If it only was the pictures...

i've been trying to post a topic on the font id forum and it always gives me an internal error...
This also happened the last time i tried to post, several months ago...

Any solutions?

(sorry for hijacking a bit your thread, but i can't even create my own post to let the administrators know!!)

Andreas — I understand your frustration and that it seems like no one is paying attention. From what I understand, however, the IT guys at Punchcut are unable to reproduce many of the image upload issues that various users encounter. That makes it very hard to troubleshoot and fix. They have been trying.

When all else fails, you can always place an image in a post using an HTML <img> tag. I realize that this is inconvenient. I also realize that this may not be so easy for folks who aren’t comfortable with HTML, but I bet they’re a small minority here. For those who don’t have their own server to host images, there’s always Flickr or a similar hosting site.

Not perfect solutions, but ways to work around these stubborn bugs.

As for the limited character support in the sIFR headlines, someone at Punchcut will have to respond about that. I don’t know what their limitations are or what guides their decisions with Featured Font sponsors about glyph subsetting.

Dust — Your issue is completely separate. You got server error messages because your ID request was flagged by Akismet as spam and was sent to a moderation queue. I can’t tell you why this happens, because I don’t really understand the Akismet algorithm. It is imperfect at best. I wish the system returned a more informative message to users, but that’s not an area under my control.

Your forum message has been cleared now and should be posted, and I’ve whitelisted your account.

Agree it's very inconvenient being unable to upload images. I posted a bug report thread three months ago, and would have appreciated some response (thanks for the background, Kent). Otherwise there's little point reporting things. I realise this is a volunteer-run site, but several of us have donated in the past and it's not clear why we should do so again.

Kentlew, thank you for answering. So I’m still in the hope of things getting better … at least.

Hi guys,

Thanks for your patience and sorry for the delay on a solution. At the moment I'm currently working on a resolution and it and will keep you posted.

Thanks again,
Rhett

I suspect the sIFR thing is a coding mismatch; a sink expecting UTF-8 is getting ISO-8859-1 instead.

I reproduced the issue in both Firefox 8.0 and IE 9 on Windows7. The problem seems to be related to the size of the image. I don't know if this pertains to the pixel dimensions or the amount of data. The original jpg failed with the 500 error, but when I re-saved it, the upload worked. I tried jpg, png, gif; the image format didn't seem to matter.

They have been trying.

Are you suggesting that they're simply incompetent?

I also reproduced this issue, with a different image in Safari 5.1.2.

I apologize for being snarky. One possibility is that the Flash upload component depends upon a component that Punchcut didn't create in-house. That would actually be likely I think for this kind of site.

WIN 11,1,102,55 on Safari 8
WIN 10,3,183,7 on IE 9

> Are you suggesting that they're simply incompetent?

No. I was trying to convey that the pleas have not simply been ignored.

I doubt the issue is pixel dimensions, since there are plenty of images still being uploaded by users that push the pixel size boundaries.

The default maximum file size per upload is 1 MB. I thought that was stated somewhere, but perhaps users aren’t aware. (But why would someone be uploading a >1MB file anyway?) Do you recall how large your original file was, Carl?

I did just notice a setting in the Admin section that Drupal annotates with “The default maximum size of all files a user can have on the site.” I wonder if users who are having the upload issue are frequent posters and have surpassed this “lifetime” limit?

I don’t think that would explain all cases, but I’ll check with Rhett and the guys and see if maybe we should change that setting.

I seem to recall that there are two separate and perhaps unrelated (or maybe not) issues — one is uploading and inserting images in a comment; the other is uploading and attaching files (especially PDFs) in an initial post. I think Andreas’ latest frustration was triggered by the former, while Ben was having problems with the latter (or maybe both?).

I have always suspected that the Flash uploader might be a culprit in the current configuration, but I don’t know enough about Drupal.

> why would someone be uploading a >1MB file

Sometimes graphic files can be much larger than you'd expect. Have you asked folks to send their troublesome photos to you by email? That way you could check the file size and also see if you're able to reproduce their upload problems.

(I've never had any problems posting photos here.)

I just generated a 268K jpg screen grab (nothing of great interest) that returned onHTTPError: 500. I then saved at 194K and the same. I then reduced to 105K and it went through.

