Resolving Cloudflare Errors
Goal
Cloudflare Errors are super jarring things to get served, for users, clients and Support Agents. They don't provide a lot of information (that Agents can see, anyway) and sometimes they end up blocking very important site functions. It's pretty tempting to get dev attention on it immediately, but there are a few things that Agents can do to resolve the issue without escalation.
Support will try to keep this updated often.
Gateway Time-Out Error
Probably the most common error that gets reported.
From Client: "Whenever I try to make a post, this error comes up!"
Information Gathering:
- When did you first notice this issue?
- Has this issue been happening consistently since it was first reported or only sporadically?
- (If they didn't provide one yet) Can you send me a screenshot that includes the Ray ID and IP address at the bottom of the error?
- Even with the error pop-up, did your comment/discussion still post?
- What category did the error occur in?
The second two questions should help you replicate the error if it is consistent.
Check for Advanced Notifications
A lot has been done to resolve this issue (we saw it much more often in the past), but check the community's larger role groups (member-level roles especially) and see if that role has the permission for 'Advanced Notifications' enabled. This permission essentially allows users get notifications of anything that happens in a category, and it can cause time-outs if the community is trying to notify hundreds of members of multiple posts happening all at the same time.
Solution
You can advise the client to turn off Advanced Notifications for that larger role group - typically only admins or moderators need to be aware of everything that happens on the site.
Alternatively, you can check to see if deferred notifications are active on the community. That should be visible in the community's config settings and if you don't see it, you can always add it:
Feature.deferredNotifications.Enabled
This configuration spaces out notifications sent from the forum, so rather than trying to send everything all at once, it'll send the notifications out in manageable groups and in still a short enough period of time that it's unlikely the receiving user will even notice the delay.
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From Client: "Whenever a user makes a search on my site, it results in a Gateway error."
Information Gathering:
- When did you first notice this issue?
- Has this issue been happening consistently since it was first reported or only sporadically?
- (If they didn't provide one yet) Can you send me a screenshot that includes the Ray ID and IP address at the bottom of the error?
- Is the site using Advanced Search?
This is typically the easiest of the errors to replicate.
Check That Sphinx Is Enabled
Sometimes, Sphinx can encounter an issue on a community that causes it to stop working. To check this, do the following:
Navigate to the community's Console page. Click the 'Sphinx' button.
This will bring up the following pop-up:
The image above is of a community with an improperly configured Sphinx. This is likely the cause of the error. On a site with a properly configured Sphinx, a Server will be picked (not 'Auto') and a Template will be selected. Like the following:
It's best to allow Sphinx to choose it's own server, so to resolve the first field, just leave it set on Auto. It will cycle once you hit 'Save.' For Templates, choose 'Standard' if the site primarily uses the alphabet in it's written language (Latin-based languages), or choose 'Extended' if the primary language is a non-Latin one (Chinese, Japanese etc).
After saving the settings here, it can take a couple of minutes for search on the site to fully re-index, but after that point you should be able to verify in the Sphinx configuration for the site that the settings are set correctly, then you'll be able to test for the issue again on the community by making any search.