ezrakilty's dashboard

ezrakilty replied on November 29, 2008 00:16 to the problem "Help Center Won't Display Dashboard" in Get Satisfaction:

Hi Ryan,

OK, this is very helpful. I suspect that Help Center is for some reason failing to parse the data coming from Get Satisfaction. Possibly that data has changed since you were first having problems, which would explain why things changed. I'll have a closer look as soon as I'm back from holiday (next week).

Thanks for your patience.

ezrakilty replied on November 26, 2008 19:24 to the problem "Help Center Won't Display Dashboard" in Get Satisfaction:

Ryan,

I'm confused. You said you haven't looked at the logs, but that you logged in a few times and "it seems to generate no errors." Does that mean you *did* look at the logs? Or that there you stopped getting errors as a user?

ezrakilty replied on November 11, 2008 10:43 to the problem "Help Center Won't Display Dashboard" in Get Satisfaction:

Can you send us any lines from the server error log that are being generated when the error page is shown?

ezrakilty replied on November 11, 2008 10:33 to the question "Help Center" in Get Satisfaction:

Tiny FAQs, your question wasn't about Help Center, but I'll talk about Help Center security for the record.

Help Center doesn't store—or even touch—passwords or any private user data, because of the clever OpenID authentication system.

Essentially all of the data stored in Help Center is public data anyway—for example, cached topic data. So it's not specially protected, because it doesn't need to be. The only thing Help Center stores which is not already public is the session cookies of visitors to the site—which is typical for any web application.

In terms of writing back to Get Satisfaction, Get Satisfaction authenticates each request to post a topic or reply, so Help Center installations (or any other API client) should not be capable of doing any damage to a presence on GSFN. Edits are always made by a particular user, and not by the Help Center installation itself.

ezrakilty replied on November 10, 2008 11:23 to the problem "Help Center Won't Display Dashboard" in Get Satisfaction:

I was able to log in too. Perhaps it was just a burp.

If you see it again, what we'll need is the error from the error logs--that is, the webserver logs from your server. If you installed it yourself, you'll probably know where to find those; otherwise your sysadmin or someone like that should be able to get snippets for you.

ezrakilty replied on October 23, 2008 11:55 to the question "Losing hair over Help Center set up" in Get Satisfaction:

Hi Adam. I'm sorry you're having this trouble. Let's see if we can diagnose it. Can you check your web server's error logs? Whenever the "It looks like something went wrong" page appears, it should make a note in the error log, which will help greatly.

It could be something such as a database connection problem, or a problem with the 3rd-party PHP packages (maybe wrong versions or something).

Let me know if you can get at the error log.

ezrakilty replied on October 02, 2008 07:56 to the question "helpstart.php blank" in Get Satisfaction:

I'm not sure why there would be no messages in the error log; I'm less familiar with IIS's error log setup. I'll mull it over some more, though.

"I set permissions to FULL on that directory..." Do you mean the log directory, or the templates_c directory? The latter needs to be writable by the web server and is one of the most common sources of this kind of problem.

Also, it sounds like Help Center must be accessing the database, if it was able to write that (incorrect) https URL into the site_settings, but it may be worth double-checking the database host/name/user/password settings (in boot.php) to make sure they're correct. If it can't connect to the database, that would cause these symptoms as well.

ezrakilty replied on October 01, 2008 21:53 to the question "Coming in late" in Sprinkles Test Company:

It's about 10:53 PM.

ezrakilty replied on October 01, 2008 21:52 to the question "helpstart.php blank" in Get Satisfaction:

Hi Joshua: I'm not sure what's up with the SSL; the only thing I can figure is that it might have gotten configured to think that its own URL is an https URL. We can check that by looking in your database, if you have access. If so, it would be the sprinkles_root_url column of the site_settings table.

As for the helpstart page being blank, that indicates that some kind of fundamental error is happening, which would be reported in the server's error log. Can you look at the error logs and see if the page load is causing anything there? It could, for example, be that something is misconfigured, like the templates_c directory is not writable or the database settings aren't right.

Have a look at the logs and report back what you find.

ezrakilty replied on September 13, 2008 22:13 to the problem "Ugly black text on white backgroun error message when submitting a blank "Share your idea" post -- error checking is horrible." in Get Satisfaction:

Hi Ivan,

This bug has actually been fixed in development, and I *believe* it was released in the latest release. I'll get Scott to check up on that, but you may just want to go ahead and upgrade to the latest version.

ezrakilty replied on September 05, 2008 10:09 to the idea "Need to be able to split threads and posts" in Get Satisfaction:

I'm surprised to hear that you're getting the error page without corresponding messages in the web server's error log. It's normally pretty reliable, in sending the error message to the log.

Is it a fresh install? Or have you tinkered with it at all?

Can you check whether there is a database for it to connect to and that you have the DB settings correct?

Barring all that, can you send us some details on your setup—for example, the version of PHP you're using, and any related packages?

Is there a public URL you can point me at that exhibits the behavior? (I doubt I'll discover much, since the error page itself doesn't reveal much, but it may be worth a try.)

ezrakilty replied on August 27, 2008 08:59 to the problem "Help Center won't stay authenticated / in sync" in Get Satisfaction:

Adam: Can you give a specific test case? Like, something I can do on your public website to see the problem?

There are apparently two issues here: One with authentication and one regarding topic data not updating.

A recent fix addressed a problem with replies not being shown, just after they were posted. Are you seeing that kind of behavior? That is, if you make a reply to a topic, does it appear immediately or fail to?

As for authentication: you say that every time you log in to view your dashboard you have to re-authenticate with Get Satisfaction. But maybe that's as it should be? Apparently enough time has passed to allow your local Help Center session to lapse; perhaps your central Get Satisfaction session has lapsed, too?

Please give me a scenario I can walk through and I'll try to debug this further. Thanks!

A comment on the question "Replies in GetSatisfaction helpcenter are not showing up" in Get Satisfaction:

In the development tip we use:

$topic_url = $topic_id;
invalidate_http_cache($topic_url);

Looks like the fix may not have been released yet, I'll look into that. – ezrakilty, on August 23, 2008 13:41

ezrakilty replied on August 23, 2008 01:36 to the question "Swallow speed?" in Sprinkles Test Company:

African or European?

ezrakilty asked a question in Sprinkles Test Company on August 18, 2008 20:53:

syncing calendar?????

ezrakilty replied on August 18, 2008 20:28 to the problem "Ugly black text on white backgroun error message when submitting a blank "Share your idea" post -- error checking is horrible." in Get Satisfaction:

Hm, good catch Ivan! Sorry this slipped through our QA. I'll get right on it.

ezrakilty replied on August 16, 2008 17:08 to the question "PHP 5.2.6 install problem" in Get Satisfaction:

Ah, I see. So the package is not yet compatible with 5.2, and you had to downgrade? I guess we could put a warning in the docs about this.

I take it that helpcenter is working for you now?

ezrakilty replied on August 14, 2008 09:42 to the question "PHP 5.2.6 install problem" in Get Satisfaction:

David,

I think this indicates that you're using PHP 4. Is that correct? Try upgrading to PHP 5 and see if that helps.

A comment on the problem "Errors On Setup With PHP 5.2.3" in Get Satisfaction:

Adam: There should be a file themes/default/templates/admin-findsite.t in your installation. Is that there? And is it readable by the webserver? I would expect that the problem relates to that file rather than its counterpart in the templates_c directory. – ezrakilty, on August 12, 2008 22:31

ezrakilty replied on August 06, 2008 21:10 to the question "what time is it?" in Sprinkles Test Company:

it's howdy-doody time.