Hello, Subeta! As you may have noticed, some recent security changes we've pushed out to the site have been accompanied by seemingly random blank pages. I've actually heard people calling these "white screens of death," so I thought you all might appreciate an explanation of what causes them, what you should do about them, and how on earth they relate to security.

Blank pages are caused by errors on the page. Ordinarily servers will show the actual error, but it's considered a good practice to hide error messages to avoid giving away sensitive information (what if a password were included in the error?), so errors on Subeta show blank pages.

So what's causing the errors? There are 2 main causes, both of which are related to the recent security fixes we've pushed out. One is a typo in the security fixes. I'm not a perfect typist, and the changes spanned tens of thousands of lines of code, so of course, there were a few mistakes I made ;)

The second cause of errors is apostrophes... they are annoying little things. You probably won't believe me, but apostrophes are rather dangerous to unprotected websites! That's because they have special meaning in the Structured Query Language (SQL) used to communicate with databases. Unless apostrophes are properly escaped (with the backslash... making sense now?), they can cause SQL errors. Just such an error kept the shop buying page from working completely.

Incidentally, Subeta sometimes gets overzealous with escaping apostrophes, and you end up with multiple backslashes... sound familiar?

So what to do about blank pages? If you see a blank page, first check to make sure nobody has reported it in problems and bugs. Then go report it there yourself. If it's urgent (like it's keeping you from doing something important), also send me an email about it at [email protected]. In the email, tell me the exact link to the page you saw it on, as well as what you were doing at the time. Be as detailed as possible.

Anyway, just thought you might appreciate an explanation.

-Alex