Hey! I'm still a fuckin' infant on here so please excuse if this was already caught elsewhere/in the wrong section/I'm just being a dingus.
Apparently, my submission on the current summer battle is linking to an almost blank page, save for a couple of lines of text. Looks like maybe a submission ID and Level?
Is this a site-based error, or should I be doing do something on my end to fix?
Appreciate it.

huh thats actually interesting / weird and looks like a bug, yes

looks like information was erased from the database or something like that idk...

did you try to resubmit the entry? this might fix it
edit: well it was an idea :(

Got it! Glad I'm not going crazy haha.
I just tried resubmitting twice, and unfortunately no dice, at least from what I can tell. I thiiiink it went through since it said I leveled up after the submission? But again I'm not 100% sure myself.

yeah it was definitely resubmitted twice. it showed up in chat.
sad it didnt work :(
well, i think only the master himself can fix this, so lets wait until puke7 is seeing this

I've noticed this occurring on a few Lyceum articles as well, actually.

n00b s0z forum is also inaccessible, plus a couple of spam-related topics (starts with XP-Pen). In the topic cases, I get a number and "Level". In the n00b s0z case, I get a link to a topic (with last poster and picture)... and not much else.

oh! i noticed some n00b s0z threads were deleted, but i thought it were only some spam threads but looks like there's more stuff broken :o

we've got a couple other examples of this:

http://battleofthebits.com/academy/GroupThread/20953/XP-Pen+Artist+15.6+Pro+Display+Drawing+Tablet+monitor+Review/
http://battleofthebits.com/academy/Group/8/n00b+s0z/

I'm not really sure what is causing this. Hopefully, after I get back home in a few days, I can figure it out.

http://battleofthebits.com/arena/Entry/Float%27n/32043/

Has somethin to do with spambot probably?
Cuz i saw both lionstigersndice's battleart entry and spring's thread about drawing botbrs (which i participated in) had spambot comment on it and is now inaccessible

Possible abuse of Firki or something else? Could be deliberately messing up a query as well using some special characters, and thus would ultimately be malicious in intent.

comment page of gamejam3 is also broken https://battleofthebits.com/arena/Battle/3861

Decided to investigate for myself to see what could be going on.

My console is saying that the server is returning a 500 Internal Server Error.

Analyzed the response header and noticed that the last piece of HTML that is output is for a "badge_group". My instincts says that the cause is someone messing things up with their country data and generating invalid flags. Alternatively, the unknown flag code is malfunctioning.

https://battleofthebits.com/academy/Group/8/n00b+s0z/2/ is working (pages 1 and 0 aren't).

the broken pages only load partially so it has to be a backend/database issue while the page is loading, and I think this only affects pages that had spam on them (e.g. the n00b s0z threads). the botb accounts that posted this spam are most likely manually deleted from the database since the botbr pages for the spam accounts cannot be accessed (e.g. http://battleofthebits.com/barracks/Profile/Ludo+Chat/ ). however I don't think the actual forum posts and comments are fully removed

I'm guessing that when the page loads the backend script is trying to get the username, icon, country etc. of the spam post/comment and fails as this doesn't exist in the database.

probably could be fixed by writing an exception when the user data cannot be found and skipping loading the post/comment or removing the posts and comments manually if possible

wat argarak said

cleaned up the db
things look fixeded
let me know if we find anymore