489632 - Personas revert to the default on 404

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Mozilla Labs Graveyard :: Personas Plus, defect)

Description

[Dan Mills [:thunder]]

Unfortunately, server-side problems (such as the ones we experienced today) can cause 404s as a transient error.  This effectively causes large numbers of users' personas to revert to the default persona.

Although 404 is a permanent error in the HTTP spec, the add-on should be more resilient to this problem because of the number of affected users.

Some options:

* Keep retrying for longer
* Keep retrying indefinitely (treat 404s as a temporary error)
* Revert to the default but keep pinging the other one (then surfacing the option to switch back to it somehow)
* Try a "known good" url and if that fails too, then present a server error somewhere ("personas is temporarily down").

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Another option would be to retain the data files for personas that are removed from the server, but update their JSON to include something like status: removed.  The extension could then positively affirm that the persona has been removed instead of simply assuming it based on the absence of the file.

That does mean doing GET requests instead of HEAD requests on those files, but they're small, so I think it's a small price to pay for this kind of positive affirmation, and it's a simpler and more robust solution than having the client implement an algorithm for retrying.

Comment 2

[Ryan Doherty (:rdoherty)]

We cache personas and no longer revert to default on failure.