tcpayne

The difficulty with the firewall solutions – at least when I tested on my end – is that my Windows XP box has absolutely no software firewall installed, no privacy software, nothing of that sort at all (not even the Windows firewall). The only thing that comes close is NAV Corporate. But the problem occured only in IE, not in FireFox, on the same machine – and I certainly didn’t customize non-existent firewall software on the machine to allow one browser but not the other to send referer request headers.

Also, as usual, my Macs didn’t exhibit the problem, unless I turned off the referer request header in Opera. So there’s something in IE that’s blocking sending that bit o’ information, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.

I’m only seeing the issue when popup comments are enabled. With popup comments commented out, there’s no problem. That’s been the temporary fix for the fiancee’s blog (disable popup comments) since I can’t very well tell her users they must use Opera.

So what would happen if I just commented out these lines in wp-comments-popup.php:

if (!$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] == dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-comments.php’)
{
die (‘Error: This file cannot be used on its own.’);
}

As I said before, I know precisely jack about PHP. What’s the purpose for these lines? Is using the referer header merely an anti-spam device, or does it serve a larger purpose? Is the error message really caused by the referer header being not present (or malformed somehow) or does it just look that way?

The same lines appear in wp-comments-post.php… would I have to remove them from there as well?

More to the point, will I be crushed by a huge foot (Monty Python animation-style) if I just sorta remove those lines and see what happens?

Troy

I have been able to narrow this down a bit. I should say from the start that I know nothing of PHP and very little about HTML… but working from the code around the error message:

if (!$_SERVER[‘HTTP_REFERER’] == dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-comments.php’)

I figured that the referer request header might be involved here.

In Opera you can easily enable/disable sending that header. With the referer header enabled, I get no error message. With the header disabled, I get the error every time. Tested in Opera v8.0 on the Mac and v7.54 on Windows.

I’d love it if others could reproduce that result, just to make sure it’s nothing wacky on my end.

Using the steps outlined at https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Enable_Sending_Referrers however, does not eliminate the error in IE6 for Windows. The Windows machines are running XP SP2 and there’s no security software – even the Windows firewall is disabled.

Any ideas from the gurus? I can’t figure out how to enable sending the referer in IE.

Troy

I’m seeing this error as well on the fiancee’s blog at https://www.believemagic.com/journal. I get the error in IE6 SP2 under Windows XP SP2 on two different PCs (one is an actual PC, the other is a Virtual PC under MacOS X). The fiancee also gets the error from work under Win2k in IE5.5 (she thinks that’s the IE version, anyway). And one of her users mentioned it to her, which is how we found out in the first place (unknown OS and browser).

Safari 1.2.4, FireFox 1.0, and IE 5.2 on the Mac exhibit no problems. Similarly, FireFox 1.1 on the PC has no problems. But every time I try to click on any comment link in IE6 in XP, I get the “error: file cannot be used on its own” message. This includes posts that already have a comment or two posted, FWIW.

Is there a recent update to IE for the PC that would cause pop-up comments to go AFU? A security setting, perhaps?

I’ll have access to a few more machines at the university tomorrow – I’ll see if I get the error from there as well.

Troy