Searching for W A T C H L I S T (without spaces) crashes Community

[yukon-cornelius]

When I search for the term "watch list", but without a space, Communities crashes & gives me the error:

An Unexpected Error has occurred.

• Your request failed. Please contact your system administrator and provide the date and time you received the error and this Exception ID: 1FF20002.

  Click your browser's Back button to continue.

Oops.  🙂

[eburtonlab]

@yukon-cornelius

I get the same result when searching the community.

However, if I type the whole word into the search bar and pause without hitting 'enter', the search suggestions give me ten messages to choose from (all but two named, unhelpfully, "watchlist"). So it is possible to do a rudimentary search, just not a very effective one.

[berserkerplanet]

Works fine for me if I type it in the search bar and hit enter in FF31. (I have autocomplete disabled)

[eburtonlab]

@berserkerplanet

I just tried again on a different machine, and the search worked this time. Both Windows 10 machines, using Firefox Quantum 64.0.2, same eBay account. Then I verified that it still fails on the first machine for me. Very odd.

[berserkerplanet]

That is extremely odd.

Thinking out loud possible factors:
1. Subtleties about the FF browsers on the 2 machines (addons, plugins, state of the cache, cookies,etc)
2. Lithium software fingerprinting the machines through the browsers, and a convoluted bug in play causing a failure because monitor on one is 27" and there's a 22" monitor on the other (viewport calculations, etc), or one machine has Balloonist font installed and the other does not. That sort of thing.
3. Machines are not at exact same Win10 update level
4. Intermittent bug, that might fail on both or neither if you keep repeating the test

[eburtonlab]

@berserkerplanet

I suspect that you are right; there is probably some subtle difference between the two machines that accounts for the behavior. Unfortunately, I can't really rule out any of your four cases.

The browsers are synched, so theoretically, they should have all the same plug-ins and extensions. Bookmarks are shared, so they should be the same. But I can't be sure that there isn't some difference -- perhaps the cookies or profiles are not shared completely, or one machine has gone too long between reboots. Settings on some of the extensions are different -- adblock custom rules are not entirely consistent, now that I consider it.

Lithium could certainly be treating them different based on IP address or display parameters (which are, indeed, different). But I have another laptop that also fails which is on the same network as the machine that works, so it's not a simple function of network (thought that could certainly be part of it).

Machines are both Win10 Pro, version 1803. But the build numbers differ after the decimal point (17134.472 on the working machine, 17134.523 on the one that doesn't). There are big hardware differences (6th gen i3 vs. 2nd gen i5). The non-working laptop is Win10 Pro v 1809, with a 4th gen i5 mobile.

So far the results are consistent over time, but there could certainly be other things going on that I haven't even considered (there usually are).