by pieterh
on 22 Oct 2009 12:18
At 17:19 UTC on Wednesday we made a small change to the Sign in and Create Account actions to make the Wikidot software work better with SSL. Unfortunately, this also broke the two actions on most Wikidot.com sites. We just resolved the issue now, and my apologies for that. Full explanation follows.
The change itself was part of our parallel work on Wikidot.org, our project to produce a full open source version of Wikidot that both runs our dot-com service, and is available for free download.
We changed the way these two actions worked with SSL, but ended up with cache inconsistency. This is one of the horrid aspects of building a service like Wikidot.com: every single access must be cached (i.e. taken from fast memory instead of the much slower database).
In this case we had JavaScript code that was trying to calculate an address for the actions, but not getting the needed information from (old) cached template code. Result: the JavaScript did nothing and people could not sign in.
On sites with recent pages, no problem: as soon as the page is changed, the cache is reloaded and it worked fine. So many people trying to sign in at www.wikidot.com (not recently changed) were unable to, but on many other sites and pages, it worked fine.
We solved it, once we realized what was wrong, by clearing the cache. This is fairly major: it took www.wikidot.com something like a minute to refresh after that.
We have looked at our internal processes to ask the key questions, "how did this happen?" and "how can we prevent such mistakes in future?" and for this change, one of us moved code to the production cluster without going through the full test cycle. A harmless change, it seemed. Lesson learnt: even the most trivial change gets full review before going live.
My apologies again. Thanks to everyone who reported the problem.
Thanks for the timely fix. Much appreciated :)
★★ Shane Smith ★★
Freelancing Website, Wikify Me (Blog)
Projects: Wikidot Editor, Wikimated, Wikidot 101 (Tutorials)
Hi, unfortunately my wikidot appears to be suffering the prolongued after effects of this… am unable to log in from my own home page. HELP!
Ugh. There is still a problem, which we'll fix, if you use custom domains. Two simple workaround: sign-in via the custom domain (http://southwestimagebank.org) instead of the wikidot name (http://swib.wikidot.com). Or, close the popup window and click Reload.
You can also configure your (very beautiful) site so that it always redirects to the custom domain. If you like I can help you do that.
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@Stacey: please try now, it should work.
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Many thanks Pieterh! All seems to be working okay now though will keep checking to make sure. I thought I had already configured my site settings to redirect to the custom domain… got in to a bit of a pickle doing it mind which might explain things. If you can help with that do let me know. Thanks for the nice comment about my site :)
Hi, Pieterh, I'm actually having trouble signing in but only with IE 8. If I hit the 'compatibility view' button on the IE 8 browser it works. I don't know if this is connected to this problem or another problem only with IE 8 that I need to fix…which I would have no idea what to do.
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I usually use FF, but I just tried to recreate your issue and couldn't (running Vista Home Premium with IE8). The only strange thing I experienced is that toggling compatibility mode actually logged me out. I was able to log in with compatibility mode both on and off.
Have you tried clearing your cache to see if that helps?
-Ed
Bootstrap Playground - Wikidot Meets Twitter Bootstrap!
Wikidot API - PHP · A PHP client and code samples for the Wikidot API
It's OK now, thanks, ED. I usually use FF as well I was checking in on IE and experienced that problem but it seems to have cleared now. Thanks!
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pieterh ,
We're brand new, and we don't even know what the sign in pop-up window looks like. It acts like the link to "sign on" is dead. When I clicked on the sign-on link the whole window evaporated on my Mac with Safari.
This gave my one invited guest a bad migraine. She's using IE8 I think. Not to worry, she blamed it on Microsoft! I just don't want to put her through this again. Do each new guest have to close the pop-up window and reload it on their machines? Or is this something I do as Master Administrator on each page?
Thanks,
TJ
@Thomas, couple of things: could you use the Community site for all support questions, since this is really for chit chat, not problem solving.
OK, so I checked your site, which is using a password access policy. (I'm supersuper admin so can see everything, but don't worry, it's properly hidden.)
I tried: signing out, then signing in on your site and joining. When signing in, I get the pop-up, and then on the Join this Site page I entered the password and I could join.
Now, if I sign out and then click the "Join this site" link on the toolbar, I'm asked to enter the secret password and then invited to either create a new account or sign in.
It all seems to work.
That was with Firefox and with Safari on Mac. I don't have IE8 here to test.
My suggestion is to try yourself, by signing out and then signing back in, and try this with IE8 to be sure of how it works.
You may also want to switch the site to open access, which makes it much easier for users to join.
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