Please help us! Content Encoding Error and nobody can login
 

We are total vB Noobs running a car site. This morning out of the blue when logging in, we get:

Content Encoding Error
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.


The site has been working flawlessly since Nov 08. I don't even know how to login to my Admin control panel since the guy who help set us up is in FL. We're in Michigan lol. Any ideas? We're a growing site of 420 members and were on a good roll...I'm afraid this may stunt our progress..

:(

Some hosting providers has limits on MySQL. This may be your problem. In that case there is no way to access even forum ACP. You'll need to login to phpMyadmin and delete some entries from database (something which can be restored later, like post index etc...). Then you'll be able to login to your forum again...

This is how I resolved similar issue once.

Please don't delete anything unless you know what are you doing.

Oh oh. I think we're in some trouble since that is all like Chinese to me lol!!

I did manage to get in the back end of the admincp...and it gave me a database error as well.

Database error in vBulletin 3.8.0:

Invalid SQL:
INSERT INTO cpsession (userid, hash, dateline) VALUES (3, '1e5e664e7cc92dd553b2f2b1d4401d11', 1239542861);

MySQL Error : INSERT command denied to user 'modernmu_vbtech'@'10.49.7.102' for table 'cpsession'
Error Number : 1142
Request Date : Sunday, April 12th 2009 @ 09:27:41 AM
Error Date : Sunday, April 12th 2009 @ 09:27:41 AM
Script : http://www.modernmuscleforum.com/login.php?do=login
Referrer : http://www.modernmuscleforum.com/admincp/
IP Address : 24.57.81.51
Username : H******
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.75

--------------- Added [DATE]1239543328[/DATE] at [TIME]1239543328[/TIME] ---------------

The site is: www.modernmuscleforum.com. Hell, at this point we'd be willing to pay someone for their work to fix it for us and keep them on retainer too lol.

Gzip compression can sometimes cause this issue as well, turn it off, you may need to use phpmyadmin to manually change the db setting for gzip.

You should make a backup of your DB before doing anything, you can try to truncate the cpsession table, but if the user don't have INSERT privileges, you may need to fix the user perms to the db as well.

How do you login via "phpMyadmin"?

And if I have to ask, should I login this way? LOL

Most of the time - I've seen that the first error is caused by "doubled-up" compression (mod_deflate/mod_gzip along with vBulletin's own one). As mentioned by snakes, disable the one inside vBulletin (mod_deflate is preferred to PHP's method). Another way to do this would be to disable the Apache module first (but you would have to be handy with Apache configs and have access to them).

If your from wixom, that may be the issue to begin with, might want to move someplace downriver. :D

If your not sure how to use pma (phpmyadmin), it may not be wise for you to be modifying anything via pma, i would suggest you hire someone or ask the host to correct the issue(s), assuming you are posting to help the original thread starter.

Most host panels have pma or their version of it and you can find it in the host control panel.

If not, you can manually install it via ftp.

LOL :erm:

--------------- Added [DATE]1239553657[/DATE] at [TIME]1239553657[/TIME] ---------------

XSIV8 and myself are the owners of the ModernMuscleForum site.

We would love to have a "Tech guy" or support person that we could use for these kind of problems.

Anybody??

Okay, the story thus far, as I'm not yet able to request help on vb.com as my account hasn't updated yet.

following the thread over there from a user that had a problem which seemed to be the same as us...
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=279702

Tech said to turn off GZip via the admin CP

just like that person, we can access admin CP other then just the login screen after successfully logging in we get the same page.

Next, tried the tech suggestion of editing config.php via FTP.

Me, like the poster, made the same mistake and didn't add the semi-colon to the end at first, and now we too are getting the error about Parse error.

Tried the SQL commands and we get different

Here's our outputs:
UPDATE setting SET value = '0' WHERE varname = 'gzipoutput';
UPDATE datastore SET data=REPLACE(data,'s:10:"gzipoutput";i:1;','s:10:" gzipoutput";i:0;') WHERE title='options';
And of course these errors make me think that we don't have access to the DB, maybe I'm wrong. But I called and my hosting provider told me that we are now with an unlimited size DB.

Any thoughts?

Eeek. We suck lol. Hopefully we'll bounce back with some assistance tomorrow.

Why does this crap always seem to happen on a holiday?!? :confused:
Remember the whole problem with the database import over New Years? Aggh....

and we're all better now....