Can't access profile of new user

[bartv (Bart)]

Hi,

I’m trying to understand why we can’t access the profile of a user who was created earlier today. When looking in the logs, I see:

Started GET "/u/blender.bender/" for xx.xx.xx.xx at 2019-12-13 20:15:18 +0000
Processing by UsersController#show as HTML
  Parameters: {"username"=>"blender.bender"}
  Rendering exceptions/not_found.html.erb within layouts/no_ember
  Rendered exceptions/not_found.html.erb within layouts/no_ember (Duration: 0.3ms | Allocations: 120)
  Rendered layouts/_head.html.erb (Duration: 1.5ms | Allocations: 790)
  Rendered common/_discourse_stylesheet.html.erb (Duration: 0.9ms | Allocations: 470)
  Rendered application/_header.html.erb (Duration: 0.2ms | Allocations: 91)
  Rendering html template
  Rendered html template (Duration: 0.0ms | Allocations: 2)
Completed 404 Not Found in 155ms (Views: 0.2ms | ActiveRecord: 0.0ms | Allocations: 58360)

I did a rebuild earlier today and tested in safe-mode with the same result. I also looked him up in the Data Explorer and at first glance, everything seems ok.

Here’s a topic where you can see him: Looking for someone to animate a drawbridge - Paid Work - Blender Artists Community

This issue also prevents his user card from showing. Any idea why this happens or where I should look next?

[JimPas]

We’ve had new users not showing up in the User Directory after they’ve first joined. But once some of the daily routines ran, they did appear in the User Directory - much to the relieve of those users. Still, there should be several places where an Admin can see them, aside from the user list in the dashboard and the report logs. All said and told, they should appear in a few hours, user card and all.
Other suggestions welcome.

[bartv (Bart)]

I don’t think that’s it - I can access the profile pages of other new users just fine. The fact that they’re not in the directory is not a concern, they should show up within 24 hours I believe?

It seems that something in this account is broken, but I can’t understand what…

[JimPas]

Okay, so you have several new users and they show up except for this one in particular?

[bartv (Bart)]

It’s not related to the user directory - this user can post and use the site, see the link I posted above. Once you click on his avatar, the user card doesn’t show. Also, if I try to show his user profile after searching him in the admin I get a 404 error page. This doesn’t happen for other users.

[JimPas]

I notice this user has a dot in his user name (blender.blender). I’m wondering if that special character is fouling things up.

[bartv (Bart)]

Looking a little deeper, I wonder the same thing - when searching for ‘%blender%bender’ usernames, I find the following list. I somehow suspect that the ‘.’ symbol is not properly treated internally. This user created these two accounts today:

Looking further back, I also see a (very) old account ‘blenderbender’. This one was imported from vBulletin.

I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong with the check on unique usernames in my instance, but I can’t imagine what :-/

[bartv (Bart)]

I managed to fix this by deactivating the old account. After that, I could rename it and resolve the duplicate username.

[JimPas]

Glad to hear you got it resolved.

[bartv (Bart)]

Update - no, I didn’t I fixed the duplicate issue of the two ‘blenderbender’ accounts, but I still cannot view the ‘blender.bender’ profile. I give up for tonight, time for some

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Yeah, I recall seeing reports of this before, with very similar usernames causing some kind of conflict… cc @eviltrout

[bartv (Bart)]

This boiled down to a broken index on the users table. After manually fixing a bunch of records (which was an interesting exercise in itself ), I was able to rebuild the index. I’ll keep an eye on this to make sure it’s not happening again.