[Bug]: OIAA Meeting Guide is down

[melindafries]

Contact Details

web.services@aa-intergroup.org

Website With Issue

https://aa-intergroup.org/meetings/

What happened?

OIAA Meeting Guide is down. It is displaying this error:
SyntaxError: Unexpected non-whitespace character after JSON at position 6673480 (line 1 column 6673481)

What browsers are you seeing the problem on?

Chrome

Relevant log output/errors

No response

[joshreisner]

goood morning @melindafries - thanks for posting here. any idea what time this started?

[melindafries]

good morning @joshreisner - we got the first email about it at 7:49am CT this morning.

[joshreisner]

ok looks like it's fixed now - all i did is i went in and edted one meeting :) i saved a copy of the list through so i'll see if i cant figure out what went wrong

[melindafries]

Thanks so much. Let me know if theirs anything else we need to do on our end. I'll mark this as closed.

[joshreisner]

best i can tell the JSON got messed up - seems strange that this has only happened one time so far with Central in about a year! i don't think this is due to any code or database changes since there haven't been any recently.

here's a copy of the JSON that was throwing an error:
6436f5a3f03fdecef8459055-2.json

seems like it had a complete set of proper JSON, and then, appended to that, two partial fragments of addtional JSON:

in this screenshot i've highlighted the first extra fragment. above that is valid JSON, below that is the second fragment

[joshreisner]

if this happens again with the invalid JSON message (one thing i'm pleased about is how accurate the error message was!), i advise making a change to any listing. in this case i removed an exclamation point from the recently-edited great escape group notes: https://central.aa-intergroup.org/groups/658d9653f936e644e31fd12f?index - i don't think the edit itself was a factor so much as letting central make another attempt at re-saving the file properly

i'm going to move this to the central repository - in the future please issues there: https://github.com/code4recovery/central/issues (but again i appreciate you adding the issue to github!!!!)

[melindafries]

Got it on where to submit and I'll put that in our documentation.
That's amazing it's only happened once. I'll let Matt know what's up when he awakens.

[joshreisner]

as to the question of why did this happen, which as i note above hasn't happened before (but I guess we launched in June so it's only been ~6 months) i think what may have happened were there were a few meetings archived all at the same time (nothing wrong with that per se) and so we wrote the JSON file to Dean's server five times - sucesssively shorter versions each time

writing the JSON file is an async process, so i think what may have happened was one write may have been already pending when the next write came in, and somehow they must have overlapped to cause the error. if it happens again, waiting a few (maybe 15 or more) seconds and triggering another write by making an edit to a meeting should fix it hopefully

i've created a new feature request issue #15 to be able to archive a whole group in one go which might also help or at least be a convenience, but in the meantime we don't need to avoid manually archiving each meeting in a group)

also there's a group within code for recovery that is working on a FTP-less approach which would eliminate this as a potential problem in the future