Problem adding source in Wikirate PROD
+issue
My colleague Anna (on cc) tried to add an answer/rating for a company in Wikirate production.
She selected the company and the year.
She entered a source URL and clicked on 'Add URL source'.
The source was retrieved. She clicked on 'Submit' and the application seemed to hang.
I could reproduce the problem, but the server came back with a 'Rats! 500 Server Error'.
+Discussion
From our email conversation:
I just tried it and it worked for me. Some things to note:
1. The permissions error you (Urs) were seeing via the api could have been causing problems here before. That should be resolved now.
2. For the source submission to succeed, Wikirate to be able to retrieve the webpage and convert it into a pdf. (This is to try to prevent cases where webpages change and we're left without anything to cite). If the server providing the resource indicated by the source url is slow (or, eg, deprioritizing requests that don't come from browsers), this could leat to a timeout. It seems like the "could not download file" error was likely caused by trouble retrieving the webpage. It is hard for us to eliminate this problem completely; other peoples' servers don't always cooperate! (But the nice thing is that once the source is added, we don't depend on them anymore)
3. We identified that the "Rats" error showed up because something had locked the database, so I'm not surprised that we weren't able to reproduce that. I have not yet been able to confirm that the initial submission locked the database.
there are still several long-term upgrades needed for sources, but I think we can close this specific ticket, since the narrow issues here were addressed.