community.subtchallenge.com is a 3rd-party install of Discourse I want to use as a user. I’ve spent hours debugging why I can’t post on their forum. I tried different browsers, computers, operating systems, IP addresses, continents… The result of clicking the “Create Post” button was either of the following (regardless of any of the options mentioned previously):
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The post was correctly queued for moderation and I got a notification saying how many of my posts are waiting in the queue (this happened only with short test messages).
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The post was not put in the queue (verified with the forum maintainers via email) and I was redirected to a nonexistent page. When I examined the network communication there was a POST request to /posts, which had this result:
The requested URL was rejected. Please consult with your administrator. Your support ID is: 18286718686107272025
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The post got visually hidden, there was only a blue “bar” displayed at the bottom of the page, with a progress circle infinitely spinning without any other action. I tried waiting several minutes. It did not stop spinning. Network log was saying the POST /posts request was sent, but no reply was received. After this started happening, I usually had even bigger problems, i.e. I could not re-login (the login page would load, but the login form would not get sent). It seemed like a silent ban of my IP address or something (changing IP address usually helped).
I figured out that I can avoid 2. (and possibly also 3.) if I watch out for the content of my post. I got error 2. in 100% of cases when my post contained an apostrophe, a quote, or a newline. I also got it when the post was longer than 1000 characters.
Does this behavior ring a bell for someone? Is there something I could advise to the maintaner of the forum?
Thank you for ideas.