A user, pfaffman, experienced an issue where they were unable to log in to their Discourse site after enabling read-only mode. This was due to the user not being logged in before enabling the mode. codinghorror suggested logging in before enabling read-only mode as a simple solution.
pfaffman pointed out potential issues with this approach, such as cookies being deleted or the person enabling read-only mode being unavailable. steef proposed alternative solutions, including a timer for read-only mode or a special URI to disable it.
pfaffman considered these suggestions and mentioned plans to develop a remote control panel for tasks like disabling read-only mode. Another user, Bathinda, shared a similar experience of accidentally locking themselves out after enabling read-only mode.
Bathinda later found a solution by running a command in the rails console to disable read-only mode, which they shared with the community: Discourse.disable_readonly_mode(Discourse::USER_READONLY_MODE_KEY).
I did an import of some Wordpress data to an already active site. I thought it would be a Good Idea to put the site in read-only mode while I was doing the import so that people wouldn’t add data to the site that would get erased when the site + import_data was uploaded.
That’s a Bad Idea. Now I can’t log in. On a self-hosted site, you can fix this from the rails console, on a hosted site, however, you’re stuck (I just emailed team). I tried /users/admin-login, but it can’t work either (obvious in retrospect).
This doesn’t seem like that much of an edge case, shouldn’t there be a way to freeze a site that still allows admins to log in?
As an alternative (or addition), perhaps a way to set a timer when enabling Read Only? Something like: Enable Read Only for: X hours.
Or maybe a special URI specifically to disable read only mode? Something like /admin/read-only which displays a login box for an administrator account and then disables read only when the credentials are correct. That wouldn’t need write-access to the database I imagine (only read to check the credentials).
Yeah. If I’d thought ahead to have an API key I probably could have fixed it that way. One of my plans is a remote control panel to do things like that. I think that there are a handful of tasks that it would be handy to be able to do via API calls via a remote web interface. Things like:
Creating sets of categories with certain colors and permissions for a particular purpose
control settings for sets of users
help to walk a user through Wordpress integration
It seems a little bizarre to build a web interface to remotely control a web app, but plugins get stale, and hosted people can’t install them anyway.