I am getting "Oops! Something Bad Happened!" quite often while editing posts

Question

I am getting quite a lot of Oops! Something Bad Happened! while editing existing posts. It seems to occur only when trying to update posts, not when creating a new one. It seems to occur when I first create a new post, then immediately after saving click the "edit" link to change it again, and then try to save those changes.

One example of error page URL: https://stackoverflow.com/error?aspxerrorpath=/posts/2662048/edit-submit/32cc6a03-b1e3-4146-a382-679e32ab67e6

If I press the back button and try to submit again, I get the same error again. If I go back to answer list and refresh the page, the editing works.

I am using Windows Vista and Google Chrome. This does not happen every time, but often enough to be annoying. This error has started to appear only recently.

I am also experiencing errors in ajax stuff like voting, see this question, for more details.

Edit: I got this error again after about 3-5 tries in SO. HTML comments have this error msg. URL for error page is this https://stackoverflow.com/error?aspxerrorpath=/posts/2767030/edit-submit/ff34ea58-e917-411e-92bc-a45f59710553

<!--
Actual error:
XSRF validation: Request form value 'fkey' did not match CurrentUser.XSRFFormValue
--> 

Edit: I experimented with editing tags. This problem occurs with Google Crome 4.1.249.1064 (45376), but does not occur with Firefox 3.6.3. I made same steps in both: make a search, go to question, edit tags, click back buttons until back in search results, go to question etc. Repeat many times.

I do not have any extensions installed in Chrome. I used same Vista machine with Firefox and Chrome. So is Chrome losing my cookie all the time, or what is wrong? I don't see how this could be networking related, like Atwood suggested.

Answer 1

Can you give us consistent repro steps? We can't reproduce this.

edit: I added the actual error message to the HTML of the error page in an HTML comment. View source on the error page and look for:

<!--
Actual error:
This is a test exception generated by SimpleErrorHandler 
1.0.3764.33883. Please disregard.
--> 

So, provide me that. I suspect this is XSRF stuff you guys are running afoul of, as we suppress all those "errors".. they're caused by networking problems 99% of the time.

edit: We did find a small bug that might have caused this in rare circumstances, for users who tend to switch IP addresses rapidly. Let us know if it's any better after today (May 14 '10).

Answer 2

If a press back button and try to submit again [..]

Does this imply you're using that Back button for your first edits as well? If yes: that is not supported on most websites. After posting your post, use the "edit" link to make changes. Do not use the Back button to try to submit again.

Answer 3

This is a test to submit an answer after 20 minutes of inactivity. Also, I only see the error message for a fraction of a second before the browser goes to a blank screen looks like its loading a new page but never loads. Im running the latest firefox

Answer 4

It does seem to be some sort of internal session timeout. Clicking Back and resubmitting the form that threw an error (post edit, profile edit) only results in the same error being thrown again, but if you call up the form anew (losing everything you typed) you should be able to submit it that time. However, you can also find that you get forcibly logged off and get a CAPTCHA page come up, or simpy "Page Not Found", where the site has kicked you off without actually noticing. Getting "Page Not Found" instead of "Please log in" is quite worrying.

Unfortunately, since the site displays the sort of hopelessly unhelpful error message that anyone here should be ashamed of, it's very hard to guess what might be going on. The error message does also contain a comforting note that it's SuperUser's fault (that's the site I was on), and that the error has been logged and will be investigated (or words to that effect), so, since no-one is able to do this, does this suggest that the logging is completely inadequate for determining what's happening?