872697 - Some team pads stuck in permanent "loading" screen

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations Graveyard :: WebOps: Other, task, P3)

Description

[Jacob [:Jacob]]

Our team has been coming across broken etherpads that remain locked in a permanent "loading" screen i.e.

This one - https://webmakers.etherpad.mozilla.org/ContentFormatsMakerParty2013

and this one - https://webmakers.etherpad.mozilla.org/bugzilla

This used to happen from a copy/paste where there was some evil hidden character inside the pasted text that would break the pads. I can't confirm that this is what is causing these pads to break, as I'm sure we've done plenty of copy/paste on other pads that haven't broken. Also I can't confirm that copy/pasting was done on these pads at all. I'm not so sure it was.

Any idea on how to prevent this would be most helpful, we are losing valuable work and since the pad URLs are no longer operational, so all canonical references that link to the broken pads have to be hunted down and updated which can be quite difficult.

Luckily I can access the info via the time slider, but when trying to migrate the text to a new URL via copy/paste or export/import - the new pad URL also breaks :-(

Comment 1

[:Atoll]

Verified this is still the case.

Comment 2

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

I've managed to save the contents of these two pads... but does anyone care anymore? It looks like no pads on this team site have been edited since 2013. I'm guessing the work here moved on to a different tool... Google Docs, maybe.


(And yes, both these two pads did have hidden/evil unicode characters, hence why copying their contents into a new pad would break the new one also. My saved copy has them stripped out.)

Comment 3

[:Atoll]

Leaving the needinfo in place to see if anyone still wants the content, but otherwise there's no further action to take here, so marking RESO FIXE to clear it from the Webops todo list.