NASASpaceflight.com and NSF Forum Bug Reports

[gongora]

(Posting this here because I can't find a specific thread for discussion of the relevant article. Mods, feel free to move this to somewhere more appropriate.)

Just wanted to make the site admins aware that many of the inline images in this recent article on the NSF main site are broken:

thanks for pointing that out

[Chris Bergin]

Great spot. Article fixed. Issue was the images weren't uploaded to the article via CMS but hotlinked. That's fine, but the hotlinks were to L2 sections thus non L2 members got a broken link.

[ChrisC]

Is there something weird going on with the timezone settings in this forum?  I know that we have to set our timezone offset in our profile settings (in the "look and layout" section), and that the forum's own clock was weirdly one hour west of UTC, instead of actually *at* UTC as one might expect.  And that I need to change it manually every time we go through a DST shift.  But today I noticed that it was off by an hour again, and now the correct offset for me is -4.  It was -3.  Did the forum's own clock finally get corrected to UTC and now everybody is off by an hour?

[Hog]

Is there something weird going on with the timezone settings in this forum?  I know that we have to set our timezone offset in our profile settings (in the "look and layout" section), and that the forum's own clock was weirdly one hour west of UTC, instead of actually *at* UTC as one might expect.  And that I need to change it manually every time we go through a DST shift.  But today I noticed that it was off by an hour again, and now the correct offset for me is -4.  It was -3.  Did the forum's own clock finally get corrected to UTC and now everybody is off by an hour?

It's been an issue for years.

[Paul451]

Not at all important, but weird:

In the User Profile, under Stats, the "Most popular boards by activity" display uses percentages that add up to a tiny amount. While it's obviously only the top ten forums being shown, it still doesn't make sense.

Using my own as an example (attached cap below), the percentages start at only 1% at the top and drops down to 0.15% for the tenth most active. That suggests that everything not displayed is not going to add up to the missing 95%.

Is this another example of the board software not being able work out percentages, or does "activity" include something not displayed. (Aside, the little pie-charts in the "Most popular boards by posts" display seems to be right, which is essentially a percentage display, so it's a weird fault.)

[Proponent]

Over time, attachments to posts sometime mutate and deteriorate.

See this post from 2013 for an example.  All five attachments now appear as big black rectangles, which take up a lot of screen space and convey no information.  When downloaded, the PNG attachments are barely visible.

[AnalogMan]

Over time, attachments to posts sometime mutate and deteriorate.

See this post from 2013 for an example.  All five attachments now appear as big black rectangles, which take up a lot of screen space and convey no information.  When downloaded, the PNG attachments are barely visible.

I too see black backgrounds on these images when viewed in the thread (grid lines and plots are barely visible).  However, if I click on them to see them full size the backgrounds revert to a very light gray and look like they were intended to. If I download them they also display correctly (as viewed in Windows Photo Gallery)

--------

Having looked at the images in more detail, the problem may be that they have a transparent background set, rather than an actual color. This may be confusing the forum software.

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Edit to add:  I've attached a copy of the first image which I downloaded and saved locally beforehand, and also a version where I have given it a white background to replace the transparent one.

[bobthemonkey]

Seem to getting corrupt text on older articles in the CMS - odd symbols at the end of a few words.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2005/10/flights-of-the-death-star/

I’ve seen it on IPad OS (Safari) and Chrome/Win10.

[AnalogMan]

Seem to getting corrupt text on older articles in the CMS - odd symbols at the end of a few words.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2005/10/flights-of-the-death-star/

I’ve seen it on IPad OS (Safari) and Chrome/Win10.

I see them too with Firefox/Vista (yeah, I know!)

Looks like character strings to encode apostrophe and single/double quotation marks:

“  open double quote
†  close double quote
‘  open single quote
’  apostrophe/close single quote

[Suzy]

Seem to getting corrupt text on older articles in the CMS - odd symbols at the end of a few words.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2005/10/flights-of-the-death-star/

I’ve seen it on IPad OS (Safari) and Chrome/Win10.

The older page was likely using a different character encoding, and these characters got messed up when the forum began using UTF-8.

[JonSBerndt]

Trying to access nasaspaceflight.com through a VPN fails. I get an error, with a message saying access is blocked.

[russianhalo117]

Trying to access nasaspaceflight.com through a VPN fails. I get an error, with a message saying access is blocked.

Please provide any browser error codes (i.e. Error 404), system/browser details and VPN service provider info if you would like fourm help.

