A Discourse site using Hebrew as the primary locale encountered a fatal error after an upgrade, resulting in a white screen on login. The issue stemmed from a malformed translation string in the Hebrew locale (client.he.yml), specifically an invalid many plural rule, which is not supported in Hebrew according to Unicode standards. Users attempted various fixes, including disabling plugins, rebuilding, and clearing caches, but the problem persisted. The root cause was identified as a translation error in the posts_likes_MF string, where the many plural form was incorrectly included. A temporary workaround involved setting the default locale to English via the Rails console, which restored functionality. The community discussed the need for graceful fallbacks when translation errors occur and highlighted inconsistencies between Discourse’s plural rules and those used by Crowdin. A bug report was opened, and a pull request was submitted to address the issue, with further discussion continuing on Meta Discourse. seefood, Jagster, thoka, and Moin contributed key insights into the technical details and potential fixes.
This happend about 3 days ago after an upgrade via the WebUI. the site is about 2 months old, has about 500 users and so far ran well.
I tried restart, then rebuild, then flushing redis. Still getting that white screen.
What do I try next? Start without plugins? Scratch and restore from backup?
Relevant logs:
rails/production_errors: empty
rails/production:
Started GET "/" for 147.234.130.218 at 2024-07-21 08:38:13 +0000
Processing by ListController#unread as HTML
Rendered layout layouts/application.html.erb (Duration: 114.3ms | Allocations: 34494)
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 264ms (ActiveRecord: 0.0ms | Allocations: 88191)
Didn’t know about it till now, thanks, but the problem remains.
Like I said, all looks ok if I log out (technically wipe cookies), it fails when I login.
I admit I have no experience with rails and getting it to produce more verbose logs.
Well, for me rails is… well, more than just difficult.
But 500 is error of the server. There is big chance it comes from some plugin, but it can be mis-configuration too. Safe mode can give a hint what is broken, if the issue happends on user’s side. But if something that changes functionality is broken in serverside then safe mode is toothless.
Sure, you can disable every plugins and rebuild to see if the situation will be fixed. And after that start figuring out which one. Or at least disabling all plugins that aren’t by Discourse — and even that isn’t totally sure because every official ones aren’t here in use.
But that takes quite much time. Perhaps it’s wiser move to wait until someone who actual knows chimes in.
oh dear… a lack of locale translation is a reason to throw a 500?!
EDIT: Since this became a bug report - I don’t think the problem is in the language files per se (since copying the *.en.yml files over he.yml didn’t help) I suggest that such problems should at leat fail gracefully and fall back to english.
From what I read, there is no way to roll back the git to a last working commit before this break? If this passed tests then I guess we have a new test to add. This commit won’t work if your site happens to be using the “wrong” locale. What’s my path to get the site up and running the fastest and how can I avoid this in the future?
I’m not totally sure it is just matter of missing locale somewhere. By that screenshot your MaxMind settings are wrong too.
My pure guess is there is something else broken and that’s rest are broken too. I would do /.launcher rebuild app and trying to find if there comes something funny.
