We recently (Tuesday) upgraded to DNN 5.6.1 and Active Forums 4.3.4.  The upgrade went smoothly; there were a couple of minor problems with DNN but none with the Active Forums portion of the upgrade.

Since then, we are finding that forums "go missing" - the page loads with the Active Forums module displayed but the forums are gone.  If I log in as Admin, run the control panel, and look, they are still there.  If I then do a Save for one of them, they reappear on the web page for normal users.

We have to instances of the Active Forums module on 2 different pages; one with 3 forums in one group, the other with 8 forums in 6 groups.  The problem has occurred at least once now on each of the two instances.

So far I have not figured out what triggers this.  Today the 3 forums on the main Forum page vanished.  The only activity seems to be that we had one user post to one of the 3 forums.  This user has Create permission for the forum so there was no approval needed.  That may have been what triggered this.

Has anyone else seen this?  Any idea what to do about it?  Help!!!

Thanks,
William Phelps
Peninsula Astronomical Society
http://www.pastro.org

I have not had anything like this reported with version 4.3.4.

Can you go to the helpdesk and create a ticket for this issue? I will likely need to take a closer look at your configuration to determine the cause.

http://www.activemodules.com/Commun...pdesk.aspx

I'd be happy create a ticket but we do not have a support agreement now. PAS is an astronomy club; we're non-profit and we run on a shoe string, so we had to renew at the minimum level this time around.

It just happened again. Several people posted to one of the forums on the "Member Forums" page, and when I went to look all the forums in the list had disappeared. This time all I had to do to get them back was log in as Admin, open the Control Panel, click on the Forums button, and click on one of the forums. At that point when I went to the Member Forums page from another browser logged in as a non-admin user the forums were back.

I checked the Event Log and there aren't any entries that show errors.

This is frustrating!

William

wasn't there a problem at one time with missing default Roles in the Security table? I just noticed that when I look at the forum that's being posted to, the Security page did not show Unauthenticated Users or All Users. When I added Unauthenticated Users then All Users showed up as well.

Probably grasping at staws here...

The database is definitely messed up. When I make changes to one thing in a forum, something else gets wiped. I added a Role, and now the Mail Connector settings are back to default and so are the Templates settings on the Forum tab for this particular forum. Yipes!

OK - I can reproduce this problem now. A post by email to one of the forums appears to be what triggers the problem. All of the Forums for that instance of the ActiveForums module disappear from the list. Going to the Control Panel, selecting a Forum, and doing a Save fixes it again.

It's definitely post by email that causes this. After anyone emails a post to one of the forums in any of the instances of Active Forums module, that module acts as if all of the forums are hidden. Somehow the permission data is getting wiped out. Go to the Control Panel, select one of the Forums, and do a Save, and the forums show up again.

I guess I'm going to have to dump the database and do a compare to see what's happening, but it could be something that's in storage. I'll try restarting the website to see if that clears it up.

Ben, any other suggestions?

Do the forums become hidden for every single email message that comes in? Or is it just certain emails or certain users.

It appears to be every email, but I couldn't be sure since I'm not tracking all of them. So far every time I've seen a post by email, when I check the web site, the forums are all hidden. I've done posts from the web sit and that does not make them hidden.

All of the forums in question are only accessible by users that have the Security Role that allows them to post. There are separate forums for several different Roles - people with access to a particular telescope, for example.

What we are seeing is that the forums go "hidden" when there is a post by email. The next post by email will "unhide" them again!

It looks like the problem is with what is kept in memory, rather than in the database. We just had the forums go hidden again after someone made a post by email. On a hunch, I tried restarting the site. After that, the forums were visible again. This would seem to indicate that the problem is not something being set in the database but rather something kept (or cached) in memory. I did take a backup of the db while the forums were hidden, and I'll take another now that they are back...

I've set up a test page on our website with another instance of the ActiveForums module. I created a single group and forum and did some testing to see if I could reproduce this bug.

The bug appears to occur when someone posts by email, and the user in question is in a security role that has permission to post. If the individual user is given permission the bug does not seem to occur. Posts by email from Admin do not trigger it.

William

I have spent quite a bit of time setting up a clone of our main web site as a test environment. This allowed me to experiment with this bug a bit and I've learned some more things...

We have 3 instances of Active Forum on 3 different pages. One is a "Test" page visible only to Admin and a small group of users controlled by a Security Role; this one has only one group and one forum. One instance has 3 forums in one group. The other has 8 forums in 5 groups.

If I disable the MC (Mail Connector) on the other 2 instances, I can post by email to the test forum without triggering the bug - I posted many times and the forum never went "hidden". If I enable the MC usage on one of the other two instances, then a post by email to the test forum triggers the bug - the forum goes "hidden" until I restart DNN.

I'm wondering if there are any other users with similar setups? Multiple instances of Active Forums and using the Mail Connector? At this point it's hard to believe that this problem is somehow unique to our website, especially since I can re-create it on both our main and test websites.

William

William,
Thanks for the effort you have put forth in trying to reproduce this problem. It sounds like there is a problem related to caching. Any time a new post is created the forum cache is cleared. What I find odd is that there isn't any kind of error message. I need to get a better picture of what you mean by the forums disappear. Can you post a screen shot of what you are seeing? This is important to help me track down where the cache is failing. It could be the entire module or just the forum view.

Thanks,
Will

Will,
I can take a couple of screen shots and post them if you wish. The appearance is exactly like what would happen if the user did not have access to any of the forums and they were all marked "Hide" in the Control Panel. The module is displayed but no forums.
William

This gets even weirder - for several days now I have not been able to reproduce this "bug"! I have repeated the sequence that caused the failure on both my test system and the production website. Several people have been posting to the forums via email. The forums have all remained visible!

The only change I made was to the time interval for the Mail Connector to retrieve email - for a while it was set to 2 minutes, normally we run it at 5. I changed it back to 5 a couple of days ago but no hidden forums.

Of course I'm happy that this problem is no longer occurring, but it could re-appear again at any time... or not?

William

Just now I created a new topic in a forum using email - and presto, the forums on that page all went hidden!

Screen capture with the forums "missing":



Screen capture after doing an Application Restart, with the forums back:

We're having this problem as well. In our case we are using the MailConnector to retrieve emails between field consultants and their support team. Time is typically of the essence, so we don't have the luxury of increasing the Scheduler frequency to more than a minute. This issue is having MAJOR impact on our team's confidence in the product. What's the status of a fix?

We are STILL having this problem - what is it going to take to get it fixed?????

William