SourceWatch:Bug reports

Changing email address -- can't
It has become necessary to replace my email address; and I have yet to be able to discover how to do it, here or at prwatch.org.

Rss isn't valid (Bad MIME type)
see validation: http://www.feedvalidator.org/check?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.SourceWatch.org%2fSourceWatch.rss

Database Query Syntax Error
17:55 BST (GMT+1), May 14

Database error! - requires maintenance A database query syntax error occurrs approximately weekly.

Google Page Ranks
Searching google I found one of your pages (national debt) and was shocked to see it had fallen from page rank 6 to 1 since last I visited it. Checking, I found Google had given me the printable=yes version (rank=1) and did not have the (rank=6) version. Rank-1 pages will not get you much traffic from google. Checking further I found you have  in your printable=yes pages instead of  (and perhaps nofollos). Searching on Bush at your site I found google had 30% more low-rank printable=yes pages than it had high-rank regular pages. You can help yourselves and google by changing your robots tags. (By the way, you have done very well at distributing your google rank across your pages.)

Description
The following appears to be a bug with the wiki software:

Wiki has problems dealing with URLs that have certain characters in it like '*' or if the URL contains part of another URL. Examples:

http://example.com/*/foo/bar some link

Work-arounds
Use URL escaping, for example:

http://example.com/%2A/foo/bar some link

Quotation mark conversion in edits
It appears that some edits to pages are causing all single quotes to be converted into Unicode left and right quote entity references. From observations, this appears to be caused automatically by certain web browsers (and/or editors) vs a conscious effort by certain individuals. For example, the single quote character (') will be converted to (&amp;#8217;). The problem with this is that this behavior can corrupt wiki links that include (').

Work-arounds
Not known. Maybe it is possible to have wiki software check for certain entity references and map them to ASCII equivalents, at least within links and article titles.

Should be a page with list of broken external links
The pedia should detect broken links before users do.

Boolean Search with AND (either as default or implicit) returns false positives
as demonstrated by: 1) search for unquoted "corrie" properly returns no matches; 2) search for unquoted "rachel and corrie" returns false positives; (there should be NO returns) --Maynard 08:38 17 Apr 2003 (EDT)

-- In America Coming Together, the "SourceWatch Resources" internal link for 501c4 has dropped off the last ] ... the ] shows while in editing but has disappeared after the save. I have had this problem with ] quite often, with them disappearing after the save both in the final version and when I go back to edit them back in. AI

-- When editing part of an existing page using the edit tag on the right hand side of the page, the entire text is deleted when I click on 'show preview'. This has happened several times on different pages -- bob March 16

Just received this error message and lost all my work on Camp Bucca article:

Warning: mysql_error: supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php on line 196

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php:196) in /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php on line 415

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php:196) in /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php on line 450

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php:196) in /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php on line 451 Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server.


 * Sorry that this happened. I'm not sure why, and I haven't had any other reports of it. If you're doing significant editing on an article, I recommend doing it in stages and saving periodically along the way. That way even if you lose something, you won't lose very much. --Sheldon Rampton 02:58, 6 May 2004 (EDT)

Actually, I had only added three external link items at the time .... this was the first time this happened and it is possible that my cursor pointer hit a line or something .... AI (however see below!)

RSS feed is missing

 * I just checked, and it didn't look missing to me. --Sheldon Rampton 02:58, 6 May 2004 (EDT)
 * Strange, I'll keep a copy if it happens again. Zardoz 12:30, 7 May 2004 (EDT)
 * http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.SourceWatch.org%2FSourceWatch.rss reports that the feed has improper content-type and illegal content

-- This search was for "prisoner" and I received a similar error message for "prisoner of war".

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching SourceWatch), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text FROM cur,searchindex WHERE cur_id=si_page AND MATCH(si_title) AGAINST('+prisoner' IN BOOLEAN MODE) AND cur_namespace IN (0) LIMIT 0, 20 from within function "SearchEngine::showResults". MySQL returned error "1016: Can't open file: 'searchindex.MYI'. (errno: 145)".


 * I don't know why this keeps happening, but the SourceWatch search feature has been buggy from the beginning. I think I'm going to follow Wikipedia's example and switch over to using Google for searches. That will meant recent changes aren't found, but at least it will work consistently otherwise. Sorry for the inconvience in the meantime. --Sheldon Rampton 08:33, 6 May 2004 (EDT)

Show next (n) Recent Changes
Shouldn't the "Recent Changes" page contain a "Show next (n) changes" link? -- Just received this error message (06:55 DST 5/27/04) AI

Warning: mysql_error: supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php on line 196

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php:196) in /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php on line 415

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php:196) in /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php on line 450

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php:196) in /usr/www/users/prwatch/SourceWatch/Database.php on line 451 Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server.

Page http://www.SourceWatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Venture_capital&action=submit# has a corrupted external link that makes the "edit this page" link open the external link -- sorry, I don't know how to fix it. 138.88.183.145 10:52, 31 May 2004 (EDT)

Reversion to old version
Yesterday evening I changed some of the settings in my user profile. Ever since I did this the site displays in its old format, rather than the rather cool looking (and easier to use) new one. I have tried clearing the cache and using different computers, all to no avail. When I log out again the site displays in its new format again. Any ideas? User:L Durnan