Disappearing Comments

Some time ago there were some complaints that comments randomly disappear from this blog. Of course people were right, but for me it was a big mystery ...

Today I finally found the reason: It comes from the interplay of the Pier Unix Security and the Pier Blog plugin. The problem was that an added comment had no owner and was therefor editable by anybody. Since Google Bots seem to be very eager reading my blog they also accidently queried a remove link. Sad. Very sad.

Anyway, the problem is fixed in the latest version of the two packages. Finally nobody should be able to edit or delete your comments any longer. I also restored all the comments that were removed. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for writing comments (even if I cannot read Japanese), so that I could track down this nasty bug.

Posted by Lukas Renggli at 28 February 2007, 4:40 pm with tags seaside, pier, blog link

Comments

Could you explain how you were able to find this bug ?

Posted by Damien Cassou at 28 February 2007, 8:18 pm link

The PRImagePersistency logs all the changes to an external file. Just by accident I noticed that some remove commands were executed, however I never removed anything so far. With the time-stamp at hand I looked at the Apache access-logs and noticed the Google bot triggering these commands. Now that I knew the reason why these comments were disappearing it was easy to detect and fix the bug that caused the newly added comments to have the wrong permissions.

Posted by Lukas Renggli at 28 February 2007, 10:04 pm link

You’re a master Lukas :-)

Posted by Damien Cassou at 1 March 2007, 12:02 pm link

That’s why you must not use GET for destructive actions ;)

Posted by Philippe Marschall at 1 March 2007, 10:11 pm link