Any account with username "adman" has a broken profile

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AI-generated summary

A bug was reported where creating a user with the username “adman” or variations like “adman-b” or “adman-c” results in a broken profile, causing a never-ending page load or an error in browsers like Firefox and Chrome. The issue was tested on both a self-hosted Discourse instance and try.discourse.org. Initially, it seemed like the issue was caused by a regex triggering on the sequence “adman”. However, after further investigation by JammyDodger, it was discovered that the problem was actually caused by the default filterset on uBlock Origin reacting to the “ad” in the username. The exact rule triggering the issue was identified by jimsalterjrs.

1

On Discourse version v3.1.0.beta5 +233, if a new user chooses the name “adman,” “adman-b”, or “adman-c” that user’s profile is badly broken. Attempting to access the user’s public profile results in some extremely low-level failure that causes a never-ending page load (Firefox) or a simple hard error “ERR” (Chrome). This does not appear to be a trapped error.

I have verified that creating a user named “adman” results in the same problem at try dot discourse dot org. No other profile setup actions are necessary–for example, you don’t need to set a profile picture, or anything else–just using a name beginning in “adman” is enough to produce the error.

I have also verified that choosing “ad-man” as a username does not break the user’s profile. The username “adma” also does not result in a broken profile. I’m stumped.

Again, I’ve verified that this is true on both my own self-hosted Discourse, AND on try.discourse.org. I’m not sure how long the content on try.discourse.org remains before purging, but you can see this right now by trying to load the user profile there: httpx://try dot discourse dot org/u/adman/summary

Or you can see the effect by trying to look at the user “adman-c” on my self-hosted instance: httpx://discourse dot practicalzfs dot com/u/adman-c

Meanwhile, user “adma” on try.discourse works fine: httpx://try dot discourse dot org/u/adma/summary

2

I’ve also confirmed that the usernames “madman” and “admyn” work properly.

So it looks like there’s a regex somewhere that triggers on /^adman/ – to reproduce the bug, the username must begin with the complete sequence “adman”.

3

Hello and welcome @jimsalterjrs :slight_smile:

I can’t replicate this. :thinking: Long-shot, but I don’t suppose it could be your ad-blocker reacting to ‘ad’ in some way? Can you try in an incognito window/ad-blocker off to check?

4

Well damn. Thank you very much, that was exactly it. The default filterset on uBlock Origin appears to be what’s breaking things, although I haven’t figured out yet which rule is getting triggered.

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And this is the rule that triggers:

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I’ll let my user know that’s a very poor choice of username, given how many people are using Easylist!

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No worries. Glad to have helped. :slight_smile: