WordPress 2.5 and http error codes

March 30, 2008 by Michael

Am i the only one who’s annoyed that WordPress 2.5 sends a http 500 code if a commentor doesn’t fill in all required fields? Any Internet Explorer 6 or 7 user won’t see any error message but a “this page cannot be displayed!” page. Stupid decision.

Otherwise, the update went smooth as far as i can tell.

Edit: Oh dear… To me it seems that IE6 shows a browser default page everytime and IE7 sometimes displays the WP error page and sometimes not. If anyone can confirm this?

Edit 2: It’s silly. The Internet Explorer masks all 500 pages if their content is below a threshold of 512bytes with “User friendly messages”. User friendly your mom. The user can turn this off as described here but i don’t think that all IE users will do this just for the WP bloggers.

Summarizing it: It’s a plain stupid idea to use the http error 500 code for errors generated by user input as some users just cannot read them as the messages are not displayed to them.

5 comments

  1. Andrew Ellis wrote:

    I completely agree, this is a horrible mistake and should be corrected. Its more of IE’s fault over WordPress, but maybe WordPress could implement a fix that will prevent this from happening.

    Posted on April 14, 2008 at 6:32 PM | Permalink
  2. Michael wrote:

    I think this isn’t IEs fault at all… He’s just presenting it in a retarded way. Its the fault of WP developers who use an internal server error as some kind of weird way to tell the user that somethings missing.

    Posted on April 14, 2008 at 7:50 PM | Permalink
  3. Benedikt Kristinsson wrote:

    WP use HTTP500 to tell the user that something is missing. This is really weird. It gets even wierder when you have a http basic authentication for the wp-admin directory and decide to password protect a post.

    When WP sends out the http500 message, IE grabs it and shows a “friendly” message and the user wont know what the heck went wrong. sf

    You can make apache trick IE so it never shows those stupid messages. (google is your friend)

    Posted on June 19, 2008 at 12:18 PM | Permalink
  4. matt wrote:

    All you need to do is add an image to the wp-comments-post.php which will take it over the 512bytes, I thank you !

    Posted on July 11, 2008 at 4:41 PM | Permalink
  5. Michael wrote:

    Matt: This is the wrong way of doing it. Fixing symptoms on a thing thats obviously broken (still broken in 2.6).

    Posted on July 17, 2008 at 10:53 AM | Permalink
One Trackback/Pingback
  1. […] Wenn einer mit WP 2.5 einen Kommentar schreibt und die Felder nicht vollständig ausfüllt, denn gibt WP einen HTTP-Fehler 500 zurück. Ja richtig, einen internen Serverfehler. Der wird im Internet Exploiter natürlich […]

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