This discourse web site being hacked? [edit: no, maintenance gone wrong]

I did that earlier.

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This is looking more and more like an issue specific to URLO and IRLO btw, since eg the Nix/NixOS, KDE and Discourse Meta forums (all of which are also based on discourse) do not exhibit this issue. The tricky part here is that there seems to be no single party I can talk to in order to discuss this.
I tried discourse meta, they told me to try safe mode (which apparently disables plugins), and that doesn't fix it. So...yeah.

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The Rust Foundation is considered the Controller and the Discourse host is considered a Processor for GDPR purposes.

@mvelanka is also a victim of these broken topics: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/how-to-pass-object-handle-to-javascript/120592

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This seems a very accurate observation, AFAICT all new post without a category are like this.

Also I'm comparing the "new topic" UI of URLO with IRLO and noticing that "Uncategorized" is only preselected for the latter.

Edit: Yep, I just reproduced the issue, see the topic backlinking to this reply ("Posts without selecting a category don't work?") below.

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@pietroalbini, is there perhaps something in the site settings around the question of what's the "default" category? Maybe a setting in a broken state? I'm noticing no actually category-less topics ever exist usually, since "Uncategorized" is also a category, so maybe the settings around that are just in a broken state? I'm also noticing that "Uncategorized" looks perhaps more visually like an ordinary category now (got a little colored square next to it, not so on IRLO) so maybe instead of a "default category" setting, a setting that sort of declares what's "the placeholder category for uncategorized topics" is broken?

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Is there already a solution in sight? I see a ton of threads appearing that can't be openend because they don't have a subject attached.

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Would it be correct to say that the ones that cannot be opened are the ones with 0 views? There are 13 with 0 views right now, with the number increasing by several per day.

Zero views and no category. Lack of category causes the problem.

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Yeah, evidently some users are not noticing the announcement PSA: Make sure to select a category for your new topics! which warns of this.

With my not wanting to reproduce the problem experimentally myself, I'll have to ask - If someone composes an original post without a category, then presses the + Create Topic button to submit it, are they seeing the "Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private." page immediately, or do they see their submission intact once, and then only thereafter are unable to see it again?

Nope.

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FYI, I don't know if it is related, but my profile picture went from the default with just an "S" to some custom thing. I don't know when it happened, but whatever, I found the setting and set it back to default. I like feeling like a newbie.

The issue is not yet solved; but at least I can fully access and fix the broken topics now :tada:, I’m going through the existing ones right now.

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I see only one such broken topic now: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/posts-without-selecting-a-category-dont-work/120608

If you're intending to leave it as a marker, perhaps change the title to something stronger? Like “Please make sure to select a category when making a post, or it will be unreadable.”

I was going to leave it as long as the issue isn’t solved yet, because it came up as illustrative example in the discussion above ^^

The role of marker currently is fulfilled by the pinned topic.

So, we have a partial fix in place. For some reason the “Uncategorized” category turned into an ordinary category? – at least it no longer indicated being “special” in the site settings. But I’ve found a setting for a default, pre-selected category, so with that active, users can no longer create broken posts now.

I will investigate more proper fixes later, but the only problems that remain are already very minor: on the overview page the “Uncategorized” tag shows on uncategorized posts, which it didn’t before. And when creating a post, “Uncategorized” is actually pre-selected in the list of categories, not just appears as a sort of default text when nothing is selected yet.

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Thank you!

@“anyone interested in the details”:

The remaining issue around uncategorized topics might be identified now. Turns out, Discourse comes with some hidden site settings including one[1] that defines the “special” Uncategorized category, and the value of this indeed seems off[2]; we’ll have to involve Discourse staff to change these settings for us, but this means I hope we can get it fixed for good soon.


  1. uncategorized_category_id ↩︎

  2. This is what the value looks like, compared to IRLO:

    Screenshot_20241112_082344

    The correct value on URLO would be 1, too, as you can see e.g. in the category URL, https://users.rust-lang.org/c/uncategorized/1. The time-frame is also interesting, the value shows as modified on November 1st; and that coincides exactly with the date the logo was being fixed. ↩︎

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The hidden setting mentioned above was reset now, and it looks like the issue is fully fixed now, uncategorized topics look normal again :tada:

In the meantime, according to Discourse staff, they’ve also identified some root cause and learned from the issue :slight_smile:

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Is Discourse still planning on rolling the settings back to whatever backup they presumably had? Presumably there's still some little things that no one has noticed.