"New forum topic" and "Active forum topic" blocks list bad links

Oh, incidentally, the "new comments" block right below those two blocks does produce the correct URLs with the "forum" term in the path.

Automatically closed? The problem is still the same.

Specifically, Drupal produces urls like:

http://www.orange-papers.org/node/1681

when it should be:

http://www.orange-papers.org/forum/node/1681

Notice that the word "forum" is missing from the first URL.

This is still not fixed. Please understand that it is an intermittent bug. Just looking at the forum once, and seeing that it is working correctly now, is not the answer.

At this minute, 1:20 PM PDT 28 June 2012, it is malfunctioning again.
I get URLs like:
www.orange-papers.org/node/1777

...when it should be:
www.orange-papers.org/forum/node/1777

Unfortunately, I cannot see any pattern to the malfunction. There is no apparent or obvious cause for this.
It's so irregular and intermittent that it might be because the moon is in Aquarius or something.

And it is malfunctioning now, at 2:39 PM PST, 29 June 2012.

And it is still malfunctioning now, 3:40 PM PDT, 16 July 2012.

I did nothing to fix the links. The problem is intermittent. Some days it's okay, and some days it isn't.
And this has been going on for a long time now. And it's really frustrating that it is unfixable.

And today it's back to malfunctioning.

Some script changed the status of this problem to "fixed", but it's not fixed.
It's malfunctioning right now.
See:

http://www.orange-papers.org/forum/node/2315

and try any of the "New Forum Topics" on the left-hand side of the page.

Also, "Active Forum Topics" also lists bad URLs.

It's always the same thing: the word "forum" is missing from the URL.

yes, I've been confirming the bug for 6 months now.
Yes, it's version 7, the only one I ever installed.
And yes, it's intermittent. I have not been able to find any common denominator to why it malfunctions sometimes and not others.

As far as issue priorities goes, the bug makes the forum unusable. Isn't that a high enough priority?
I'm getting 2.5 million hits a month now, and a lot of complaints about broken links, and all I can tell people is that I'm working on it.
It would be a horrendous job to have to switch from Drupal to something else, but the problem cannot
continue unfixed for another 6 months.

okay, it just started malfunctioning at 4:52 PM PST. One minute it was fine, the next minute, consistently bad URLs.

Okay, yes, pardon my impatience. It's just that I've been fighting with this thing for a long time and getting nowhere. I'd try to fix it myself if I were a PHP programmer but alas, I'm not. C and assembly language.
and Basic and Fortran, but not PHP.

The theme is the drupal default that came with the package. I haven't changed that.
The version is 7.0. I just found that there are new versions (7.15) available when I checked for the version.
That leads to the question of whether I can install the updates without blowing up the existing forum?
Just over-write the existing files? Will that destroy all of my configuration?
And advice on that ?

Just to make things more interesting, I just got this email, from last night:

It seems that you may have been hacked... Either that or drupal is acting up.
When I try to make a new blog post the link is dead and will not allow me to post.
The same goes for the links at the bottom of all posts that say the number of
comments on blog posts, or the number of new comments. The links are dead.

But let's not worry about that until I get the updates installed.

Okay, thanks. I'll check that out.

Okay, the update went very smoothly. The system is now running 7.15.

Alas, the same bug has just come back -- 2012.09.11 1:44PM PDT

So I'm not out of the woods yet.

And it's doing it again at 4:00 PM 13 Sept 2012.
It's totally random. One minute, all of the links worked fine. The next minute, nothing but 404 error messages
from those "active forum topics" and "new forum topics" blocks. And it's always because the word "forum" is missing from the URL.

Oh, and for those that asked, this occurred while I was logged in. I don't know if that has anything to do with it.

There is no such term in the .htaccess file.

The whole file consists of:

# Use PHP5 as default
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

By the way, the bug is back.

If someone wishes, they can have the entire contents of the "sites" subdirectory. That is the only thing that is customized or non-standard. When I installed the 7.15 update, everything else got erased and replaced.

