Error 503 Backend Fetch

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Hi everyone,

Hoping someone can shed some light on an error I'm getting. I was able to post a first chapter of a story and when I went to add a second chapter I was able to preview it, but clicking "save" gives me the following:

Error 503 Backend fetch failed
Backend fetch failed

Guru Meditation:
XID: 1835784

Varnish cache server

I've tried logging out and logging in again, clearing my browser cache, and even attempted to post from a different computer. Nothing seems to help.

I had the same problem happen probably 8 months ago, I got 10 chapters into a story and then the site suddenly stopped accepting new posts, and I always got this same error. I gave up after Erin and Piper weren't able to troubleshoot it, and have been posting my fiction elsewhere. No idea why I was suddenly able to come back and post a single chapter before it started up again.

I found some older posts in the forum with this same error, but wasn't able to tell what those users did to fix things (or if they even were able to). Posting here in case someone else has triumphed over this particular annoyance in the past.

Thanks,
Paige

Generally

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erin's picture

Usually, this error if real, gets fixed by an auto-reboot of the server. Occasionally, Piper has to take a hand.

You did all the right things to clear up the reporting if you were getting a stale page saved by your computer or your ISP. Yj nrxt thing to do is probably use the Discord Chat to leave a message for me or Piper.

But if you can leave a PM, then the problem is likely not on our end. Because if it were, we would be hard down until an auto or manual reset.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Thanks for reporting this

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gillian1968's picture

I’ve run into those occasionally. They’re frustrating, but generally resolved in a day or so. Except for the time I think they had to rebuild the site.

Thanks to Erin for the info. I’ll try to hit the Discord and post a message next time.
It’s why I do all my serious writing offline with a Word Processor.

Other sites have their own quirks. One site I’ve followed for years uses WordPress and it often takes a day or two for me to be able to read comments I know have been posted.

But thanks to you for coming back and sharing your writings. I’ll look for them.

All the best!

Gillian Cairns

Mystery solved!

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Paige Turner's picture

Oh my goodness, Erin figured it out. Turns out the culprit was... a non-ascii emoji. Literally just one little smiley face buried in my story text. Once she removed it, everything posted perfectly fine.

I'm honestly a little mortified that I put Erin through all that troubleshooting over a smiley face, but she was absolutely wonderful and patient with me the entire time and managed to track down what was causing it. Thank you SO much, Erin!

So if anyone else runs into this same 503 error - check for emojis or any other special characters in your text and strip them out before posting. Lesson learned!

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go crawl under a rock for a bit.

xoxo,
Paige

Emojis

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I have had a run-in with the odd Unicode glyph. It is most definitely not all non-ASCII characters that are affected, but rather seems to be restricted to certain classes or groups of non-ASCII code-points.

Some times it might help to use the numerical character code in the form of &#nnnn; as HTML encoding, which you can find with any decent character selection utility that are available for all modern operating systems or graphical user interfaces.

At other times you are out of luck, because the server's back-end software either does not support or has elected to exclude certain character classes, groups or code-points for some reason.