Closed Bug 841735 Opened 11 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Prevent self-redirects in wiki documents

Categories

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: General, defect)

All
Other
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: lorchard, Unassigned)

Details

(Whiteboard: [specification][type:feature][selected])

What problems would this solve?
===============================
It's possible to insert a REDIRECT into a wiki document that points back at the document itself and forms a redirect cycle. These are troublesome because 1) it requires a `?redirect=no` added to the URL to edit and 2) browsers aggressively cache these redirects and that makes it hard to correct.

Who would use this?
===================
All editors and readers of MDN

What would users see?
=====================
When a self-redirect is detected, display an error rather than executing the redirect.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
Users would no longer get caught in self-redirect loops.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
Note that bigger redirect cycles (ie. A->B->A... A->B->C->A...) are not in the scope of this bug. We could look into that eventually, but the immediate issue are self-redirects (A->A)
See bug 818477 for an example of this problem.

I wonder why people are creating these redirects in the first place. I can't imagine anyone would do so intentionally. Maybe something interface-wise is leading people astray?
Whiteboard: [specification][type:feature] → [specification][type:feature][selected]
(In reply to John Karahalis [:openjck] from comment #1)
> See bug 818477 for an example of this problem.
> 
> I wonder why people are creating these redirects in the first place. I can't
> imagine anyone would do so intentionally. Maybe something interface-wise is
> leading people astray?

It's probably an accident, most likely a copy-paste error while building the redirect. I'm starting to rethink my original opposition to adding UI for inserting redirects. We probably ought to add one after all.
Great! Can you open a bug for that?
(In reply to John Karahalis [:openjck] from comment #3)
> Great! Can you open a bug for that?

Done; see bug 849853.
Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/kuma

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/a3202893d5742bbf9d921d708ca025194601e8b1
fix bug 841735 - Prevent self-redirecting

https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/1e3527606c6648ba68580ff890abb1fd7d98603c
Merge pull request #929 from darkwing/self-redirect-841735

fix bug 841735 - Prevent self-redirecting
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Product: developer.mozilla.org → developer.mozilla.org Graveyard
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