White page on search.php

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White page on search.php

The issue of a blank page on search.php in Discourse instances has been discussed. gauthier reported that clicking on mydomain.com/search.php results in a blank page and noted that this issue occurs on multiple Discourse instances.

gdpelican explained that the issue is due to the fact that search.php is routed to a particular route in the application, but the route doesn’t know how to respond to a .php format, resulting in a ‘406 - Unacceptable’ response. In contrast, non-existent routes like wark.php return a 404 - Not Found response, which Discourse can handle.

To solve this issue, codinghorror suggested routing 406 responses to the 404 landing page, and sam agreed to implement this change.

1

Hello,

I have an old page indexed by google: mydomain.com/search.php
When i click on it, i get a blank page.

It’s seems this page, search.php doesn’t work on any discourse instance. Why?
Why
https://meta.discourse.org/search.php = ko
https://meta.discourse.org/search.xyz = ko
https://meta.discourse.org/sqd.xyz = ok

Is it a bug with the search feature?
It’s not really a problem, but it’s strange.

Thanks

2

Discourse doesn’t have a /search.php page, search resides on the /search page.

3
  • meta.discourse.org/search.php is routed to a particular route in the application, but that route doesn’t know how to respond to a .php format. This results in a ‘406 - Unacceptable’ response, which Discourse doesn’t really know how to handle.
  • meta.discourse.org/wark.php is not a route in the application, so it’s dropped by the router and returns a 404 - Not Found response, which Discourse knows how to handle.

This could be solved by routing 406 responses to the 404 landing page

4

Thanks @gdpelican for the explanation :slight_smile:

5

Thanks for the detailed analysis @gdpelican! Should we make this change @sam?

6

Sure, we should 404 here, fine with me.