Metafilter sites not working in Firefox

July 16, 2007 5:27 PM

I cannot access any of the metafilter sites when using Firefox. It works in IE (what I am using right now) but in firefox I get an error message page that reads as follows: [more inside]
posted by DetonatedManiac to bugs at 5:27 PM (8 comments total)

[manual more insidery]

================================
The web site you are accessing has experienced an unexpected error.
Please contact the website administrator.

The following information is meant for the website developer for debugging purposes.
Error Occurred While Processing Request
The value "" cannot be converted to a number
....
Browser Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Remote Address 24.211.174.92
Referrer
Date/Time 03-Jul-07 06:24 PM

=========================

Please help. I don't like using IE and am concerned about such strange behavior. Could it be signs of a Virus or some such malware?

The only proximate cause I can think of was that I messed with my router recently to give it a static IP address so that I could use a torrent downloader, however I changed all the IP and router settings back to what they were before (or at least what I think they were before ) and metafilter would still not work in Firefox.

Thanks

(NOTE: I know its not good practice to post this here, but I have had this problem for about 2 weeks and no other channels have provided a solution)
posted by cortex at 5:32 PM on July 16, 2007

I've been using Firefox happily for a couple of weeks.

It's definitely not a virus.

This is the kind of error you get when you access a page and it expects a number somewhere but instead the value is blank. Perhaps your cookie data was messed up? Did you try clearing out your history/cookies and then logging in again?

And was this really posted by cortex? I'm confused. I thought it was DetonatedManiac...
posted by Deathalicious at 5:52 PM on July 16, 2007

Oh and mathowie or whoever is doing site admin now should really set up a site-wide error page and get some nice error logging on. That would help catch these things for sure.
posted by Deathalicious at 5:53 PM on July 16, 2007

Yes, it was from me... Cortex was nice enough to clean up my origional post and add a "manual more inside".

Incedentally... clearing the cookies seems to have worked... thanks Deathalicious!

Once again... something so simple causes such a pain.
posted by DetonatedManiac at 5:57 PM on July 16, 2007

Do you have Greasemonkey installed?

Does the problem still occur if you run Firefox in its safe (no extensions enabled) mode?
posted by flabdablet at 6:18 PM on July 16, 2007

Lack of preview. Glad it's sorted.
posted by flabdablet at 6:19 PM on July 16, 2007

I'm glad to have some closure on this.
posted by dhammond at 8:14 PM on July 16, 2007

You know it, dh.
posted by cortex at 8:28 PM on July 16, 2007