Topic on Project:Support desk

Hi,

I cannot save or edit anything on our wiki page as the following message comes up when I try:

Your edit has been rejected because your client mangled the punctuation characters in the edit token. The edit has been rejected to prevent corruption of the page text. This sometimes happens when you are using a buggy web-based anonymous proxy service.

I have googled this a bit but cannot come up with a straightforward solution anywhere, or really an explanation of what exactly has gone wrong.

I would be supremely grateful if anyone could offer a solution or advice towards it?

Thanks!

Is your wiki public? Can you point to it?

Is anyone else having the problem or is it just you?

What web browser are you using?

Thanks Mark - the wiki is for private use so we can't point you to it I don't think. However, all users in the office are having the same issue across different computers using different browsers. It's unclear to us what exactly changed, as to our knowledge nothing was altered before it stopped working?

The error message thrown is MediaWiki:Token suffix mismatch.

The form on the edit page has a hidden value, which is the edit token. This edit token should always be returned exactly as is. This error indicates that it was not, and there can be various places that could have broken it. From your browser (due to a browser extensions messing with the value) to an incorrectly configured webserver and any party in between (if you are not using https).

This might also be due to usage of PHP 5.2.7 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T18570

Thanks - we're using PHP 5.2.17 and haven't updated for some time, so I don't really know why this would suddenly have happened - but different users in our office on different computers using different browsers all started encountering this problem, though without having changed anything that we are aware of? What would be the most straightforward fix for this? Updating the PHP or version? Or something more direct?

Thanks..

What version of MW are you on? Can you upgrade? PHP 5.2.7 is quite old.

The field responsible for this check is wpUnicodeCheck, and contains the string "ℳ𝒲♥𝓊𝓃𝒾𝒸ℴ𝒹ℯ"

The problem may be that your server is incorrectly configured, and is sending pages with a non-unicode charset (like latin1 or iso-8859-1) instead of utf-8, which would cause the browser to interpret unicode strings as garbage characters. Open the developer tools of your browser (hit F12), look at the network tab and reload the page. The first request to the page should return this header:

content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

If it returns any other charset value, it's wrong, and your webserver is forcing it somehow.