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Mozilla support forum is malfunctioning, Mozilla cannot be contacted

  • 16 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 21 views
  • Last reply by AliceWyman

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As user MSEL, I have received random email notifications to a Thunderbird support forum thread that I have nothing to do with and never replied to. User Lunaea asked a question, and user Matt replied. User Matt's reply was duplicated as my reply. Mozilla posted Matt's reply to Lunaea, first as my reply, then duplicated it as Matt's reply. Or Matt somehow figured out a workaround and reposted with his user name, rather than mine. Again, I have nothing whatsoever to do with this thread, and never posted to it, other than my posts trying to figure out why I was mistakenly included.

Earlier today, Mozilla had a notification that it is conducting system maintenance. Perhaps this glitch is a result of the maintenance. As of 6 pm PST, the notification no longer appears.

My attempts to contact Mozilla went in circles, due to their bureaucratic firewall against contacting them directly. Mozilla has turned into an unresponsive hydra headed monster like Google. All contacts lead back to support forums, yet Mozilla does not have a support forum to report flaws to its own support forums. Hence I am posting this problem, which is a Mozilla systems problem, not a Thunderbird problem, here, as Mozilla provides no other place to post it. You may review the problematic thread at

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1192360?utm_campaign=questions-reply&utm_medium=email&utm_source=notification

As user MSEL, I have received random email notifications to a Thunderbird support forum thread that I have nothing to do with and never replied to. User Lunaea asked a question, and user Matt replied. User Matt's reply was duplicated as my reply. Mozilla posted Matt's reply to Lunaea, first as my reply, then duplicated it as Matt's reply. Or Matt somehow figured out a workaround and reposted with his user name, rather than mine. Again, I have nothing whatsoever to do with this thread, and never posted to it, other than my posts trying to figure out why I was mistakenly included. Earlier today, Mozilla had a notification that it is conducting system maintenance. Perhaps this glitch is a result of the maintenance. As of 6 pm PST, the notification no longer appears. My attempts to contact Mozilla went in circles, due to their bureaucratic firewall against contacting them directly. Mozilla has turned into an unresponsive hydra headed monster like Google. All contacts lead back to support forums, yet Mozilla does not have a support forum to report flaws to its own support forums. Hence I am posting this problem, which is a Mozilla systems problem, not a Thunderbird problem, here, as Mozilla provides no other place to post it. You may review the problematic thread at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1192360?utm_campaign=questions-reply&utm_medium=email&utm_source=notification

All Replies (16)

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I am MSEL, not Lunaea. When logged in as MSEL, my posts appear to originate from Lunaea.

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Regarding your login user name vs. display name, you can edit your profile if you like. There should be a link at the top of forum pages with your username or display name.

Your profile also has links to all the threads you've participated in. To unsubscribe to those threads:

(A) Load the thread.

(B) Near the top, find QUESTION TOOLS and click that heading to expand the options if necessary.

(C) Then click STOP EMAIL UPDATES to unsubscribe.

Hope that works for you!

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Lunaea said

I am MSEL, not Lunaea. When logged in as MSEL, my posts appear to originate from Lunaea.

Did you log off and on again as I told you to earlier, before you posted this off topic thread in the Thunderbird support forum?

I suggest you post here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums at least then you will perhaps get the attention of a Mozilla employee if you want to continue to pursue the issue.

@Jscher Before you get involved be aware that the forum has had some sort of $%^&up.

This morning local time it was posting my responses to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1210609 as MSEL. I also posted to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1192360 where I was identified as MSEL.

Following that we have MSEL now being identified as Lunaea the original poster from https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1192360

Logging out of the forum and back in fixed the immediate issue in my case, but it does not resolve what I see as a serious security issue that the forum software can mess up so badly as to ascribe post to someone else. If it is a corrupt cookie which I am assuming it is a security issue that a corrupt cookie will work at all..

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Hi Matt, thanks for the heads up. Perhaps when the site was moved to the new hosting all of the old cookies should have been treated as invalid.

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Thank you for the reports everyone! Especially Airmail for flagging this up. I notified the site developers & they're looking into it. Most likely this is a resurfacing of a very old bug we briefly experienced in 2013 while ironically doing site maintenance.

