Last modified: 2009-07-14 06:16:51 UTC
Three people, enwiki users RichardRothwell, Apeiron, and Oaktree_b, reported a permanent fatal error that prevented them from voting. They each appear qualified to vote and appeared to be following the process correctly. In each case when they arrived at SPI they recieved an "Internal Error" message along with the "Set $wgShowExceptionDetails = true;" boilerplate. This was a persistent condition occurring every time these accounts attempted to vote. Their report suggest to me that the associated account data at SPI was erroneously or incompletely generated. Possibly the database got overloaded when they first visited and something was dropped? Whatever the cause these editors were totally blocked from voting. Since this was reported only 3 times with >18000 ballots cast, it is obvious that whatever caused this condition is an unusual and hard to replicate problem.
There's no way I can isolate this without any exception message or backtrace. I'll keep an eye out for potential exceptions but I can't promise anything.
Then you should probably at least change configurations to allow the backtrace to be displayed. As it is they are given an error message with no usable details.
