Is it you or is it me?

January 3, 2013 11:06 PM

System problems?

I can get to the grey, but not the blue or green. I get "400 Bad Request", also:

Your browser sent a request that this server couldn't understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

Cookie

n/

Apache Server at www.metafilter.com Port 80

I also can't connect to status.metafilter.com. Can't use contact form either.

This has been going on for the last 15 or 20 minutes or so.

posted by marsha56 to Uptime at 11:06 PM (8 comments total)

I'm not having that problem - I'm in New Mexico, so I don't think it's a US thing, anyway.

That sounds like a cookie problem. Have you tried clearing cookies? Sorry if you've already done that, it's just one of those things that's worth checking first.
posted by koeselitz at 11:08 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

(How-to on clearing cookies can be found here)
posted by koeselitz at 11:09 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

Yeah, we're all-systems-go here, and I'm not seeing any mail from anyone else with trouble.

Here's our standard advice (from the FAQ):

1. Clear your cache and do a hard refresh. Here are Wikipedia's instructions on how to do this with various browsers.
2. Log out and log back in again.
3. See if the problem persists across multiple computers and/or internet connections and/or browsers if you can.
4. Check to see if you are running browser extensions that may interfere with site features. Try disabling them.
5. Make sure you are allowing googleapis.com and cloudfront.net to run scripts on the site.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:11 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

Oh my gosh! That was it. Thanks koeselitz!!!!

So sorry mods. I really thought it was a server outage.

Go ahead and close this down.
posted by marsha56 at 11:15 PM on January 3

Thanks taz also. I'm fine now. Just have to clean off this egg all over my face.
posted by marsha56 at 11:16 PM on January 3

No worries - glad we could help!
posted by koeselitz at 11:22 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

Cool! Glad you're back with us. :)
posted by taz (staff) at 11:27 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

I just want to add a public service message for anyone else who runs into this. This problem is a symptom of running an older version of a Greasemonkey script called MetaFilter Scroll Tag. Older versions set a very high number of cookies that causes problems like this. If you update to the latest version you shouldn't run into this anymore.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:02 AM on January 4 [6 favorites]