403 errors, unresponsive buttons and admin menu disappearing

Product Support

AI-generated summary

Jay_Dee reported persistent issues with their Discourse forum, including 403 errors when quoting, unresponsive buttons (like “discard drafts”), and a missing admin menu — even after updates and restarts. Logging out didn’t work, requiring cookie clearing to temporarily restore functionality. Heliosurge suggested trying Safe Mode to rule out theme/plugin conflicts; while quoting worked in Safe Mode, the admin menu remained inaccessible. JammyDodger pointed to Cloudflare’s Auto Minify feature as a potential culprit, referencing a meta.discourse.org thread on similar issues. Jay_Dee investigated Cloudflare settings and confirmed that adding an exclusion rule to disable all optimizations resolved the problem entirely Jay_Dee. The root cause appears to be Cloudflare’s minification interfering with Discourse’s JavaScript, though it’s unclear whether Auto Minify specifically was to blame. The fix involved excluding the forum from Cloudflare’s optimization features, restoring full functionality without requiring further server-side changes.

1

Hello all,
Been running discourse for a few years - love it. However, lately it started acting up, and I’m not able to figure out why.

If I try to quote someone on the forum, then I get a message saying “drafts offline”, and then it fails to post with a popup saying 403 error.

If I try to cancel, the discard drafts button fails to function.

I went to check for updates, but the admin menu is gone for my user.

Logout button does nothing. So, I have to clear my cookies, refresh, login, and then things seem to work fine again.

Done a full update and restart - didn’t fix the issue. Anyone run into this before?

2

Have you tried Safe mode?

You may have themes and/or plugins that might be causing issues due to changes in core that are not updated with needed changes

3

Could be. Just tried that. Quoting seems to work now - admin menu is still gone. Also when I go to an admin page, it says it doesn’t exist or is private.

Pretty sure restarting the app fill fix it, but no idea why.

4

Sounds a little like some of the problems people have been having with Cloudflare’s auto minify feature, if you’re using it?

5

Actually, I just logged into to Cloudflare to see about excluding the forum and see if that helped.

6

That was it! No sure if it was Auto Minify exactly, but I wrote an exclusion to shut everything off and it’s working again.

Thanks!