Encoding issue in WP.org notifications

[SergeyBiryukov]

Previously: ​#wp21542

In my WP.org profile, I've set a notification for my name in Cyrillic ("Сергей", 6 letters). It seems to work fine, however, I also get notifications for six question marks in a row (??????, see ​this post on Polyglots for an example).

[Otto42]

@coffee2code: You might want to take a look at this, probably some character encoding issue in the notifications code.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Still getting notifications each time someone writes ​"??????" on the forums.

[SergeyBiryukov]

...or in a ​BuddyPress ticket.

[coffee2code]

@SergeyBiryukov: I just pushed up a bunch of updates for the notifications code. I created the same notification rule as you have ("Сергей") for myself and have since gotten the "??????" notifications as you reported (while the old code was still in use). When testing with the new code while sandboxed, I was unable to reproduce the issue. Now that the new code is live, I'll continue to monitor if the issue persists. If so, I'll get those errant emails and investigate.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to coffee2code:

Now that the new code is live, I'll continue to monitor if the issue persists. If so, I'll get those errant emails and investigate.

Cheers! Closing as fixed then, will reopen if it happens again.

[SergeyBiryukov]

@coffee2code: Got a notification for a ​comment on lt.wordpress.org:

[wporg-match] on Lithuania (match: ??????)

[SergeyBiryukov]

Got a notification for ​this comment as well:

[wporg-match] Stephen Edgar on WordPress Trac (match: ??????)

[netweb]

Replying to SergeyBiryukov:

Got a notification for ​this comment as well:

[wporg-match] Stephen Edgar on WordPress Trac (match: ??????)

That was me on a Mac using CTRL+CMD+SPACE and selecting the "thumbs up" emoji :+1:

[SergeyBiryukov]

[wporg-match] Mosterd3d on WordPress Trac (match: ??????) (​ref)

[coffee2code]

@SergeyBiryukov: Just check in, is this still an issue you're seeing?

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to coffee2code:

Just check in, is this still an issue you're seeing?

Yep, the latest notification was 4 months ago from ​this topic. For a quick test, just post "??????" somewhere and I'll tell you if I get it :)

[coffee2code]

@SergeyBiryukov: I don't believe this is still an issue. Since this ticket was opened I've had a notification for "Сергей" set up so I could see the problem firsthand. I was able to verify getting notifications for occurrences of "??????" for awhile, but eventually that stopped. I haven't received an errant "??????" notification in many many months.

I recently ​posted to the support forums from a test account with "??????" in the reply content and haven't received a notification about it.

As such, I'm going to close this as fixed.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Just noticed that while notifications themselves seem to work, non-Latin keywords are not correctly displayed in the notification settings, both when viewing and editing. I have not tried to re-save them yet, as I'm not quite sure that it won't break the notifications.

See 354.png​, these should be displayed as "Бирюков" and "Сергей", respectively.

[dd32]

Looks like this will only be the case with notifications added prior to a certain date when the Latin1 database was being treated as utf8.

Looking through the affected notifications, there's definitely a few legitimate ones like this, but the majority are spam and vulnerability testers.

I'll see if I can convert them over automatically without too much difficulty..

[dd32]

Hey Сергей

Can you confirm that your notifications now look correct, and that this triggered a notification?

Marking as fixed, preemptively.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to dd32:

Can you confirm that your notifications now look correct, and that this triggered a notification?

Nope, "Сергей" is better than question marks, but still quite different from "Сергей" :)

The notification did work though.

[dd32]

Nope, "Сергей" is better than question marks, but still quite different from "Сергей" :)

Hrrmmm.. That's been double UTF8->latin1 encoded.. that should not have happened.. I'll check it again..

Your notifications page looked fine to me yesterday, and no longer does, so I'd be willing to bet I accidentally ran the query again somehow..

[dd32]

I fixed the DB again, and have left it for a few days, and still looks correct to me still. So I'm guessing it was my error.

There were a few other users who also had mis-encoded data, I believe from a previous conversion fix, that I've also mostly fixed.

Hopefully Сергей will trigger a notification correctly this time.