Bug DBSEO broke a few features of the site...

When we installed the Lite version of DBSEO for testing purposes, we experienced a couple of pretty serious issues. 95% of the addon worked perfectly, but a few things made the site unusable.

1. Links to go to a specific post, whether that was a specific numbered post or the latest post, resulted in a blank white page. Visiting threads, forums, etc... all worked fine, but specific post links resulted in an error.

2. It seemed like when DbSEO was installed, users were unable to change styles via visiting /index.php?styleid=XX

3. When I went into a member's infraction page, it said he has 3 pages but when I click on page 2 or 3, it takes me to his member page not the next page of infractions

And lastly, a feature request. We don't actually need the search engine friendly URLs for the site. All we need is reliable sitemap generation (Vbseo sitemap generator was starting to break for some reason). Unfortunately, if we disable the URL rewrites and enable the sitemap generation, the sitemap has friendly URLs in it instead of the standard showthread.php URLs that the site is using. This means of course that when google visits the friendly URL, it doesn't work. We'd love to be able to activate the sitemap without activating the URL rewrites.

The most serious problem we were having was #1. The others are minor but still impacted site usability. If we can at least get #1 fixed, we'll be able to use the product, but really we don't want to change our URL structure right now so we'd much rather just be able to use the sitemap separately.

Kevin C said:

1. Links to go to a specific post, whether that was a specific numbered post or the latest post, resulted in a blank white page. Visiting threads, forums, etc... all worked fine, but specific post links resulted in an error.

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Please make sure you have not turned off error reporting in PHP. display_errors must be set to On, and SKIP_ALL_ERRORS must not be enabled in config.php.

Kevin C said:

2. It seemed like when DbSEO was installed, users were unable to change styles via visiting /index.php?styleid=XX

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Can you not change styles on this forum either?

Kevin C said:

3. When I went into a member's infraction page, it said he has 3 pages but when I click on page 2 or 3, it takes me to his member page not the next page of infractions

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I'll look into this and get back to you with more information.

Kevin C said:

And lastly, a feature request. We don't actually need the search engine friendly URLs for the site. All we need is reliable sitemap generation (Vbseo sitemap generator was starting to break for some reason). Unfortunately, if we disable the URL rewrites and enable the sitemap generation, the sitemap has friendly URLs in it instead of the standard showthread.php URLs that the site is using. This means of course that when google visits the friendly URL, it doesn't work. We'd love to be able to activate the sitemap without activating the URL rewrites.

Click to expand...

I am unable to replicate this issue, please make sure you have turned off all URL rewrites and that you have rebuilt the sitemap after doing so. I have tested this on multiple occasions (most recently being to investigate a problem with the & character in non-rewritten URLs), so I want to make sure you're not viewing an old sitemap before investigating this further.

Fillip H. said:

Please make sure you have not turned off error reporting in PHP. display_errors must be set to On, and SKIP_ALL_ERRORS must not be enabled in config.php.

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Just for clarification - Are you suggesting that we need to turn on display_errors in our PHP configuration in order to get the specific post links working? This is our live site, we definitely can't enable error displays for it. Or are you saying we need to enable error display in order to debug the issue? If the latter, I know, I just wanted to check here before doing so to see if you had any ideas on what might be wrong.

Fillip H. said:

Can you not change styles on this forum either?

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Sorry, I'm not sure what you're asking here. When the mod is enabled, links to /index.php?styleid=XX to change styles were not actually changing styles. It was just loading the default style.

Fillip H. said:

I'll look into this and get back to you with more information.

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Thanks.

Fillip H. said:

I am unable to replicate this issue, please make sure you have turned off all URL rewrites and that you have rebuilt the sitemap after doing so. I have tested this on multiple occasions (most recently being to investigate a problem with the & character in non-rewritten URLs), so I want to make sure you're not viewing an old sitemap before investigating this further.

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I had disabled friendly URLs and rebuilt the sitemap and it definitely still had friendly URLs in it. I'll try again once we can get post links working without blank paging.

Kevin C said:

Just for clarification - Are you suggesting that we need to turn on display_errors in our PHP configuration in order to get the specific post links working? This is our live site, we definitely can't enable error displays for it. Or are you saying we need to enable error display in order to debug the issue? If the latter, I know, I just wanted to check here before doing so to see if you had any ideas on what might be wrong.

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Honestly, both. If you cannot enable error display on your live site, then something is seriously wrong with one or more of the modifications you have installed, and you should disable them until the author(s) can give you working versions, or uninstall them if they cannot.

Hiding the error messages is the equivalent to that guy from every zombie movie that is totally fine and absolutely did not get bitten during that last fight (spoiler alert: he totally got bitten and will kill half the group 45 minutes later in the movie).

This site is also a live site, and is a business, and we have error display enabled live. This means if something goes wrong, our community can accurately report the issue to us, instead of them having to say they got a blank page.

Having error display enabled means that your site can continue to work even with non-fatal errors, and that fatal errors can be diagnosed and addressed much, much quicker. I'd say you're doing more harm to your site by giving users blank pages than you would by showing them a PHP error in the header, but that's just my opinion.

If, against my strongest recommendations, you must leave error reporting off, then please enable it for debugging or inspect your error log.

Kevin C said:

Sorry, I'm not sure what you're asking here. When the mod is enabled, links to /index.php?styleid=XX to change styles were not actually changing styles. It was just loading the default style.

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I am asking you if you are able to change styles using the style chooser in the footer here @ this site. If you can't, then this would be a DBSEO issue. If you can, then it's likely you have a conflict with another mod on your forum that's preventing the style chooser from working correctly.

Hello Kevin C,

This ticket has now been closed with the status Cannot Reproduce.

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