Forum Discussion

ShotFromGuns's avatar
ShotFromGuns
Seasoned Traveler
2 months ago

"Access Denied"/"This message cannot be found"

After posting a new thread about pages only loading as "Internal Server Error," I restarted my browser as part of my troubleshooting process. This meant I lost all the tabs that I had open to this forum, since I can currently only access it in Incognito mode. When I tried to navigate back to the new thread so I could update it with additional information, I found that:

  • It was not shown on my profile, e.g., under "Most Recent" or "Newest Topics"
  • I could only find it by going into the My Settings > Follows & Notifications, where it was listed under Follows
  • However, attempting to click the link to the topic, I instead got a page titled "Access Denied" with the message "This message cannot be found"

My guess is that this is possibly due to some sort of moderation filter/delay on posting new topics, but this is a terrible, terrible design. Even if posts aren't yet publicly visible, the users who created them should be able to navigate to them to edit or add to them. (I will add that when you make this your only way to report issues and get help, it's extra egregious to add a significant, noticeable delay to posts going live, particularly when you don't warn people it will happen. If I hadn't started digging around, I would have just assumed my post had disappeared and and submitted a second version of it.)

  • ShotFromGuns's avatar
    ShotFromGuns
    Seasoned Traveler

    After submitting this post, it's also now appearing in/disappearing from my profile, the "Recent Discussions" sidebar, etc., though currently I can still access it.

  • ShotFromGuns's avatar
    ShotFromGuns
    Seasoned Traveler

    As of when I checked just now, the missing topic is visible again. No indication why it was not immediately visible, why it became visible, or how to avoid this issue in the future.