More precisely here one of the files

-rw-r--r--@ 1 boyer staff 193585 1 Dec 19:42 geo4.jpg

and here is the message

As for the first question, if I tell Safari that the encoding is Latin1, I see this when I look at http://typophile.com/user/17347

Title ok, but not the rest, of course...

The 'normal' sized file I tested varied depending on the file format, but all versions were less than 200KB. The above image is 102KB, and it works. I tried another jpg which is 132KB and it causes the error. I have a 117KB image that also would have uploaded. So, the magic limit seems to be 117KB > x > 132KB.

This was at home on Mac OS 10.7.2, FireFox 8.0.1, Flash MAC 11,1,102,55.

1MB is a reasonable limit for images. If its a web-friendly format like jpg/png/gif, 1MB would typically be too large for useful display. That said, I use a Wiki at work, which provides a really cool 'thumbnail' option. The article gets a small, re-sized image and a link is auto-generated to load the full file. That kind of scheme would be ideal for Typophile because users sometimes want to share minute details. It is a community of design wonks, after all.

This might be an opportunity to explore different uploader options. Perhaps there's something commonly used with Drupal with similar functionality that doesn't depend on Flash.

Hot-linking, or whatever the web kids call it, is wrong because the content is not contained. Typophiles refer to old content much more often than other web communities. If a pertinent image goes missing from an archived thread, the value could be lost. It might not seem obvious if you ignore other discussion sites, but the signal-to-noise ratio is probably higher here than any other site I visit.

I'm not even sure I'm a true Typophile--I just find John Hudson and Hrant's banter interesting.

I know absolutely nothing of Flash but I can at least use the Safari inspector to look at what is happening. I simply modified the string at the line beginning with txt=Andreas and replaced what was encoding Stötzner by the corresponding utf-8 string, and here is the display: the title is fine, the full name also. It just seems the string in the flashvars needs to be adjusted.

If a new image uploading setup is going to be installed, I hope it's one that can deal with spaces in the filenames.

My guess is that the right string is Andreas%20St%C3%B6tzner, that I obtained with encodeURI('Andreas Stötzner') in the Safari inspector, and that flash 10.2 displays correctly on my MacBook Pro (with Safari 5.0.6 on OS X 10.5.8)

File names need to have no spaces or non-standard ascii glyphs. I have noticed a change in file sizes accepted by Typophile, though. It used to be any file less than 550 pixels wide would upload. Now, there appears to be a vertical limit as well. Perhaps there is a total file size limitation as well? How many K that is? I don't know. I have noticed some problems with higher resolution jpegs or mostly PNG files.

Non-standard ASCII? *blink* *blink* Quite certain this is an oxymoron. Has to be meaning 'outside the ASCII subset of alphanumerics, period and underscore [A-Za-z0-9._]'. That subset is file system safe as far as I can tell.

Sorry to be the "moron", Té, at least I am not also an ox. ;-P
I was just too lazy to type: " 'outside the ASCII subset of alphanumerics, period and underscore [A-Za-z0-9._]'"

You know what I meant. The biggest bugaboo is the % sign which gets placed by default when the space key is typed.

But my point is that in 2011 we should have uploading programming sophisticated enough to convert submitted filenames into workable ones rather than just failing.

'Oxymoron' doesn't mean 'contradiction in terms'? Oh well... live and learn. Or was it learn and live? *looks blearily into monitor* I'll think about it sometime later...

"'Oxymoron' doesn't mean 'contradiction in terms'?"

Of course it does. Forgive my errant attempt at humor.

The "onHTTPError: 500" is different than the problem with spaces or UTF-8 characters in the file name. The latter results in: "Could not copy image. Error".

But my point is that in 2011 we should have uploading programming sophisticated enough to convert submitted filenames into workable ones rather than just failing.

Exactly.The latter issue reminds me of a statement made within Flickr's API documentation. It says something like "The Flickr API expects all data to be UTF-8 encoded" in giant letters. This is the baseline/expected behavior for the web circa 2011. A Chinese type designer should be able to name their files in Chinese. The majority of human beings do not speak English, and modern type design potentially involves all written language. So, it seems to me that Typophile should be able to handle this stuff. Again, I'm not suggesting that Punchcut is capable of creating an uploader. They just need to find/license one that works properly for their site and implement it.

No worries, @dezcom. I happened to be rather sleepy at that time, hence that bleary look.