Lists of system/browser HTTP error codes:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

[jcm]

This is about the front page stories rather than the forum:  when I print hardcopies of a story it's started cutting off the right hand edge of the text, as illustrated below. The amount of text lost seems to vary.
This seems to have started (or perhaps just gotten worse) in the past week.

[JonSBerndt]

Seems like it's OK, at this moment. It appears to be sporadic. Will post specifics i it happens again.

[AnalogMan]

This is about the front page stories rather than the forum:  when I print hardcopies of a story it's started cutting off the right hand edge of the text, as illustrated below. The amount of text lost seems to vary.
This seems to have started (or perhaps just gotten worse) in the past week.

Its the same for me printing from Firefox when using the "scale to fit" option.  A temporary workaround is to select 90% scaling (from the "print preview" page in Firefox) - this avoids clipping the RHS of the text.

[Ken the Bin]

This is about the front page stories rather than the forum:  when I print hardcopies of a story it's started cutting off the right hand edge of the text, as illustrated below. The amount of text lost seems to vary.
This seems to have started (or perhaps just gotten worse) in the past week.

Its the same for me printing from Firefox when using the "scale to fit" option.  A temporary workaround is to select 90% scaling (from the "print preview" page in Firefox) - this avoids clipping the RHS of the text.

This is a bug introduced in Firefox 90.0, supposedly fixed in 90.0.2 released this past Thursday.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/90.0.2/releasenotes/

I'm still on Firefox 89.0.2 so I haven't experienced it, though I've downloaded 90.0.2 and plan to install it tomorrow morning.

[AnalogMan]

This is about the front page stories rather than the forum:  when I print hardcopies of a story it's started cutting off the right hand edge of the text, as illustrated below. The amount of text lost seems to vary.
This seems to have started (or perhaps just gotten worse) in the past week.

Its the same for me printing from Firefox when using the "scale to fit" option.  A temporary workaround is to select 90% scaling (from the "print preview" page in Firefox) - this avoids clipping the RHS of the text.

This is a bug introduced in Firefox 90.0, supposedly fixed in 90.0.2 released this past Thursday.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/90.0.2/releasenotes/

I'm still on Firefox 89.0.2 so I haven't experienced it, though I've downloaded 90.0.2 and plan to install it tomorrow morning.

Actually this particular bug appears in Firefox 52.9.0 for me (yes, I know!)

[JonSBerndt]

Trying to access nasaspaceflight.com through a VPN fails. I get an error, with a message saying access is blocked.

Please provide any browser error codes (i.e. Error 404), system/browser details and VPN service provider info if you would like fourm help.

Lists of system/browser HTTP error codes:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

Happened again today. Got this error (got a screen grab of the error but can't find a way to post that.):

---
Error 1005 Ray Id: 6825db528eea74ab * 2021-08-21 18:17:10 UTC
Access Denied
What Happened?
The owner of this website (www.nasaspaceflight.com) has banned the autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (14618) from accessing this website.
---

If I turn off my VPN, I can access the site again, and then after I turn back on the VPN, I seem to have no troubles at all. It seems to happen only when I have had the web site up for some time (days) and then try and access it with the VPN on. Again, turning off and back on the VPN seems to resolve it.

[RonM]

Trying to access nasaspaceflight.com through a VPN fails. I get an error, with a message saying access is blocked.

Please provide any browser error codes (i.e. Error 404), system/browser details and VPN service provider info if you would like fourm help.

Lists of system/browser HTTP error codes:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

Happened again today. Got this error (got a screen grab of the error but can't find a way to post that.):

---
Error 1005 Ray Id: 6825db528eea74ab * 2021-08-21 18:17:10 UTC
Access Denied
What Happened?
The owner of this website (www.nasaspaceflight.com) has banned the autonomous system number (ASN) your IP address is in (14618) from accessing this website.
---

If I turn off my VPN, I can access the site again, and then after I turn back on the VPN, I seem to have no troubles at all. It seems to happen only when I have had the web site up for some time (days) and then try and access it with the VPN on. Again, turning off and back on the VPN seems to resolve it.

I get that sometimes. The error messages I get states Cloudflare has blocked the ASN your IP address was using. NSF's host must be using Cloudflare for security.

Edit: I recreated the error and attached it.

[ulm_atms]

This is not really a bug per say, but I noticed a hard margin set for the left forum pane that shows the user posting's info.  For FutureSpaceTourist's sake....can we either make it more auto scaling or at least a little bigger?  I noticed more and more longer names getting chopped like this and was just curious if it is easily fixable or not.

Unless you like being FutureSpaceTouri   

EDIT:  It just occurred to me.  Is there a max character length for a username?  If so, set the margin to a width that and this never happens.