Losing changes made on blog under some circumstances

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6/17/2011 5:50:42 PM
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Losing changes made on blog under some circumstances

Hi,

I'm seeing an issue where I edit an existing blog & press save. It looks as if its worked, but when I look at my blog it remains unchanged and I've lost my changes.

I think this only happens if there is an error in the connection or something similar (which I'm experiencing a bit of right now), but its quite frustrating.

The same symptom can be replicated by signing in as admin on computer 1 and start editing a blog, using computer 2 sign in as the same user and change the email and password. Go back to computer 1, make some changes and press save. It appears to work but the changes are lost. You can also go again into edit mode, make changes and save and again same thing.

I'm seeing it because I seem to have an issue whereby my ftp stops working on one particular pc if I'm using wireless, but I still seem to be able to navigate the web. I'm a bit confounded at quite what's happening & why, but a side effect is I lose my blog changes if this happens.

Its probably unlikely to be encountered by most people.

mojoPortal Version 2.3.6.6 MSSQL
Operating System Microsoft Windows NT 6.0.6002 Service Pack 2
ASP.NET Info v4.0.30319 Running in Full Trust

6/18/2011 7:41:36 AM
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Re: Losing changes made on blog under some circumstances

Hi,

This is what caused the problem:

The same symptom can be replicated by signing in as admin on computer 1 and start editing a blog, using computer 2 sign in as the same user and change the email and password. Go back to computer 1, make some changes and press save.

on computer 1 you were still logged in according to your authentication cookie but since you changed the email your authentication cookie no longer matches up with a user in the database so it causes a null reference exception when it tries to get your user and this prevents you from editing any content. You should sign out and sign in again on computer 1 before making any changes. 

I've added logic for the next release of mojoPortal to forcibly log you out if it detects this condition, but in that case it would still have lost your work by forcing you to sign in again on computer 1. So the bottom line is don't change your user on a different machine or browser while editing content on another machine or browser.

Best,

Joe

6/18/2011 1:34:51 PM
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Re: Losing changes made on blog under some circumstances

Hi Joe,

That sounds like an improvement as at least I wouldn't keep trying and not getting it to work (having forgotten I'd changed the password). If it was only caused by this password change that would be fair enough, but it seems that a similar issue is caused by an error (maybe a dodgy internet connection) - it would be really great if there was a solution that gave a chance to copy the changes before they are just lost - at the moment I daren't make changes to blogs while connected via wireless in case I lose my work, and its a bit of a pain to have to connect up to the cable every time I want to add to a blog. At least if I got an error message and a chance to copy it, I wouldn't stand to lose 15 or 20 minutes worth of work if my internet connection starts playing up again.

Maybe this isn't feasible though?

6/20/2011 7:29:33 AM
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Re: Losing changes made on blog under some circumstances

Hi,

I just visited your site from a link you posted on another thread and I fist got an error about it not having enough memory to run the sql query. This is a hosting issue, it sounds like you are hosted in a low memory environment. You mentioned your internet connection but it seems there are other problems such as low memory on the server. The only good solution is better hosting with more resources so it isn't starved for memory. 

Also it seems you have the CustomErrors set to OFF which is a bad idea on a public facing site because hackers can see the error details and those details may give them information they should not have. Its ok to do that when you are troubleshooting a problem but afterwards you should disable error details.

If you have do have problems due to internet connectivity that is a difficult problem for any web site to make it possible to work offline and not lose data when disconnected. So the feasibility to solve that kind of problem is fairly low in that it would require very complex development effort to solve that problem today. However with the emerging HTML 5 web standards for browsers to have local storage, the feasibility of solving such problems in the coming years should improve greatly. In the future we may be able to buffer content changes into local browser storage and then it would be possible to get the data back and resubmit it to the server when connected later. I don't think it will ever be a trivial thing to implement but it will be less difficult in the future than it is today.

Hope that helps,

Joe

6/22/2011 6:05:51 PM
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Re: Losing changes made on blog under some circumstances

Hi Joe,

I chose my hosting provider from the recommendations on your site, so I'm sure they are fine. I've forwarded them your comments and they are going to check it out.

I'm testing a daily backup option, maybe that triggered the issue you saw? Its set to run at 3am GMT, but of course that won't be 3am for you.

Thanks for the heads up on custom errors. I did purposely have them set to off because I've been debugging a couple of issues that were not seen on my local setup, but I probably should have set it straight back in between debugging.

I'm still pretty foxed by the apparent internet connection issues I'm seeing. I'm currently consistently seeing a problem if I try to use Jing to ftp but only when using wireless (plug in a cable & it works fine). Also Filezilla ftp fails using wireless but not cable, although both work wirelessly on another pc (could be a windows 7 issue?). But thats an issue I will need to sort out. (I've just found a service pack for Windows 7 so will test with that).

I've no experience (yet) of trying to deal with loss of internet connectivity on a website. I've got the mojoportal source building on VS 2010 and now need to find the time to setup a database and get it running via the IDE. Maybe then I'll be able to get an idea of whats happening.

Many thanks for your time in explaining things.

Spike

[update] On the MojoPortal forum page, for a day or so when I've pressed the reply button to reply to this I was getting the "we're sorry but a server error has occurred while trying to process your request" message. And just as a comparative I tried the buy Joe a beer button and that works fine :) (gave me an excuse to join you with a Guiness). Seems to be working again now.

6/23/2011 2:02:00 PM
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Re: Losing changes made on blog under some circumstances

Hi,

It is possible that the error I saw coincided with the time of your backup and that could have been a factor.

Regarding the connectivity issue, it might be something with your wireless router, I've seen strange results before, one possible cause is if your computer has ipv6 enabled but your router has problems with ipv6 either not supported or not well supported it may fail to resolve the request, while it should fall back to ipv4 it may not be doing that or doing it fast enough. Playing around with disabling ipv6 (on the network card properties) may help or may not but it might be worth a try.

The forum error was my fault, I'm often running newer builds of mojoPortal on this site in order to test new features and find any bugs before they make it into an official release, and there was a change in the forums that introduced an error, I saw the errors in my log the next morning after I had updated the site and fixed it quickly.

Best,

Joe

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