When I am trying to post a comment, often times I will get this JSON error “unexpected token <”. I wonder if the call is erroring out on the server side and you’re getting an HTML error page back?

Odd thing is that 9 times out of 10, when this happens, the comment will still post. Until i discovered this, I was repeatedly hitting “submit” (since after the error you get sent right back to the comment edit dialog) and repeatedly posting! Now I can identify Memmy users by their repeat comments 😅

Is this a known issue?

I’m on lemmy.world and so it might happen more frequently for me as their servers have been going through some stuff lately…

  • gkdMEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    This is almost always an instance issue. Sean and I know there needs to be better error messages and it’s on the todo list, but regardless that won’t solve the issue at hand

    I should note that you should see if the comment was posted successfully. I’d say in about 80% of cases it is, but the server doesn’t respond appropriately.

  • tenth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I have the same issue. Sometimes comment was posted, sometimes not.

    I actually had that error when submitting this comment. Keep submitting will eventually work

    Edit: maybe network/instance issue??

  • deejay4am@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    So, more info on this: it’s definitely when servers get slow, and if I spam the submit button, I can post my comment as many times as I can tap before the response comes back.

    So when users are waiting for a UI response, they think they’ve mis-tapped and are probably hitting submit multiple times.

    This is definitely a flow that needs attention since most users are probably on larger instances that are expediting periodic failures. This has the potential to be one of those “perfect storm” kind of bugs.

  • ShunkW@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    If the comment posted, it likely didn’t fail on the backend. It likely is an error parsing the response json.

    • deejay4am@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Well that’s my point - the response isn’t JSON, it’s HTML. “<“ would always be the first character of an HTML document. Probably the 502 errors that have been plaguing the larger instances.

    • data_corruptedEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      The error probably showed up by trying to parse the response of a failed http request