OT: reply

Posted Feb 12, 2008 12:57 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (guest, #307)
In reply to: Gentoo's gentoo-sources updated by dberkholz
Parent article: vmsplice(): the making of a local root exploit

> (Unrelated: the comments didn't have a Reply link, so I had to stick
> this in a new thread.)

What happened to the "reply" button?

to post comments

OT: reply

Posted Feb 12, 2008 13:22 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (6 responses)

I've definitely seen this phenomenon. I'm not quite sure how it happens, but it seems to be
possible to be in a state where the site doesn't give you any reply buttons, yet you're
allowed to read the article (so you're presumably logged in as a paying customer). Maybe
(editors?) we should try to pin down when exactly this happens ?

OT: reply

Posted Feb 12, 2008 14:44 UTC (Tue) by jake (editor, #205) [Link] (5 responses)

If anyone sees that problem again, I'd love to figure it out and fix it.  The source of a page
that exhibits this behaviour might help.  Also, does anyone remember if *all* comments had no
"Reply ..." button or if it was just one?

Rather than clutter the thread, email to jake, you can probably guess the domain, is fine.

thanks,

jake

OT: reply

Posted Feb 12, 2008 16:10 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (4 responses)

The one time I saw it, it was all comments missing the button, and 
reloading the page fixed the problem.  And I was using Konqueror as my 
browser.

OT: reply

Posted Feb 14, 2008 11:51 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (2 responses)

I've seen this repeatedly with Firefox, probably because I always throw out all browser
cookies on exit; the refresh trick always fixes it.

This is how the problem occurs for me:

1. I'm not logged in and click on an article that requires subscription; LWN informs me that I
can't see this article.
2. I click on "log in to read this article"; https://lwn.net/login?target=/Articles/268783/
3. After filling in username and password, I'm redirected to the
http://lwn.net/Articles/268783/ page without the "reply to this comment" buttons -- as if LWN
thought I wasn't logged in.
4. Reloading the page makes the buttons appear.

To reproduce the bug again, I have to clear my cache (!) after logging out. This would suggest
that it depends on some external dependency (like CSS or JavaScript) that varies depending on
login, but gets cached pre-login by the browser. However I couldn't find such dependencies on
the LWN site.

OT: reply: FireFox versus CSS

Posted Feb 14, 2008 14:42 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

I think it is a CSS problem. As I use non-standard colors, when I do the same operation ("log
in to read this article"), it comes back with the default colors instead of my colors. At this
point, I refresh the page... hence I don't encounter the "no buttons" problem.

OT: reply

Posted Feb 19, 2008 8:09 UTC (Tue) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]

So it turns out that this indeed is the problem; the stylesheet file sizes only differ in one byte so I didn't catch the difference the first time (I thought they were equal).

--- lwn_logged_out.css  2008-02-19 09:58:38.000000000 +0200
+++ lwn_logged_in.css   2008-02-19 09:57:04.000000000 +0200
@@ -135,7 +135,7 @@
 DIV.CommentBody { padding: 0px 4px 0px 4px; }
 P.CommentPoster { margin-top: 0px; }

-div.CommentReplyButton { display: none;
+div.CommentReplyButton { display: block;
                         text-align: right;
                         padding: 4px; }

The problem here is browser cache. When the user first visits LWN.net, not having logged in yet, the browser downloads /CSS/lwn which specifies that div.CommentReplyButton should be hidden.

Later when the user does log in, the browser doesn't bother re-fetching the stylesheet because it already has this URL cached. The Right Way to fix this is to have different stylesheet URLs depending on whether the user is logged in -- rather than using magic stylesheets.

OT: reply

Posted Feb 15, 2008 15:07 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

I see this happen somewhat often using FireFox too.  As you say, the buttons are ALL missing,
and a reload takes care of it.  I checked the source once on these but it looked fine: the CSS
for the buttons was all there.  They just didn't show up.

I've also had situations where the front page says there are replies, but when I click the
link I don't see any replies.  Then if I reload, the replies appear!  This happens more
rarely, but it's happened more than once.

At first I thought it was because I was using the greasemonkey add-on to distinguish between
read and unread comments, but I've since turned that off and I still see both of these
problems.