I'm hoping it was a one-off occurrence but please if you do experience this problem again, definitely report it here. We're filing bugs for these issues as we speak to investigate what may have happened.

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It has just happened to me too. I found myself logged in as "MSEL" and appeared to have access to his profile.

That's a really bad security breach, and a bit more important than the complacent comment about "cookies" would indicate.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1211080#answer-1093496

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I agree. So sorry this happened! Zenos, could you tell the devs your exact timezone & the time it was for you when this bug occurred? It would help confirm it happened in the AWS migration time frame. Were you already signed in or logged in manually today? Also did the bug go away for you on its own or only after signing out? And as far as you can tell, are you back to normal now & not experiencing any problems/side effects?

Wait... if I'm looking at your other thread right, you're still seeing this bug as of an hour ago?!

I've linked the devs to this thread so they can monitor it during their investigation. And I linked them to your other thread where the username swap happened.

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I believe this sounds like zenos also. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1211144

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I experienced a similar issue. I posed a "Hey, that's great! ... " reply yesterday, to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1210357 where [user/wdrapkin] had just marked my answer as the solution. After posting I noticed that I was signed in as wdrapkin and I received an email notification of the reply!

I signed out of the /user/wdrapkin profile, signed in to my own profile, deleted the reply I made using his profile and posted a new reply.

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Thanks Alice! Do you remember at what time you made that post as another user? It might not be very significant but I'm curious if it affected users who were logged in during the read-only mode. My account was not signed in at all during that time so that could be why I was spared.

Do you also tend to keep your account always signed in?

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Noah_SUMO said

Thanks Alice! Do you remember at what time you made that post as another user? It might not be very significant but I'm curious if it affected users who were logged in during the read-only mode. My account was not signed in at all during that time so that could be why I was spared. Do you also tend to keep your account always signed in?

Noah, I made the post as the other user a few minutes before my last reply in the thread, https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1210357#answer-1093185 ... so it would have been around 3:05 pm EDT yesterday.

Yes, I stay logged into the forum as AliceWyman. When I replied to the email, I got to the thread by hitting the "Reply" button on the email notifying me that the user had solved the issue. Odd that, when it took me to the thread it logged me in as that user.

Modified by AliceWyman

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To close out this discussion the bug is files here https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/issues/3153

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I remember I could access the SIGN IN page https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/users/auth (as I was logged out by the move) but could not log in. I decided to come back later. Forty minutes later I noticed there were new posts, even ones within a few minutes after I tried logging in earlier and was able to login then.

Modified by James

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Airmail said

I believe this sounds like zenos also. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1211144

Yes that was me also. I was smart enough to log out and in again and resumed my proper login identity.

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Noah_SUMO said

I agree. So sorry this happened! Zenos, could you tell the devs your exact timezone & the time it was for you when this bug occurred? It would help confirm it happened in the AWS migration time frame. Were you already signed in or logged in manually today? Also did the bug go away for you on its own or only after signing out? And as far as you can tell, are you back to normal now & not experiencing any problems/side effects? Wait... if I'm looking at your other thread right, you're still seeing this bug as of an hour ago?! I've linked the devs to this thread so they can monitor it during their investigation. And I linked them to your other thread where the username swap happened.

I'm in the UK so on UTC+1 as of Sunday 0200.

I login when asked to; when I'm done I generally just close the browser because there isn't an obvious logout option. I have just noticed it in the "toolbar" at the top, but this is hidden unless you're scrolled way up to the top.

Does a login timeout after a period of inactivity? Or when the browser is closed?

The site is generally clumsy to navigate. I usually return to the forum via an email notice, or by visiting my profile and then choosing a recent answer, since there doesn't seem to be any easy to browse the forum. When a site is hard to use, one doesn't generally expect useful things to be to hand and so you don't go looking for them.

Having become aware of the issue, I fixed it in one case by logging out and in. That probably means, by habit, I just closed the page and re-opened it.

Modified by Zenos

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Matt said

To close out this discussion the bug is files here https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/issues/3153

comment from glogiotatidis 3 hours ago:

Thank you all for your input, it was really helpful. I'm going to copy/paste contents and remove this issue and continue discussion in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1449599

That bug is restricted (I get an Access Denied message). That tells me that this is a security issue that is being worked on so I'll close this thread.

Modified by AliceWyman