i know i am going to probably be banned for this but image uploading and image thumbnails have been broken for many hours with no fix in sight so i should probably go public about what happened
i have a stupid image on my computer. it is a screenshot of a north korean soldier taken from google streetview. i tried to make this image absurdly big at one point but my computer crashed halfway through. now i have a massive corrupted jpg.
i tried uploading this to chacha because i was curious how the site would handle it. i would’ve tried to responsibly disclose this before attempting it but i did not know how to anonymously contact the moderation team, since dms are disabled for new accounts. this inability to reach out to the staff anonymously is also why i’m forced to make this a public post instead of trying to inform them by dms, because i can’t dm them and i do not know how to reach them otherwise. if i can suggest anything from this situation, get rid of the account age limitation on dms, or allow new accounts to still message site moderators.
it would also be much more professional for the site to have a dedicated email address you can contact for security that has a rapid-response, as is standard on most other major websites that have elevated security risk, as chacha does.
whenever i uploaded the image, even before posting it, the site gave me a json error: “unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data” and then proceeded to crash. this downtime started at 3:58 PM EST and continued until roughly 4:03 PM EST.
even after the site recovered since then, it is impossible to upload any new images, thumbnails aren’t being processed, and any attempt to access old images times out. sometimes you can get a single small thumbnail to load but it takes forever
my guess is that the image processing server is continuously looping on that one corrupted image or something along those lines, and making it slow to the point of timing out on anything else. it probably needs to be purged from the database, but this also needs to be fixed in general otherwise it will just happen again the next time a bad actor has a similarly messed up image to break the site with.
i acknowledge that posting this could lead to more harm, but i feel that since image uploading is already broken (i’ve tried to post it again and it hasn’t crashed the site, it doesn’t go through at all), and since this hasn’t even been addressed or acknowledged for many hours, it’s important to point this out.
i apologize for the hassle, i did not expect it to cause any problems that would go on this long
As someone who’s worked as a sysadmin, banning you for this would be an unbelievable level of shittiness of the parts of the admins, if anything you should be sending them a bill for your unpaid QA hours. I kid, I kid of course. But seriously, endusers are constantly doing stupid shit that breaks sites (And then do it again, and again, and again, after each time its fixed because “it didn’t work the first time” ) and never file a bug report or probably even know what a “bug report” is. I seriously probably woulda cried tears of joy if I came across someone not only giving a heads up of even “hey, this thing I tried to do didn’t work and now your site is broken”, but also being able to explain exactly what they were doing and how it caused it to break.
Don’t worry. no one is getting a ban hammer for this. but for the record, please don’t gray-hat us without a heads up first.