BuddyPress.org

Jeff, thanks for the extensive efforts to repro on your side. I have answers to your first two questions:

1. No other plugins

2. Default BuddyPress Home Theme

I will investigate the server logs.

The specific error that shows in the error log is

[Fri May 22 15:44:40 2009] [error] [client xx.xxx.xxx.xxx] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace., referer: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2840

I just clicked the link from an earlier post and the 500 error happened.

xx.xxx.xxx.xxx - - [22/May/2009:15:44:40 -0700] "GET /wp-content/mu-plugins/bp-core/images/mystery-man.jpg HTTP/1.1" 500 612 "https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2840" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) FirePHP/0.3"

the latter is from my access log.

My permissions are set correctly, that’s usually the first thing i check.

now onto a couple more of your questions:

Have you searched the WPMU forums for 500 Internal Server Error thread? I think this may be more related to you WPMu install than BuddyPress?

Yes, I have searched WPMU forums, and even posted on there my problem, but no one reponded. I was pretty sure that it was related more towards WPMU. But these errors only started happening a few weeks ago, after I upgraded to WPMU 2.7.1 and BP 1.0

Are you using some special permalink structure? That should not be causing the lack of 404’s but every bit of info helps.

No, everything I was using was either in the htaccess.dist and the wp-super-cache (which has since been taken out until i find the cause). The permalink structure that I use on http://sportsblognet.com is the “year/month/day/name” option, which is one of the standard ones.

Did you carefully follow the readme.txt file that comes with WPMU?

I just re-read it to be sure, yes, yes I did follow it.

Is this a new WPMU 2.7.1 install, or did you upgrade from an older version?

This is an upgrade from WPMU 2.7, it was first created with WPMU 1.3.3 over a year ago. We’ve been following buddypress since October of 2008 and have been using it since 12/08, when the first beta came out. I’ve upgraded pretty much everytime without problem. And these Internal Redirects only started after the upgrade to WPMU 2.7.1 and BP 1.0 at the beginning of May.

The offending party is usually Googlebot-images (but it has been others in the past).

I did what you said a disallowed googlebot-images with robots.txt, it seems to be working, but googlebot might only come through every 6-12 hours so can’t tell yet.

But even if that does work, I can easily recreate the error myself.

If I type in (which doesn’t exist):

http://sportsblognet.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/bp-core/images/mystery-man.jpg

I get a 500 Internal Server Error

If I type in (which doesn’t exist):

http://rotoassist.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/bp-core/images/mystery-man.jpg

It comes up as the proper 404 error

the rotoassist site is a regular WP 2.7.1 site on Site5 (one-click install type)

On another topic…is it good to create a ginormous robots.txt file? I’m wondering if that slows down your site at all.

And yes I use Firefox and have the Web Developer Add-on. The only info it gives me with the error though, is that it is a 500 internal error.

Another question…would you know anything about MySQL? Or do you know who I could talk to? I have some questions on our database and the speed of it.

Thanks for the constant help.

I think if you look at how many people (including myself) look at a BP site, it actually does seem reasonable to assume that people would conform to the questions and care about the answers. As I see it, rolling your own facebook is nice, but probably not entirely practical or necessary — once a true alternative pops up, there’s usually a standard alternative for a while until the next comes along.

Personally, I feel BP is wonderful for smaller niche communities where that structured social interaction is, in many ways, the selling point. A music site that asks “what are you listening to right now?” a cooking site that asks “what are you cooking right now?” etc. Connecting people along that shared niche interest, I think, provides value.

In some ways, BP already supports this by giving admins the option. I’m thinking specifically with respect to the profile options you have with categories and questions for users. “What’s your favorite song?” or “What’s your favorite food?” would be totally logical there, and I’d love to see (and plan to try to implement one way or another) the same thing for status.

It would be amazing to see it built in for status updates when that rolls out (which I’m hoping is still this summer). The ability to add fields, mark their importance, and even customize the way they render in search results and things would be very, very nice. Sort of like how you template a WP entry and can customize how it displays in various places. I realize all of that is much harder than a simple text area and pulling the most recent data out of the db, but it would add a lot in terms of flexibility for niche networks.

