ConwayLife.com

Recently, I've noticed that any URL slug containing the whitespace character (%20) on LifeWiki causes a 403 Forbidden error.

Examples:
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Eater 5
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Cloverleaf interchange
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Jason's p22

They're supposed to redirect to a page with all the %20 characters turned into the "_" character (e.g., https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Jason's_p22). However, I've recently noticed that it simply doesn't. This is causing some broken links as these links with whitespaces are often linked from the forum using the wiki tag. It might also cause some inconveniences while browsing the wiki.

carsoncheng wrote: March 30th, 2023, 8:57 am Recently, I've noticed that any URL slug containing the whitespace character (%20) on LifeWiki causes a 403 Forbidden error.

Examples:
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Eater 5
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Cloverleaf interchange
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Jason's p22

They're supposed to redirect to a page with all the %20 characters turned into the "_" character (e.g., https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Jason's_p22). However, I've recently noticed that it simply doesn't. This is causing some broken links as these links with whitespaces are often linked from the forum using the wiki tag. It might also cause some inconveniences while browsing the wiki.

This does seem to be new and unwelcome behavior. There are all kinds of places where I've relied on the automatic conversion of spaces to underscores, and that no longer seems to be working.

Wikipedia accepts links with spaces:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular%20automaton
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Cellular%20automaton

Several days ago I made the link LifeWiki:Tiki bar in a forum post, and (if I remember correctly) I checked the link and it did work at that time. It might be because I misremembered, or because the link handling actually changed in the last few days. (I already edited that forum post to fix the link.)

Thanks for the report -- there was a recent Apache security fix that caused this problem (see here for info). Fortunately it's an easy fix, and it's now fixed.

Nathaniel wrote: March 31st, 2023, 8:51 amFortunately it's an easy fix, and it's now fixed.

I am getting this whenever I attempt to submit an edit to OCA:2×2 (adding a spaceship collection and noting the c/3 diagonal speed limit), I thought it was a momentary thing (as happens occasionally) but it has persisted every time I've tried.

Fortunately, I recovered the edit's contents, so nothing was lost by the page overwriting itself, so if you can reproduce and fix this, I will try to submit it again.

Very occasionally in the past (not more recently than two months ago, I don't think), during unexpected downtime, the server has destroyed my edits' contents due to the error page having the same URL and clearing the cache, maybe there is something that can be done to avoid this?