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A Geek in Beantown: A big old :p to WordPress

  • Jul. 26th, 2006 at 11:03 AM
Blog update

I have no problem with people choosing to use something other than :MT: when they blog (because different packages work better for different people, same thing goes for OSen, browsers and editors -- I totally get that), but dammit if it doesn't piss me off when I go to leave a comment (from the laptop) and I get the "you can't post comments from your laptop because it doesn't send some information that I need, sucka" error message. I almost never go back and leave a comment on those posts when I am on my PC later.

So :p to whatever cofiguration option causes that.

Update: More information error message from a friend:
Error: One of the WordPress spam-prevention systems is not letting you post because you did not send at referer (sic) header. Some firewalls block referers for privacy reasons. WP requires a referer because some comment spammers do not send it. So, either turn off your firewall for a bit, or whine about it on LJ ;).

Actual error message:
Error: This file cannot be used on its own.


[A Geek in Beantown] (Permanent link to this entry and comments from non-LJers)

Comments

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[info]badlittlemonkey wrote:
Jul. 26th, 2006 03:36 pm (UTC)
Wow, I have no idea what would have caused that — I've been using WP on my sites for a year and a half and have never seen that before. I wonder if that person's got some bizarre plugin they're running that might have caused it...? And I can't imagine what bit of info it possibly could have wanted that it wouldn't get from you just 'cause you were on a laptop. BizARRE.
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[info]jasra wrote:
Jul. 26th, 2006 03:38 pm (UTC)
It's something to do with the laptop firewalling system and some piece of info it's not sending to the comments script. The error is "Error: This file cannot be used on its own.". If I disable the firewall, I can post. But yeah, I'm not so interested in disabling the firewall just to leave comments. :p
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[info]jasra wrote:
Jul. 26th, 2006 03:40 pm (UTC)
PS: You don't have whatever setting it is that causes that error. :)
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[info]novalis wrote:
Jul. 26th, 2006 05:09 pm (UTC)
Is that better?
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[info]novalis wrote:
Jul. 26th, 2006 05:11 pm (UTC)
(I am requesting permission to remove the error message entirely -- this is a temporary measure.)
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[info]jasra wrote:
Jul. 26th, 2006 05:29 pm (UTC)
You are a funny man. :p

New error message for the curious:
"Error: One of the WordPress spam-prevention systems is not letting you post because you did not send at referer (sic) header. Some firewalls block referers for privacy reasons. WP requires a referer because some comment spammers do not send it. So, either turn off your firewall for a bit, or whine about it on LJ ;)."

(And I'd been trying to comment on another site this time, so it's not only you guys.) :)
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[info]greyduck wrote:
Jul. 26th, 2006 10:12 pm (UTC)
Aha! - http://wordpress.org/support/topic/23942

Distilling down that thread as best I can: WP installs configured to use a popup window for comments are subject to this error, under what appear to be varying conditions. The trick is that the popup script is checking for its referer (which, of course, should be another document on the blog) and bailing when that referer data isn't there (because it thinks that someone's trying to call the popup page directly).

Not that I have a solution for this, mind you, but maybe this will help someone cleverer than myself to do so. I don't use the popup window method, myself, so... *shrug*
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[info]jasra wrote:
Jul. 28th, 2006 02:58 pm (UTC)
Most of the WP sites I visit don't use popup comments. Anyway, no biggie. :) I just was annoyed and mostly needed to get it off my chest.
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[info]dajt wrote:
Jul. 27th, 2006 11:53 pm (UTC)
Is that really the firewall, or is it an http proxy? (Possibly being transparently inlined by the firewall) Most firewalls I know of don't know how to change the contents of datastreams like that. If it is a proxy, maybe you can configure it to send a referrer for those URLs. Maybe even a nice referrer like http://www.whitehouse.com :-) Then you can find out whether WP actually checks the referrer for validity, or happily accepts any referrer as good enough.
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[info]jasra wrote:
Jul. 28th, 2006 03:01 pm (UTC)
That's entertaining. I should figure out how to send a funny referrer!
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