Last modified: 2011-11-30 16:10:01 UTC
As pointed out by [[test:User:Chris 73]] in [[test:]] and [[test:Bug reports]], if a category page contains another category which is an ancestor of the former category, there is an infinite loop when loading any of the categories in the cycle formed by the categories as well as any page belonging to any of these categories. This is presumed to be due to the display of the "infinite" category hierarchy in the page being loaded. The edit links of the categories and pages in those categories work, though. Or else, this would've caused a denial of service as everyone (except developers. of course) would be prevented from viewing or editing the pages concerned.
Armed with enough bots (i.e. different logins/IPs), it could be possible to really do a DoS since server time is wasted in the infinite loop and reverting may not be able to cope with the bots. The DB could be made readonly and all that, but still that's DoS as I understand. Hence making severity blocker and marking as blocking bug 202 (in accordance with [[en:Wikipedia:Be bold]] :). BTW shouldn't there be some way to report security-related bugs "private"ly or some such thing?
http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Loop1?action=raw&ctype=text/css hangs but http://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Loop1&action=raw&ctype=text/css works.
*** Bug 817 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Copied from bug 817 comment 1: [[test:WikiHiero]] refers to [[test:Category:Ancient Egypt]] which refers to [[test:Category:Abcd%C8]] which refers to [[test:Category:Ancient Egypt]] which triggers bug 875 which is why [[test:WikiHiero]] is inaccessible. [[test:Template testing]] transcludes [[test:WikiHiero]] using {{:WikiHiero}} which is why that page is also inaccessible.
Hey this seems to have been resolved (try the URL for this bug)! Why's no one making any noise about this?
I believe Tim Starling fixed it. Need to be checked.
I can't reproduce this either, having tried 1.3.10, 1.4beta6+ and HEAD on a local wiki, as test.wikipedia.org isn't available. Marking as fixed based also on comments 5 & 6 above.
