Every once in a while, upon typing in a new post and clicking on the Submit button, I get a response saying: “You have chosen to open newreply.php which is a PHP file from http://boards.straightdope.com”, with a choice to save it or open it with some application I must choose. Link to screen shot.
Anybody else ever see this? Anybody know what is happening here? Is it an error on the SDMB side or (another) error in my machine? Should this be brought to the attention of the admins?
The only thing I can do is Cancel, which is what I would do anyway. (Note that the OK button isn’t even active. WTF?) After I Cancel, I can click on Submit again and it (usually) works just fine.
(For the curious, the post shown in the screen shot is here.)
This indicates a problem with the board. The response from the server was malformed somehow, probably missing a Content-Type header at the very least, so your browser didn’t know what to do with it, and decided to treat it like you were downloading an unrecognized file type by offering to save it for you. The reason the OK button isn’t active is probably that the server isn’t done sending the data yet.
You may actually get some usable details if you wait for the OK button to become active (should be 30 seconds or less) and save the file with a .txt extension and then open it with your editor of choice. It’ll probably have some lovely PHP error barf that you can post here to provide a bit more info to the board admin. There is, of course, a reasonably good chance that the file will be empty, so don’t be surprised if that’s the case.
