Dear all,
I've just subscribed to this list, and am looking forward to participating in some of the discussions regarding the REUSE specification and its associated tooling. However, I came up against an issue with the web form for subscribing to this list.
Upon entering the correct information into the form, I got an error message saying "The form is tool old. Please GET it again." - a screenshot of this message is attached. This wasn't resolved by merely refreshing the page; but I managed to subscribe by selecting the digest mode on the form and changing that back in the Mailman settings once successfully subscribed.
I have to admit that I'm rather intrigued by this error - I would expect such a form to be using a POST request. Is the form being fetched from some sort of reverse proxy cache, maybe?
I hope this report is useful!
Best wishes,
Sebastian
Dear Sebastian,
~ Sebastian [2021-04-14 18:11 +0200]:
I've just subscribed to this list, and am looking forward to participating in some of the discussions regarding the REUSE specification and its associated tooling. However, I came up against an issue with the web form for subscribing to this list.
For of all, thank you for signing up and becoming part of the list, albeit the hurdles on your way. Welcome!
Upon entering the correct information into the form, I got an error message saying "The form is tool old. Please GET it again." - a screenshot of this message is attached. This wasn't resolved by merely refreshing the page; but I managed to subscribe by selecting the digest mode on the form and changing that back in the Mailman settings once successfully subscribed.
I have to admit that I'm rather intrigued by this error - I would expect such a form to be using a POST request. Is the form being fetched from some sort of reverse proxy cache, maybe?
I have tried to reproduce your error, to no avail. Of course, the form uses the POST method and some CSRF protection. There are no complex proxy hacks in use as long as you use the following site to sign up:
https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/REUSE
Could it be that there was a longer timespan between opening the sign-up form site (URL above), and actually sending the request? In this case, the CSRF protection kicked in because the dynamic code of your individual form expires after a certain time (10 minutes IIRC). A short research in Mailman's source code hints that the error message you saw is connected to this scenario.
Usually, this CSRF code should be regenerated with every page reload, so what you did (refreshing the page) should have worked. I honestly don't know why this failed, and why signing up to digests worked eventually.
If you or anyone continues to experience similar technical issues, please let me know (ideally via private mail) and I'll investigate more thoroughly. For now, I reckon this was just a silly edge case of failed communication between Mailman and your browser.
Best, Max
Dear Max,
For of all, thank you for signing up and becoming part of the list, albeit the hurdles on your way. Welcome!
Thanks! I'm glad to be subscribed; I'm sure it'll have been worth it! :)
I have tried to reproduce your error, to no avail. Of course, the form uses the POST method and some CSRF protection. There are no complex proxy hacks in use as long as you use the following site to sign up:
I used that URL, except with REUSE in lower case (as linked to at the bottom of the https://reuse.software homepage).
Could it be that there was a longer timespan between opening the sign-up form site (URL above), and actually sending the request? In this case, the CSRF protection kicked in because the dynamic code of your individual form expires after a certain time (10 minutes IIRC
According to my browser history, my initial visit to the registration page to the error were less than five minutes apart. I was using Chromium, specifically the chromium-browser-privacy build from RPM Fusion.
Usually, this CSRF code should be regenerated with every page reload, so what you did (refreshing the page) should have worked. I honestly don't know why this failed, and why signing up to digests worked eventually.
I tried to reproduce it with Firefox, using a different email address and with the non-digest setting. The subscription was successful, but bizarrely, I could not get to the subscriber settings page! I got 'Connection refused' errors regardless of whether I contacted lists.fsfe.org with or without TLS, on Firefox, Chromium or even curl.
If you or anyone continues to experience similar technical issues, please let me know (ideally via private mail) and I'll investigate more thoroughly. For now, I reckon this was just a silly edge case of failed communication between Mailman and your browser.
In conclusion, I agree - you can discount my experiences as a silly edge case :) We are getting into real xkcd.com/2259 territory here!
Thanks for taking the time to look into this.
Best wishes,
Sebastian
