Error message

[Nick]

Hi Actinic

We have at least two customer sites that are showing the following error message in the error.err logfile:

"Internal Errors = The site configuration has been updated by the shop operator while you are checking out. Please navigate back to the product pages by pressing the Browser Back button and try again or contact the site owner. "

The text of the error message implies that the shopper is seeing this error message during the checkout and it may mean that some sales are being lost. (The sites are not being updated at the time the error is logged)

The error message is occuring about 2 or 3 times every day and I think it has started since the sites in question were upgraded to 6.1.3

The two sites in question are: www.accessorystore.co.uk and www.furnituretoday.co.uk

Any ideas please?

Regards

Nick

[Ben]

Hi Nick

What version of the software were you using before the upgrade? Do you use any referrer.pl links as a route to your site? I'm not sure what is causing this error, but we had a problem a while back where entering the site from a referrer link would terminate all session files active at the time. The new referrer.pl (available here (http://www.actinicdownloads.com/referrer.zip)) fixed this.

Ben

[Nick]

Hi Ben

Thanks for your reply.

The two sites I mentioned (www.furnituretoday.co.uk and www.accessorystore.co.uk were both running 6.1.2 previously).

However, we have just upgraded www.eliteelectronics.co.uk from version 5 and this is giving the same error.

The problem is also occuring on www.talbotfashions.co.uk and www.ascolights.co.uk - there are other sites too. In fact it seems to affect all the sites that we have upgraded to 6.1.3

Some sites use referrer.pl and some don't.

We've upgraded all of the sites in question with the new referrer.pl script that you advised me about. Alas, the problem is still there.

Any other ideas?

Thanks

Nick

[Ben]

Nick, I'm checking with development on this and will feed back their response.

[Ben]

Could you try clearing your session files - easiest in Help | Troubleshooting | Purge Session Files. You should be aware that this will terminate anyone's shopping session at the time and they will have to start again, so it would be wise to do it at an expected 'quiet' time. Once they are cleared, note the time and date and monitor any occurrences of the error from then on.

[Nick]

Hi Ben

We've tried clearing down the session files, but the problem still persists (it seems on every site that we've upgraded to 6.1.3)

At the time that we looked on the individual sites, the sessions files that were there, before we purged them, were not older than 24 hours.

Any other suggestions?

Regards

Nick

[cdicken]

It must be something to do with the way none of your stores use an 'acatalog' folder.

What method have you used to hide the 'acatalog' from the shop URL?

[Nick]

Thanks for your reply Chris.

However, it is not just sites that have the acatalog directory hidden. The problem is also on the following sites:

www.furnituretoday.co.uk
www.accessorystore.co.uk

Plus some others. Neither of these sites have the acatalog directory hidden.

On the following sites, to "hide" the acatalog directory, we have simply made 'acatalog' the document root, set-up an alias to point to cgi-bin and removed 'acatalog/' from the path of the acatalog URL in network settings.

www.eliteelectronics.co.uk
www.talbotfashions.co.uk
www.ascolights.co.uk

The error message described at the top of this thread occurs on all of these sites, regardless whether the acatalog directory is hidden or not.

The common factor is that the we only noticed the error message when these sites were upgraded to 6.1.3

Thanks

Nick

[cdicken]

OK Nick

I'll pass this back to the development team.

[Sly9er]

I am also getting the same error log messages. I am still on version 6.1.2.
I have also noticed that when ever customers just go shopping, without logging in, that the links from a site search results group produce an error message as follows:
"A General Script Error Occurred
---------------------------------------
Error:
---------------------------------------
Press the Browser back button and try again or contact the site owner"

Any thoughts on this one?

[Nick]

Anyone at Actinic,

Any news on this problem?

Our customers are concerned that they may be losing orders.


Cheers

Nick

[cdicken]

Nick/John

The developers have taken a look at your sites and have been unable to see what might be the matter from just looking at the online stores.

Would you be able to send me a snapshot of an affected site that I can send to the team? Email it to me at communityadmin@actinic.co.uk. If it is too huge, then FTP it somewhere and let me know where I can download it from.

Problems like this are notoriously tricky to pin down so please be patient with us as we investigate.

[Sly9er]

Hi Chris,
I will get a snapshot to you as soon as I can get to it.
Right now I am kind of in the middle of some other
clients web sites, and such.
If you do come up with something from Nicks Snap]
shot, in the mean time, I would love to see your
comments and suggestions.
Hope to hear form you soon - John

[cdicken]

Nick

Here is the response from the development team (I think James in support has sent you this as well)

-----

Re: www.accessorystore.co.uk

The customer has manually set the checkout URLs (2 off) in the
Act_Primary.html template.

The action in the 2 URLs is set to 'Start!', but the upgrade to 6.1.3 changed the prompt in Actinic (Phase: -1, ID: 113) from 'Start!' to just 'Start'. This was to fix a bug on Zeus servers. As a result of this 'fix', the manually written URLs do not work because the Perl is comparing 'Start!' with 'Start'.

Have the customer change the 'ACTION=Start!' to 'ACTION=Start' in Act_Primary and update the site.

---

So you need to change any hard-coded checkout URLs to remove the exclamation mark.

It should also work if you add the exclamation mark back into the prompt mentioned.

This is going to be added to the knowledge base to help people in future, and I will also put a separate posting on the community here to tell people about this.

[NickD]

Hi All

I am experiencing exactly the same problem. There was definitely no update of the website taking place when this was encountered. I'm using Catalog 6.1.3 DHBA, previously it was 6.1.2.

I have not (a) done anything with referrer.pl (b) hidden the acatalog folder (c) changed any URLs in Act_Primary template.html.

If it were anything to do with Act_Primary.html, would it not be the case that the fault would always be there? It seems in my case to be intermittent - I cannot reproduce it myself for example.

I'm concerned about lost orders - I realise I'm joining this thread quite a long way into the discussions, and that quite a bit of work has been done already, but I'm not quite sure the fixes that have been described are definitely the final solution. I can't help thinking there's something lurking in there still.

I can make my error.err file or a site snapshot available if that helps.

Any input anyone?

Regards

Nick Dobson :confused:

[NickD]

I modified my product line this morning and uploaded the site again - and now I can reproduce the problem myself (see image file). In fact I now can't place any orders at all, so this has become a major issue.

Actinic - please help!! :mad:

Regards

Nick Dobson

[NickD]

I just noticed another minor oddity which may or may not be related to this - during a shopping session, the cart contents and cost are shown in a small area on a sidebar. Normally these are correct. But I noticed that when I proceed to the checkout before encountering an instance of the problem, they are shown as set to zero. But after the problem is encountered, if I close the window & re-enter my site, they are then shown as having the same contents as when I tried to checkout.

Possibly related?

Nick