.

clarkwinkelmann

Jenxi maybe a post was too long and got truncated? Flarum validates the post content length but that happens before the encoding to XML, so it might be possible that the resulting XML with all the formatting exceeds the database column length.

If other data is broken or missing in the database maybe there was some corruption in the database or filesystem?

The main difference to tell if it's a Flarum issue or a server issue would be when the issue started happening. Is it caused by a post that was just created, or was the post working fine before the issue suddenly happened (without anyone editing the post)

We should make a utility to parse and repair the post XML. I wanted to do this for a while but since I never managed to corrupt my own data I'm not really sure what situations should be handled. The only corruption issues I saw in the past were Unicode-related and I never found out how it happened because it wasn't a website I managed.

EDIT: I thought the ending quote tag error was with the current content of the database. The codeblock is your attempt at fixing the code? I see you used two different kinds of quotes (" vs ”) in the second <QUOTE> block, so that likely makes the second quote tag invalid.

Jenxi

clarkwinkelmann Thanks! I’m trying to determine when the issue started. It is starting to look like it is due to a post because it seems to have happened before the upgrade.

For the quote, I edited out the member’s name and the browser replaced with smart quotes. The error is happening with posts with <QUOTE> tags. The validators seem to be throwing errors because the </s> comes before the </QUOTE> but I don’t think that’s the cause of this issue.

Jenxi

Noticed something strange. Some entries are disappearing from the database without me doing anything to the site.

clarkwinkelmann

Jenxi do you see any pattern? Is it only in one table? Does it break relationships between for example discussions and posts?

Are you sure it's not caused by moderators permanently deleting content via the UI or REST API?

If it looks like a user is behind it, one of the audit log extensions could help find out who is doing what on the forum.

If that doesn't help, can you give us more information on your hosting? Is it a VPS, or managed hosting?

Jenxi

clarkwinkelmann No one else is able to log in. It doesn’t seem to affect the discussions and posts. I’m on Cloudways.

Jenxi

Some of the posts are using quotes instead of mentions.

Some of them use post mention like below:

<POSTMENTION discussionid="8" id="465" number="1" username=“name”>@name#465</POSTMENTION>

Could this be a cause? I’ve identified the posts that doesn’t load and those that can be loaded.

Jenxi

Some updates with interesting findings. The posts causing problems were previously migrated from phpBB a long time ago. Not sure if something broke with a recent update?