CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

v2.2.7

This is a very bizarre problem, and I'm not even 100% convinced that it's caused by CiviCRM.  However, it's likely that it is, so I wanted to post in here just in case anyone had even the slightest clue what the source of this problem might be.

We are using CiviMail to send out a newsletter.  When trying to add our message body at step #3 (text email), every time we would click Next>> we would get nothing but a blank page.  I finally nominally tracked it down to a precise bit of text in the middle of the message:

"Ecoinformatics - Maximizing your data:  What can informatics do for you?"

I found that if you removed the colon after the word "data" that it worked fine.  Likewise, putting a space between the word and the colon ("data :") also fixed it.  Or moving the colon to follow the word "your".

However, that one string is not precisely the problem, as it CiviMail accepts the entire paragraph that that string is a part of.  Apparently some parser between my browser and CiviCRM is interpreting some sequence of characters in the full text as control characters and triggering and error condition.  It just so happens that removing the colon or putting a space before it somehow doesn't trigger the error.

I'm fairly certain that it's not reaching ./CRM/Mailing/Form/Upload.php, which it normally would.  If anyone is interested, the entire message text we were trying to use is attached.

Any clues?

Aloha,

Nathan

Hi Kurund,

Yes, it fails on the demo site as well.  Go here:

http://drupal.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/mailing/send?mid=31&continue=true&reset=1

On step 3, expand the Plain-text Format textarea, scroll down a little more than halfway down to the text:

"Ecoinformatics - Maximizing your data :  What can informatics do for you?"

Remove the space between the word "data" and the colon, then click Next>>.  You'll just get a blank screen and will have to hit the Back button.  Hopefully you'll be able to get to the bottom of this.

Thanks!

Nathan

Kurund,

Are you considering that expected behavior, or a bug?  What exactly is this "IDS" trying to protect against?

If it is expected behavior, then some outcome other than a blank screen would be ultra helpful.   I consider a white screen with no message to be a bug, even if what caused it is expected.   The system should kick the user back to step #3 with an error message.  Is someone going to file a bug and patch for this?

Thanks!

Nathan

Thanks, Lobo.

What's the method again of getting Drupal/CiviCRM to dump PHP errors to the screen?  The other day I suspected that some PHP errors were being suppressed, but I was unsuccessful in getting them to display.  I tried configuring Drupal's settings.php to display errors, but that didn't seem to do it.  I feel like I'm missing something obvious here, so I apologize if how to make this happen is documented in a 1,000 different places.

I'd like to look at the PHP errors so that I can understand why this IDS system would cause uncatchable PHP errors instead of catchable ones that can dealt with.  Or is that just how the IDS works?  By throwing an uncatchable error and just dying?

Thanks for your help.