Geeklog Forums

I had a mishap and had to restore my gl_users and gl_userprefs from a recent database backup. Since then, in many areas of my site, particularly the forum, when any link is clicked, the result is a blank page. Plain wite page, nothing there.

Now, I can take the same link and copy the link location to a browser URL bar and it will go, but not when I click within gl.

I am dumbfounded. Truly.

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John Nordquist,
Applications Specialist, medical Technologies

Blank page

I did look at that Blank Page post and tried it. No change.

Its not like I did anything at all to the lib-common, or even to config.php. This just started happening after deleting and restoring from backup the gl_users.

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John Nordquist,
Applications Specialist, medical Technologies

None of the blank page references I have found seem to apply.

When a visitor tries to reach kenshaonline.net, they'll get the blank page. Refresh does nothing. BUT, if they have FireFox and hit GO on the browser URL bar, the site displays.

hmmm.

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John Nordquist,
Applications Specialist, medical Technologies

Looking at your site, it seems to be working fine in both IE and Firefox. I was able to browse through most of the features and didn't notice any problems. Are you still seeing problems on your end?

Thanks!
Mark

no, its not fixed. still a whole slew of issues and the more I poke, the worse it gets.

I am figuring I can backup the database again, copy my custom files and themes, dump my current GL install and reinstall. I have done that once a couple years ago...

Waiting for a short bit more tho to see if anyone has had a similar situation and come through okay.

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John Nordquist,
Applications Specialist, medical Technologies

Wow! I do see your issue now, after viewing a forum message, I clicked the Forum Index link and received the blank page. Very strange indeed, enter the URL directly, works fine.

Can you see the webserver's error log. Anytime I have had an issue like this, there are usually good clues there (normally I'll see the actual error message generated by PHP).

Besides loosing the gl_users and gl_userprefences tables, were there any other items that were corrupted, lost, damaged? I'm actually curious how only those 2 tables could be damaged. Anything else on the site changed in this process?

Rebuilding from scratch will be a challenge, but I'm sure you can pull it off, I'm just wondering if you backtrack over what caused the initial problem with the tables and any other changes made if that might give a clue to the issue. I see the forum plugin has issues, but browsing around in gallery and the classified ads seems to be OK.

These are the kinds of challenges I like to see solved, not sure I'm much help.

Thanks!
Mark

What started this mess was after I noticed about 20 new users all with the mail.ru domain I smelled a rat. So I banned the entire domain (not many Russians visit Kenosha!) and started deleting them. Then I got the big idea "hey, I'll go into the database and sort out the .ru's and all who have ever logged on and clean up!" Clean up is what it did. I deleted all users. I'm no mySql genious, but I've done this thing a number of times over the years and never had a problem. So the two tables that went blank were userstats and users.

Since restoring from a week old backup (lucky to have that!) all the problems occurred. I only restored the two tables.

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John Nordquist,
Applications Specialist, medical Technologies

Well, don't feel bad, everyone, sooner or later does something like this at some point.

I wonder, the Forum plugin has it's own user table's (forum_userinfo and forum_userprefs). I wonder if these being out of sync could cause the issues.

Have you tried disabling the forum plugin and see if everything else works OK?

Also, you didn't comment, but any clues in the web server's error logs?

Thanks!
Mark

After a complete reinstalll of GL, the same problem occurs. I'm about to totally give it up. Users cannt log in. When they hit enter, they get a blank page. And any plugin where a click of a post form is nenessary, blank page. Nothing in the docs, or none of the help files or forum posts to date have applied in this case.

I'm being strongly pressured to convert to mambo/joomla. After three years of GL, I am not relishing the idea.

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John Nordquist,
Applications Specialist, medical Technologies

Without any error messages, it's next to impossible to tell what's happening. That's what the FAQ page is all about: Enable displaying of error messages. There must be an indication as to what is happening somewhere. If not in Geeklog's error.log then maybe in your webserver's logs.

bye, Dirk

There just isn't. The error pages don't show a thing. you can see for yourself.

The odd part is that for every blank page occurance, if the user were to click the browser GO the page comes up. (not pages with a form post, however). So it doesn't appear as an error.

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John Nordquist,
Applications Specialist, medical Technologies

That is so strange, the same thing is happening to me on a site that I am a member of. I can't get to it from any computer at my office, but I have no problem from home. It is only that site and it has not been blocked. I don't know anything about computers, but is there maybe some type of Virus going around?