Conversations and Random Additions

Lykaon

Has anyone else had the problem where they create a conversation with one person and then upon creation, other people are magically added?

Many of my users have complained about this and I had it happen to me as well. I entered a user whose name started with c and it randomly also added a user whose name began with b. I am 100% sure that I only entered one name.

It does not happen reliably. I made a conversation with the same "c" user and the "b" user was not added the second time. It's very strange behavior that I wish I could get a better handle on. I personally use the conversation system very little, but my members like to use it a lot.

It's a real issue in terms of privacy. If I create a conversation intended for a certain recipient and it adds random other people (seemingly random at least), then I pretty much can't trust the conversation system at all.

Anyone else seen this? I'm a a few versions behind. Was this a known fix along the way?

Lykaon

I've updated to the latest version of Vanilla and this is still happening. Today, a conversation with 2 users somehow managed to add almost all of the other users in the forums, causing emails to go out to nearly all of my forum users.

I have turned off the Conversations Application for now. It's not just my users accidentally typing in random people. I've seen it happen with my own eyes that I type a single user and multiple other users are magically part of the conversation.

Since no one else seems to be reporting this problem, I realize it must be isolated, but does anyone have any ideas that could point me on a path of recovery?

luc

Which browser?

Lykaon

Users have reported it in IE, Firefox and Chrome. I've only personally tested it in Chrome. The form itself never shows more users than what I type. But when the message is actually displayed, seemingly random users are in the conversation.

To make matters worse, it doesn't *always* exhibit this behavior. Sometimes it works as expected.

The only unorthodox thing I'm doing is using Lighttpd with rewrite rules that I wrote to make everyting work. Could something be going wrong there?

Lykaon

In Chrome, I just did the following test:

1) Started a Conversation
2) Entered myself (Lykaon) as the only recipient
3) Hit 'Start Conversation'
4) Conversation has the following people in the conversation:
* Lykaon
* Gomer1188
* Chuck.Sarah

Okay. Same test again and the people in the conversation are:
* Lykaon
* Ritchie922
* alexg
* Curtis
* tylerp
* sevine
* agent_walker74

It's just mind-boggingly random. I'm happy to approve a user to my forums to watch it in action.

Lykaon

I turned off URL rewriting and that made no difference in the behavior. I have another instance of Vanilla running on a different server and it does not exhibit this behavior, but it is only a test installation with two users.

I still suspect that this is somehow related to not using pretty URLs *WITH* Apache rewrite rules. When I right-click the "Start Conversation" button and open it in a new tab, it doesn't seem to ever add random users.

Lykaon

I isolated the problem.

This happens whenever I have a plugin that goes through and "prettifies" things. HtmLawed, HtmlPurifier and Emoticons all cause the same behavior. Without those, the conversations work fine.

I'm not sure what they're doing that is clashing with my setup, but I actually even reinstalled vanilla from the ground up and was able to replicate the problem. My guess is that it's related to not using Pretty URLs+Apache.

Now that I've gotten this far, do the authors of plugins that work that way have any ideas?

Lykaon

Sorry to keep bumping my own post, but I really need help here.

Here's what I've done:
Installed Apache on a different server
Set up pretty Urls with Mod Rewrite
Install Vanilla
Test the install
Imported my data
Deleted all plugins

The problem still occurs. Regularly, and easily repeatable. So with that troubleshooting all done, it leads me to believe that I have some sort of "bad" data in my database somewhere that's causing something to go haywire.

luc

Custom theme?

Lykaon

I do have a custom theme, but I was able to replicate the problem with the default theme. I literally did nothing but install Vanilla and then drop my data in instead of the install data.

I seem to have caused the problem to stop happening at a cost... I emptied the conversation, user conversation and conversation messages tables. Since then, I have been unable to replicate the issue. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.