Odd access denied error prevents updating a gallery

  • Resolved ACEkin

    (@acekin)


    3 years, 1 month ago

    I needed to add an image to a gallery, I added the image and went to manage the gallery. When I clicked on the sort or save buttons, Firefox gave me a blank white page. I tried in MS Edge and got the following message:

    Access to https://www.keptlight.com was denied.
    You don’t have the user rights to view this page.
    HTTP ERROR 403

    Obviously, I am logged in but some part of NGG thinks I am not. The NGG plugin, WordPress core, and all other plugins are up to date.

    I created a new gallery to test the problem, uploaded images, and clicked on Sort, and it worked as expected. I went back to the list of galleries and selected this new one to manage and clicked on Sort and it worked again. Then I searched for the gallery that gave me the problem, clicked to display the collection, then clicked on Sort to receive the same terse message once more. Does searching have any effect on the process?

    How do I proceed?

    Thank you,

    Cemal

    • This topic was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by ACEkin.
Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Imagely

    (@imagely)

    Hi Cemal,

    In some of the cases ( rare ) NextGen may have have problems performing actions from Manage Gallery in case that any of the images’ titles contain apostrophes or special non-ASCII characters like ({@&’/, etc. Triggering ModSecurity rules usually prevents the request and redirects to a 403 page.
    ?
    We hope that you wouldn’t mind making sure that you are not using any special characters for any of the images of that gallery that you cannot edit ( if you do, please remove them then try again ).

    The only suggestions here are to either avoid using these special characters as image’s alt/titles or reach the hosting provider so they could look into whitelisting NextGen’s requests from ModSecurity.

    Thanks for your understanding

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Imagely.
    • This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Imagely.
    • This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Imagely.
    Thread Starter ACEkin

    (@acekin)

    Thank you for the quick reply. I went back and checked the file names, there was no name with a special character like the ones you mentioned. The last file I added had 1_ before the name, I deleted that image. Even after that, that specific gallery continued to behave the same way. I will later download all the images in that gallery, check the names once more. A while back, I reported a similar problem on another site caused by a single image. I accidentally stumbled on that image problem and resaving it solved that. I still don’t know what the problem was but a single image presence was creating it.

    I will report again after I try the new gallery route.

    Thank you,

    Cemal

    Thread Starter ACEkin

    (@acekin)

    I have done the following and identified four files that cause the problem:

    1. Created a new gallery
    2. Uploaded images in small batches and tested if I could sort the new gallery
    3. If I had the same problem, I deleted the gallery from NGG but it did not remove the gallery from the system. That I completed via FTP
    4. Repeated the above process until I had a working gallery of 35 out of 39 images
    5. If I add any of the problem files, troubles return
    6. The file names have no offending special characters, just letters, numbers, and an underscore

    I will be glad to share those files if that may help you. They all display fine in an image viewer or in the browser window. I have no idea how many more such problems may be hidden in my over 550 NextGEN Galleries!!

    I hope this information may be of help to you and to other users.

    Cemal

    Plugin Contributor Imagely

    (@imagely)

    Hi Cemal,

    ModSecurity issues are usually hard to track but we are also not excluding something different happening in your case.

    We hope that you wouldn’t mind reaching out to us directly via https://www.imagely.com/report-bug/ page and we’ll be happy to have a look at it.

    Thanks

    Thread Starter ACEkin

    (@acekin)

    With the help of Imagely support, the problem was identified as indeed a modsecurity problem. It was triggered by an apostrophe in the image title (not the image file name).

    They suggested I contact my hosting company and after a couple of tries, they found the rule triggering the block by their firewall and disabled it. If you are running into a similar problem, you may contact your hosting company and ask them to look into this problem in the modsecurity rules.

    Thanks to Imagely and my hosting company support staff, I can now edit my galleries.

    Cemal

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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