Thanks for the guidance on programming. I’ll figure it out somehow.

(I actually thought wire v. status was semantics too at first, but wire is more like facebook’s wall, where people can post and conversations can be two-way. Status is more personal for users, something larger and untouchable by others.)

Okay, thank you for helping me, I’ll try to go through your questions one-by-one.

First I’ll let you know what I have:

Slicehost

1GB slice

Ubuntu Hardy LTS 8.04

Running Apache, PHP 5, MySQL 5.0 (followed Pickeled Onion’s walk-throughs on how to set it up, I am by no means an expert, and my very first barebones VPS was this one.)

I help run http://sportsblognet.com where we have WPMU 2.7.1 and BP 1.0, along with bbPress 1.0-alpha6

Have you tried deactivating all non-buddypress plugins, wp-super-cache in particular?

I deactivated all but buddypress, feedwordpress (because our theme will break), wp-super-cache, and doncha’s domain mapping plugin. But maybe I will remove them all for an hour to see if any errors get through

I am removing wp-super-cache right now, but it was tough to get rid of the wp-content/cache folder because it was owned by the root user. But i got it deleted and removed the wp-super-cache stuff in the .htaccess and I’ll guess i’ll have to wait to see how that goes.

Have you tried using the default .htaccess file that ships with WPMU?

I just tried to, but it won’t let me.

My current working .htaccess (minus wp-super-cache stuff)

<FilesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">

Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Apr 2015 20:00:00 GMT"

</FilesMatch>



RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /



#uploaded files

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/$ index.php [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*wp-content/plugins.*

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2 [L]



# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*/wp-admin$

RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1/ [R=301,L]



RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d

RewriteRule . - [L]

RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-.*) $2 [L]

RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*.php)$ $2 [L]

RewriteRule . index.php [L]



<IfModule mod_security.c>

<Files async-upload.php>

SecFilterEngine Off

SecFilterScanPOST Off

</Files>

</IfModule>

and the WPMU standard one

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase BASE/



#uploaded files

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/$ index.php [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*wp-content/plugins.*

RewriteRule ^(.*/)?files/(.*) wp-content/blogs.php?file=$2 [L]



# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*/wp-admin$

RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1/ [R=301,L]



RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d

RewriteRule . - [L]

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-.*) $2 [L]

RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*.php)$ $2 [L]

RewriteRule . index.php [L]



<IfModule mod_security.c>

<Files async-upload.php>

SecFilterEngine Off

SecFilterScanPOST Off

</Files>

</IfModule>

it wont let me use the standard one, and the only difference that I can see is the expires header setting that i added.

Are there any PHP errors in your log files?

this is my current concern right now

Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error.

ALERT - canary mismatch on efree() - heap overflow detected

for the ALERT error, I contacted slicehost and they upgraded my kernel, they said that has fixed other people’s problems (fingers crossed – but no errors since they did that this morning) if that doesnt work i have to go through and install php without the suhosin patch.

most of the other errors are of spam scripts trying to signup and not finding wp-signup (i changed the signup name)

what are the other listed errors in your apache log?

That’s pretty much it.

EDIT: it’s about 30 minutes later and an Internal Redirect Error just showed up in my logs with wp-super-cache out, and all but buddypress plugins out. So it doesn’t look like its a plugin.

Jeff,

To answer your questions:

1. I recently installed a couple of plugins. I removed them all and the same thing is still happening.

2. I haven’t changed any settings for the main blog in WPMU admin

3. No errors logged

Any thoughts?

Jessica

Maythil–

I was advised by someone ON the forum to do it! I was making changes and asking questions, and was told by a moderator to be sure and “create a new theme” by “changing the theme name,” so that’s what I did!

And I did change the name back to the original, and as I noted in the last post, nothing happened. Still blank!

This isn’t an absolute disaster, though, since what I changed was on a test version of the site I’m developing, but if someone could outline the proper procedure for making a theme name change (I have only made minor modifications of the CSS files in my BuddyPress home theme), that would be great. Or point me to where I can find that information. Thanks!