Guest Book Plugin

[Wizard]

I've been using the Guest Book for a while now with no problem. I had it setup so that when users entered an entry I was notified. Recently, I installed the new plugin that displayed the last entry in the side bar. To my amazement I was surprised to see entries that I was not aware of. In fact I notice when someone tries to submit an entry an error displays.

Code: Select all

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, support@supportwebsite.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.socalwizard.com Port 80

The entry is saved however, but no email is sent. What could be the cause? I am using a shared host so I don't have access to the web server directly. I am running s9y ver 0.9 and PHP 4.3.11 I also have the guest book plugin ver 1.31. If you hit my site and leave try to leave a guest message the error occurs.

[garvinhicking]

Hm, that is really strange. We need your Apache ErrorLog file for this! A 500 Internal Server Error can mean anything, which is why we need insight from the error log...

Best regards,
Garvin

[Wizard]

I'll see if I can get the error log. Any clue as to where to start looking? Remember, this is not my web server and it was working before.

[garvinhicking]

Actually, looking for "500" or "Fatal" or "Parse" should give you a pointer in the errorlog; the errorlog shouldn't contain much else.

Best regards,
Garvin

[Wizard]

I called GoDaddy.com (my hosting company) and they said there was a problem with their mail daemon which has since been fixed. I guess that is why I the entry was being recorded but no email sent to me. Anyway, everything is all good now.

[Wizard]

I may have spoke to soon. When I was testing with GoDaddy I was logged on to my web site. So when I added an entry to the guest book my item was saved and a email was sent. However, I tested again from another computer and didn't log on and received the error. This leads me to believe that there is a problem with permissions. So nothing was changed on the web server. This plugin use to work just fine, until I upgraded. What do I check now?

[garvinhicking]

This sounds very much like a PHP Fatal or Parse Error, we will definitely need a look into the Apache errorlog...

Regards,
Garvin

[Wizard]

GoDaddy will forward the error log to me BTW, They are running Linux:
Kernel 2.4.21-4.0.1 elsmp
Apache 1.3
PHP 4.3.11 [more]

General:
Tomcat (Java) 5.0.27 [more]
CGI / Perl 5.8

[Wizard]

I can't believe it took this long, but after what seems like pulling teeth this is what I get.

Officially, since this is shared hosting site they cannot release the Apache log file to me, but they were able to track the error and sent me this statment:

Apache does not like this because a GET /
POST is being sent to a url ending in .html, the GET
syntax for the url is not valid with a variable and data.

So hopefully this is enough information to fix the guest plugin. Again, it seems to be with the eMail feature.

[garvinhicking]

I'm sorry, I don't understand that. Do they say that you cannot send POST values to a URL like "index.php?page=guestbook"?

Strangely this works on all of the environments I could get a hold of -- or mabe I'm not getting what they wrote?

Best regards,
Garvin

[Wizard]

I'll try to get more information from GoDaddy. In the meantime, I've been doing some more testing and I discovered something.

If a user is not logged into my blog, the entry is created but the error appears for the user and no email is sent.

If the user is a registered standard editor and logged on to the blog, then the entry is created, no error is shown but also no email is sent.

However, if I log onto the blog as the administrator of the blog, then the entry is created, no error is shown and the email is sent.

So it would appear it has something to do with permissions. Not sure where or how.

I have disabled email notification to the admin on the plugin for now until this is resolved.

[garvinhicking]

I've heard a seperate request on this -- did you check if you configured your "Blog's E-Mail address" field in Serendipity configuration?

Regards,
Garvin

[Wizard]

Yes, I have that configured. The email is sent and everything works fine... if and only if... I log into my blog and create a guest book entry. If someone else uses the blog then no email is sent and if it's a guest user (anonymous) then the error occurs.

[garvinhicking]

Hm, I guess then that it must be because of a missing $serendipity['email'] index for anonymous users.

I'm out of time right now, but I can look into it next week.

Regards,
Garvin

[Wizard]

Ok, I also found out one more thing. In the second condition the email was sent to the registered user account instaed of the admin account. I had created a user with my girlfriend's email address and she asked "how come I'm getting an email that I wrote in your blog?" So I think the mystery is solved. The guest plugin send messages NOT to the admin account, but to the logged on user.

BTW, this is through IE if that helps any.