I think I have the solution for titles: the string sent to flash in the flashvars is currently built with escape which does not encode utf-8 characters the way flash is expecting them. This happens at line 561 of the file http://typophile.com/files/js/js_906ebf552a4d48f32d6b19cd75bded6f.js in the definition of the function toFlashvarsString. In order to change as little as possible the code, I would simply replace escape with escape_utf8 at line 561 and define escape_utf8 as follows:

// encodings for lower characters  returned by escape
//    that differ from those returned by encodeURI
function nkch(c)
{
  var nkc = {};
  nkc["~"]="%7E"; nkc["!"]="%21"; nkc["'"]="%27";
  nkc["("]="%28"; nkc[")"]="%29"; nkc["#"]="%23";
  nkc["$"]="%24"; nkc["&"]="%26"; nkc[","]="%2C";
  nkc[":"]="%3A"; nkc[";"]="%3B"; nkc["="]="%3D";
  nkc["?"]="%3F";                  return nkc[c];
}

// Same as escape for lower characters (from 1 to 127)
// Same as encodeURI above 127
function escape_utf8(s)
{
  rexp=/~|!|'|\(|\)|#|\$|&|,|:|;|=|\?/g ;
  return encodeURI(s).replace(rexp, nkch);
}

The behaviour should stay unchanged on characters from 1 to 127.

Michel

Here is a better comment and a more compact code for nkch

// escape's encodings for lower characters
//    that are left unencoded by encodeURI
function nkch(c){ nkc= {"~":"%7E", "!":"%21", "'":"%27",
  "(":"%28", ")":"%29", "#":"%23", "$":"%24", "&":"%26",
  ",":"%2C", ":":"%3A", ";":"%3B", "=":"%3D", "?":"%3F"};
  return nkc[c];
}

I just tried to find out the maximum size accepted; a file with 132117 bytes causes the error; another one with 128246 does not. I searched the web and found that typophiles are far from being the only ones to experience that error 500 problem; I also found one analyst that solved a case that (at least superficially) seems to match ours: MaxRequestLen (131072); his maximum was 131072 bytes. I gather from his comment and others' that the cause may not be easy to pinpoint.

Sorry to post my message in this thread, but I have the same problem with Dust (start of topic):
I can't post any new topics, I can only comment on existing ones.

Every time I try to create a new topic (in any forum) it fails with:

500 Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, itadmin@punchcut.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache Server at typophile.com Port 80

Am I black-listed too as a spammer?

PS1: I also get the same error when I click on [Preview] of new topic creation.
PS2: If this is the case (blacklisted) there should be at least a different.more informative message and a different e-mail to handle these cases

Fivos —

Yes, your announcement did get sent to the spam moderation queue. I don’t know why the spam engine picks some legitimate posts from some established users to flag.

Your latest Build thread has been approved, and I’ve whitelisted your account now so hopefully you won’t encounter this problem in the future.

I’ll talk to the Punchcut IT guys, but they may not have easy access to setting the messages when Akismet flags spam.

Meanwhile, I know Rhett is working on the image upload issue. I pointed him to Michel’s latest link, which looks promising.

Thanks for your continued patience.

Kent -
thanks for whitelisted my account :)
Fivos

Beautiful picture of typeface!
This is the one Christian Dior uses (slightly changed, made the ‘h’ higher) as logo typeface, isn’t it?
It’s a case that I have on my desktop a picture of an old perfume bottle (it’s in the Dior book, Collection Rolf Heyne) and I see the character almost identic.
Very nice!
Did you make a digital version of it?

For uploading pictures I use often GIFs that are smaller and permit greater picture measures.

Stefan

Exactly the same problem here

What is the HTML syntax for inserting a picture?

Image upload is working fine for me.

What if its a picture on my HD?

Hard Drive?

You can't really link to an image on your own pc unless you have that pc set up as a server.

Just upload it to an image hosting service like file den or image shack.

I managed to upload an image earlier today, though IE9 wouldn't do it and I had to switch to Chrome (Firefox doesn't work either AFAIK). Might be worth trying other browsers, Chris.

Chris, is there any chance you can change the title of this thread from "A question for Berk Williams" to "A question for William Berkson" ? Or forward this request on to someone who can? It wold be much appreciated.

On a similar note, if someone could see a way to stop all of my new posts from getting flagged as spam, I'd appreciate it. This has been happening to all my new thread attempts in all forums for several months now, and I'm not having any luck trying to report it through (what I assume are) the official channels...