From: Ben <westbywest-AT-riseup.net>
Date: 18 Jan 2007 22:30:15 UTC   (03:30:15 PM in author's locale)
To: dadaIMC Discussion <dadaIMC-AT-lists.dadaimc.org>

Still observing problems, old and new, on the radicalendar sevice:

1. The problem with captcha validation consistently failing might be
linked to the user's cookies. I noticed that upon opening the public
event submission page today (using Firefox for Debian), the default
start date was 1/11, which happened to be the last day I viewed
radicalendar on that particular machine. Clearing the Firefox cookies
apparently fixed, leading me to believe the problem with captcha
verification failing is actually a problem with radicalendar not
properly handling stale cookies in the user's browser.

2. The "check future dates" button on the event submission page throws a
javascript error: "1169269200;116935560." This error happens in Firefox
and Konqueror, and it actually prevents the event submission page from
working (disables submit button, can't recover w/o reloading page and
losing form data).

3. It is still not possible to edit dates (i.e. correct erroneously
posted events) via the radicalendar admin interface since no captcha
field appear on the event edit page, causing captcha validation to fail
consistently. This bug is recent (last few months).

3. I still have an IP erroneously blocked by radicalendar.org. This
block appears to be controlled by the dadaimc CMS itself, indicating
that it was either intentionally placed (???), or the block was somehow
triggered by too many consecutive page views. This block has been in
place for several days, despite my emails to webmaster-AT-radicalendar.org
requesting it be removed. (Sending them another email after this.)

Given the number people who use still use radicalendar (and thus the
number of peeps affected by these problems), it would be nice to see
sort of acknowledgment that yes, these bugs are being worked on, or at
least they are known. Even a response like "yes, aware of these bugs,
but too busy to address them" is better than no response.

When there is no response, I have to assume the radicalendar service has
been abandoned by its maintainers, and that I should consider doing the
same myself. Radicalendar, being a fork of dadaimc whose code is not
made publicly available, is essentially a *closed-source* project.
"Closed-source" and "unmaintained" are a very difficult combination to
work with. It's a great calendar service, and it's unfortunate to see
it fall into disarray.

Ben wrote:
> There still appear to be intermittent problem with the captcha
> verification on the Radicalendar service.
>
> In particular, trying to edit events via the admin interface fails since
> the event edit page has no captcha field, causing to always fail the
> captcha verification.
>
> Also, barely half a dozen page views of the radicalendar admin interface
> (for which I have valid username/password) has apparently caused by IP
> to be explicitly blocked. This feature is apparently new, since I've
> used that admin interface w/o problem in past, to correct misposted
> events and such.
>
> At any rate, this IP blocking now prevents me using (or even viewing)
> radicalendar at all. What is the threshold beyond which a particular IP
> address gets blocked? Can this threshold be tuned so that people using
> admin access don't find themselves suddenly blocked?
>
> Thanks.
>
> (P.S. I'm sending blocked IP address to radicalendar webmaster separately.)
>
> Ben wrote:
>> Visitors to stlimc.org have not been able to submit events to
>> Radicalendar for at least the past 2 days. Event submission fails with
>> the following error:
>>
>> Edit cancelled. The submission failed to include the proper token
>>
>> ...which apparently means the captcha validation failed, even tho the
>> captcha field was correctly filled in. What's odd is that this captcha
>> bug does not occur when directly submitting events via radicalendar's
>> admin interface.
>>
>> I do notice that the starting date on the anonymous event submission
>> page is 2 days in the past, whereas the starting date on the admin
>> submission page is correct. Is one of the radicalendar servers out of sync?
>>
>

--
Ben West
westbywest-AT-riseup.net
savetheinternet.org
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