Suspected bug in group creation leads to 'nameless' groups.

Submitted by Jordan Conway on Thu, 04/07/2011 - 09:52

Issue ID:	3125
Issue Category:	bug
Component:	core
Priority:	normal
Status:	active
Assigned:	mymmn
Version:	1.0
Keywords:	patch exists

Does not seem to be happening consistently, but occasionally creating a group can lead to an unnamed shadow group.
You can verify this on your installs with a sql query
select * from local_group where nickname is NULL

Updates

#1

Submitted by marjoleink on Thu, 04/07/2011 - 10:23.

some symptoms:

on identi.ca they all seem to have group URL 'http://identi.ca/group'
following a link (from a user's profile) for such a group (apparently by name) you end up at that URL (where you can find them)
from the groups list you can actually join them (by id? - they are listed with id info in the groups list)
they all seem to be created by (would-be) spammers, most likely using a faulty group creation script; often there are several similar nameless groups immediately followed by a similar named group

#2

Submitted by marjoleink on Thu, 04/07/2011 - 10:27.

one case outlined here (with screenshots):
http://identi.ca/notice/70592867 followed by
http://identi.ca/conversation/68298114#notice-70592961

#3

Submitted by Sean Calvillo on Tue, 10/04/2011 - 20:57.

This is still happening in version 1.0.1. It is when you get a validation error when creating a group. The database entries still get added even though there was something wrong with the entry.

#4

Submitted by Mikael Nordfeldth on Sat, 12/24/2011 - 09:04.

Is this the same case? http://status.net/open-source/issues/3127
"Group created despite bad nickname"

I posted this solution there, and will make a merge request for Gitorious now:
"I tried adding a return; statement in actions/newgroup.php on line 128 (inside the catch{} for Nickname::normalize, to make it behave just as the rest of the tests below.

This solves the problem and doesn't regress any functionality."