PM Box Full

My PM box is full but I every time I try to delete a message and confirm and then go back to the main page, nothing happens. I've deleted messages many times in the past so I'm not sure what the issue is.

Not the first time we've seen something similar to this in the past (issues with PMs in general) -- I'm guessing it's related to the PHPBB3-10605 bug, or something thereabouts:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=9181

We still have not upgraded phpBB as it involves downtime (and we're most definitely not going to do it over the holidays, in case it goes awry and things are broken with no one around). I'll see about scheduling some maintenance in early 2015. We're currently using 3.0.10, so you're welcome to review the full ChangeLog to see if the issue has been fixed in either 3.0.11 to 3.0.12 (latest 3.0.x stable); I'd link to it except currently it looks like the server area51.phpbb.com (official support location for phpBB) is having major issues of some sort, and links like this don't work/result in PHP errors at the very top of the page (easy to miss). If you feel like going through changes between 3.0.10 and 3.1.x and see if the fix is in there, that'd be helpful too.

Are you getting this at the top?

No, I am not getting that at the top. My assumption is that I have no incoming messages to me. I was merely trying to delete older ones but I can't due to the issue at hand. Currently, my box is at 100% used up in memory (350/350 messages).

phpBB here is set to allow up to 350 private messages total for each PM box. In the case the default inbox becomes full (i.e. is holding 350 messages), phpBB here is configured to "hold back new messages". Quoting the documentation (link to 3.1 documentation):


You being unable to delete a PM is indeed a problem, possibly it's because the box is already full (and that would be a bug in phpBB if that's the case). To see if this helps things at all, I've increased the PM maximum from 350 to 450. Please see if you can now delete old messages -- I've changed absolutely nothing else.

I've attempted to delete a message three times. When I was taken to the screen to confirm that I wanted to delete the marked messages I clicked on "Yes". I was then taken back to my inbox and nothing happened; it still says 350/450 (78% full). So that didn't work, either. I guess at least I can send messages now since it was increased to 450. Thanks, though I still cannot delete messages. --ShaneM

I can't seem to reproduce this. I myself had 226 of 450 messages, and I was able to delete one successfully (so now down to 225/450). I may have to lower the number of messages to 225 just for testing (but this could impact everyone, because there is no per-user setting), but I'm doubting that is the issue at this point because I increased it (from 350 to 450) to give you ~100 slots of space and there was no improvement in the behaviour.

Can you try the same procedure in another web browser, or clear all cookies and sessions and cached data in your existing browser? There have been complaints about server-side sessions not always working correctly since the server move back in 2012, but it's something that's been very difficult to debug, and I'd guess that would manifest itself in the same way.

I'll also see about going through webserver error logs to determine if anything there is appearing. Going through the phpBB changelogs would still be a worthwhile thing to do. Things like this usually turn out to be actual bugs in phpBB.

Edit: Yes, I'm thinking this has to do with sessions. When I deleted a message myself, this was what transpired on the server URL-wise:



1. Viewing my actual inbox
2. Viewing the 5th (last) "page" of my inbox. At this point is where I checked the checkbox, then pulled down the "Delete marked" selection and clicked Go.
3. Verification/confirmation page with Yes/No buttons. Chose Yes.
4. Page where I was told the message was deleted. You can see the confirm_key stuff.

Now here's what yours has (excluding all the /favicon.ico fetches):



1. Viewing the inbox
2. Presumably attempting to delete some messages (can tell from the POST used here), or maybe this is the confirmation page.
3. Not sure what is going on here with the style fetch (maybe another tab at the same time?) -- but the important thing to note is the session ID in the URL (sid=573674c625dfbd6b399f99d9c133a25e). That does not happen for me, and it almost certainly refers to an old/incorrect session, which phpBB will silently treat as "do nothing" if it doesn't exist (as I understand it), i.e. a no-op.
4. This would be the "messages were deleted" page, as confirmed by the confirm_key. However, again note the injection of a session ID in the URL (same session ID as mentioned in #3).
5. Another style fetch -- and this time for a different session ID.

So this is probably related to session problems, especially if you had no other tabs open to the nesdev forum at the time -- and if that's the case, this is the same thing thefox and some others have seen in the past. Sessions == cookies in this case. The server tends to have a lot of session files laying around leftover in /tmp, but which ones are for nesdev is unknown.



I don't see any errors in the webserver error log during this timeframe that pertain to nesdev.

I would suggest clearing your entire browser cache, sessions, cookies, and restarting the browser and I bet the problem goes away (until it happens again in the future). Also, if you are using bookmarks of any kind anywhere, please make sure they do not contain the sid=XXX stuff in them.

As I read more about cookies and sessions on phpBB's site, I realise that their cookie mechanism only supports one domain, so I hope you're accessing the site as forums.nesdev.com and not something else? The webserver configuration doesn't give me insights into this, sadly.

I usually use Firefox. I tried your suggestion on IE11 to no avail. (I closed Firefox and waited 10 seconds before logging on in IE11.)



Tuneup Utilities automatically cleans my web browsers and cookies for me every three days, so I'd assume that that's most likely not the issue. I even took off my IP server blocker to no avail. (Hide My IP). I disabled my "Encrypt My Connection with SSL" and "Hide User Agent" and "Hide Referrer ID" and still I'm at 350. --ShaneM