Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

'''Description:''' 

1A.  The problem occurs only when using the Firefox browser.  

1B.  I am using Firefox latest (3.03) on Mac OS X 10.5 (but prior Firefox and OS X builds were affected). "Load images" for the Wikipedia URL is enabled (but images from any different or related domains are not loaded).  Firefox's "Warn on Redirect or Reload" is enabled.  Cookies are allowed from "wikipedia.org".   Firefox's proxy is not enabled.  The popular NoScript add-on is set to allow JavaScript from Wikipedia.org, and wikimedia.org are whitelisted.  The popular AdBlock and FlashBlock add-ons are also normally in use.  I do not usually allow pop-ups, but it seems to make no difference to the problem.  

2.  I try to edit an article or create a new section, and click on "Save Page".  

3.  I get a variety of non-functional results;  

3A  Sometimes I am thrown to the Captcha area, but Captcha text never appears, whether I've tried to include a URL footnote in my edit or not.  Sometimes I can provide URLs as footnotes to the text even though I can't see the Captcha and just look at the article and it's there.  Other times, to provide helpful URL information, I have to hack the URL parts of the web address, , e.g., "htt ETC w3 ETC and then put the rest of the URL.  Otherwise, can't get through at all.   


3A.1  Sometimes if trying to submit a foreign URL I get the URL ending in "submit", e.g., 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wiki&action=submit 

This does show the box for entering the Captcha characters, but never the characters.  

Nonetheless, my edits frequently appear, complete with the foreign URL, despite my never having entered the Captcha characters; 

3B  Most often, lately, instead of the Captcha view, I am thrown to a variety of error pages;

Examples:  

3B.1 First frequent error message:  

"Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand." 

The URL for this message is from the same page I was trying to edit, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wiki#New_section (when I was trying to edit "New Section" on that talk page).   

(Happens sometimes when trying to create a new section, sometimes at random other times).  



3B.2  Second frequent error message: 

"Forbidden 
You don't have permission to access / on this server."  

(I am a good citizen of Wikipedia, and have never been criticized, let alone barred)


3C 
When I navigate back to the main page of the article by hitting the back button, scrolling to the top of the page, and clicking the "article" tab, the article appears, with my edits, notwithstanding whatever error messages I may have been thrown to.  

Especially unfortunately, the article at this point is usually -- maybe always -- found on inspection to be defaced by newly inserted garbage text, always the same garbage proxy message, and always overwriting 2 to 4 characters of article text.  The garbage text is: 

"Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0"

(This message rarely appears in my edit -- it appears somewhere nearby in the article).  


3D

When I diligently try to remove the garbage text and restore the lost letters in the article via further edits, I can, but each time I do the same garbage proxy message appears elsewhere in the article.  


Steps to Reproduce: 

One crucial step to reproduce is that the user must be in Firefox, my strongly favored browser.  I suspect that certain security settings particular to Firefox may be part of the problem -- a setting of Firefox, NoScript, etc.  If it is a security setting, though, I haven't been able to find it, though I've tried and tried.  

I suspect Firefox or NoScript because in Safari on the same computer, the problem does not appear.  And Safari has the same firewall settings (Little Snitch Firewall, Mac OS X firewall), same virus checker (ClamXav), etc.  

So maybe there is a meta-redirect involved that I could allow?  Maybe another images site that is required?  Something I can & must allow?  

Anyway, once you are in Firefox, you just go in and try to edit and it happens.  I recognize this must be rare, which is why I put the importance as not that high.  But even rare problems are problems.  And this one does bugger article text and allow the insertion of URLs (sometimes) without entering Captcha text.  

  

I'm sorry I can't provide minimized, easy-to-follow steps that will trigger the bug, nor any special setup steps.

But that doesn't mean it's not real, and it's important to me. But it may call for thinking outside of the box in terms of a solution.  The solution may be user education, rather than code.  Three suggestions:

A)  Somewhere, is there perhaps a list of the functionality that must be enabled, and from which URLs, for editing on Wikipedia to function properly?  If not, it should be created and made available to new users and in trouble reports.  If so, it should be made more easily and readily available.  

B)  Might users be enabled to write trouble reports in a little separate wiki created for that purpose, and to help one another find workarounds?  Developers who were assigned a trouble report that didn't seem to lend itself to code-based solutions could put the bug description over there.  Either other users might be able to help, or they might say "hey, me too" or they might make other comments that helped point to a solution either in code or out.  

C)  A wiki where users could list every error message that they saw while trying to use Wikipedia could be a powerful way to sort errors that result in particular messages, and to suggest solutions.  If, e.g., an Apache function often interferes with Wikipedia use, it could be valuable to Wikipedia to tell its users how to work around it.   

Thanks for all the good work.