Okay, I found the file. It's long. The relevant section says:

# Modify the RewriteBase if you are using Drupal in a subdirectory or in a
# VirtualDocumentRoot and the rewrite rules are not working properly.
# For example if your site is at http://example.com/drupal uncomment and
# modify the following line:
# RewriteBase /drupal
#
# If your site is running in a VirtualDocumentRoot at http://example.com/,
# uncomment the following line:
# RewriteBase /

That looks all commented out to me.

I am using Drupal in a subdirectory: ~/public_html/forum , which is really a symbolic link
to ~/public_html/drupal-7.15

I am guessing that the suggestion is to insert this line:
RewriteBase /forum

Yes?

Okay now, this feels like a dumb question, but I have to ask:

How do I restart Drupal? With a lot of tasks, you can type something like
"kill -1 1" or "kill -INT 39355", to get it to restart.

What is the magic command for the Drupal server?

I put the new "RewriteBase" line into the file, but nothing has changed because Drupal has not reinitialized itself yet.

== half hour later, maybe something changed because the bad URLs just stopped. But they are so intermittent that it will take a few days to know what is really going on.

Alas, as of 4 October, I'm still getting the bad URLs.

Okay. I'm not sure how I get a list of installed contributed modules. I don't recall downloading any. That is, I just installed the Drupal package. And I recently re-installed the new 7.15 distribution. And that's it. It's clean, with no add-ons or additional modules.

I'm not sure how I change the passwords only in a .tar.gz copy of the sites folder. I think it will be easier to just go change the passwords after archiving.

You can sure have a copy of the sites subdirectory.
I just made one. It is at:
http://www.orange-papers.org/orange_papers-sites.tar.gz

I will try a different browser the next time it happens. I know it is happening to other people because they complain when it happens.

Alas, it's still doing it. See:
http://www.orange-papers.org/forum/node/2831

And click on any of the links in "New Forum Topics", or "Active forum topics", on the left-hand side of the page.

Also, I just tested it with both Firefox and Google Chrome, and get the same results.

RE:
Were you logged in at the time? Or an anonymous user?

I've tried it both ways and it seems to make no difference.

And it's still doing it, randomly. One hour, it's producing bad URLs, and the next hour, okay.

Well, it's still doing it. I thought I had a fix. I posted this notice to my forum:

News

We all know about the annoying bug in Drupal where it drops the word "forum" from a URL and produces a broken link which yields a 404 error message.

http://www.orange-papers.org/forum/node/1300
becomes
http://www.orange-papers.org/node/1300
which does not work.

I found a work-around that seems to be working for me so far: That is to put the "forum" word in front, where it doesn't get lost. (Technically, we are making the forum a subdomain of the Orange Papers, rather than a subdirectory.) Enter the forum with this URL:

http://forum.orange-papers.org/

That produces URLs that look like:

http://forum.orange-papers.org/node/1300

Because there is no trailing "forum" word, the bug never appears.

It's working for me so far.

Have a good day now.

====================

And it looked like I had a good work-around.

But today, I get goofy URLs like:

http://forum.orange-papers.org/forum/node/3248

Now it's adding the missing trailing "forum" back in. So now I have two "forum"s in the URL, and that doesn't work either.

==================

Later: Although maybe this work-around works. I went into the forum subdirectory
and put in a symbolic link:
ln -s ../forum forum

and now

http://forum.orange-papers.org/forum/node/3248

works. And if Drupal drops the trailing "forum" term, it will still work.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Nope. Nice try, but that doesn't work either. When somebody tries to get into the forums by clicking
on "forum" in the upper left-hand box, it logs people out and invites them to log back in and then adds the word "forum" onto the end of the URL. And you still cannot get back into the forum.
You just end up with goofy URLs like:
http://forum.orange-papers.org/forum/forum/forum/forum/node

So the symbolic link is out.

still doing it.

Reassertion of issue. Bug is not fixed, issue is not closed.