# Empty category about topic is crashing my browser tab
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [3월 21, 2019, 5:12오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269 "2019-03-21T17:12:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 15
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@bartv](https://meta.discourse.org/u/bartv)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 5:12오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/1 "2019-03-21T17:12:35Z")
We have a weird issue where one ‘about’ page is crashing the browser. I can’t figure out how to debug or even solve this - some ideas would be appreciated!
To reproduce:
1. Tested in Chrome, Safari and Firefox
2. Visit [Blender Artists Community](https://blenderartists.org/safe-mode) to disable all our themes and plugins
3. Navigate to Categories \> Jobs
4. **Warning this step will crash your current tab** : navigate to the ‘About the Jobs category’ topic.
---
### Author:  [@awesomerobot](https://meta.discourse.org/u/awesomerobot)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 5:14오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/2 "2019-03-21T17:14:51Z")
I’m not sure what the problem is, but I see this error in the console
```
Could not view topic TypeError: Cannot read property 'get' of undefined
at _application-2a1d858e65ec0b4525cdf5e0b11710ee777a37442b3db4ccec07b79396ed4e02.js:26658
at h (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:56524)
at C (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:56702)
at E (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:56687)
at e.invoke (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:26887)
at e.flush (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:26790)
at e.flush (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:26963)
at e._end (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:27447)
at e.end (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:27180)
at e._run (_ember_jquery-716f4989c2eb49ad65163ffb56185407340c2b195b81b9392b62cde3e992cade.js:27492)
```
---
### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 5:19오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/3 "2019-03-21T17:19:45Z")
Is this topic from yesterday related?
> [@"About" pages crashing our Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-pages-crashing-our-discourse/112058/):
>
> Hello everyone. We have a problem here in our Discourse. When we enter some of the “About” pages, it simply locks up the tab and the forum breaks (I mean, not literally. It just reload, and reload, and reload… until I close the tab). There is a pattern: All “about” posts that are crashing the forum have been created by “system” user You can check here two pages: [Created by System](https://www.guj.com.br/t/about-the-privado-category/12/1)[Created by a regular administrator](https://www.guj.com.br/t/sobre-a-categoria-infraestrutura/302308/7) It’s a brazilian forum. Hope u guys don’t mind it. What can we do to resolve…
Note that [safe mode](https://meta.discourse.org/t/53504?silent=true) doesn’t disable everything, the only way to be totally sure is to briefly comment out plugins and rebuild.
---
### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 5:26오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/4 "2019-03-21T17:26:17Z")
This topic has 0 posts or an empty post so, it looks like a regex goes crazy.
Can you query this topic and posts in the console or database?
Compare [your topic](https://blenderartists.org/t/about-the-jobs-category/294130.json) and [a normal one](https://meta.discourse.org/t/about-the-community-category/67750.json).
The post\_stream.posts element in the json.
Maybe this is related to translations @gerhard ?
---
### Author:  [@bartv](https://meta.discourse.org/u/bartv)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 6:12오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/5 "2019-03-21T18:12:09Z")
I think you’re on to something. I ran the following query in the [Data Explorer](https://meta.discourse.org/t/32566?silent=true) and came up with 0 results - so apparently I have a topic with no posts. I wouldn’t be surprised if this has been the case since we migrated from vBulletin.
Is there a way to fix it? Can I generate a new ‘About’ topic?
```plaintext
select *
from posts
where topic_id = 294130
```
---
### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 6:18오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/6 "2019-03-21T18:18:25Z")
Try posting to it with the API. That will either error out or fix it 😛
---
### Author:  [@bartv](https://meta.discourse.org/u/bartv)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 6:19오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/7 "2019-03-21T18:19:57Z")
Do you have any hints, tools or code snippets to help me with that? 🙂
Wait, I think I’ve got this. Let me try and learn 🙂
---
### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 6:25오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/8 "2019-03-21T18:25:25Z")
> [@bartv](#):
>
> tools
>
---
### Author:  [@bartv](https://meta.discourse.org/u/bartv)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 6:31오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/9 "2019-03-21T18:31:57Z")
I went for the curl solution and that fixed it. You’re awesome, thanks for your quick help!
For future readers: first create an API key in the user admin for your account, then run this from the command line. You’ll find in-depth API documentation [here](https://docs.discourse.org/).
```plaintext
curl -X POST "https:///posts.json" \
-H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data;" \
-F "api_key=" \
-F "api_username=" \
-F "topic_id=" \
-F "raw="
```
---
### Author:  [@gitCommit](https://meta.discourse.org/u/gitCommit)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 6:33오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/10 "2019-03-21T18:33:20Z")
Anyone can say anything about this topic?
---
### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 6:35오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/11 "2019-03-21T18:35:21Z")
Opa,
Use the same workaround that @bartv used.
We will try to find a root cause in the meantime. I suspect of [FEATURE: Locale support for seeded categories and topics by gschlager · Pull Request #7110 · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/7110) plus migrations leaving an inconsistent state @gerhard .
I believe both GUJ and BlenderArtists came from imports.
---
### Author:  [@riking](https://meta.discourse.org/u/riking)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 9:34오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/12 "2019-03-21T21:34:28Z")
This (problems with 0-post topics) has happened enough times that I think adding an additional mitigation is worth it - e.g. the server-side TopicView giving the client an error message if it’s asked for a topic with no posts.
---
### Author:  [@gerhard](https://meta.discourse.org/u/gerhard)
#### Post date: [3월 21, 2019, 10:13오후 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/13 "2019-03-21T22:13:33Z")
I fail to see how the changes in PR #7110 could cause such issues. There’s no migration that touches arbitrary categories. And the fixtures for special categories like Staff, Meta and Lounge should work the same as before. The wizard and the “Replace Text” functionality also updates only the About topics of those categories.
There must be another reason for missing posts in the “About category” topics or, if the posts are missing for a long time, why the browser crash didn’t happen before.
---
### Author:  [@sam](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sam)
#### Post date: [3월 22, 2019, 2:40오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/14 "2019-03-22T02:40:18Z")
Our weekly schedule should clean this up just in case. Categories without “About category” cause a lot of pain.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [4월 21, 2019, 2:40오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/empty-category-about-topic-is-crashing-my-browser-tab/112269/15 "2019-04-21T02:40:19Z")
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