Issue with User Pages Fixed (We Hope!)

For some months now, we've been dealing with an issue where pages with /user in the URL occasionally recall what is known in the Drupal community as the White Screen of Death: a blank white screen and ominously simple black text that states, "The website encountered an unexpected error." This issue appeared to be related to one of the contributed modules we use for member profiles. Over the past few months, Russandol and Dawn have been reworking this section of the site so that member profiles no longer use the problematic module but only core software fields and functionality.

Today, we completed the migration of the rebuild and all data from the old module into the new fields. Ideally, you should not notice a change! However, if you are a registered user, it would be helpful to us to check your member profile to make sure that your preferred name, pronouns, and member biography all look as they should.*

Due to this change the way you update your member profile is now slightly different. After logging in, if you click the Edit tab on your member profile, you will see three tabs at the top of the page: General, Profile, and Volunteer. Click on the Profile tab to update or add a preferred name, pronouns, userpic, or biography. The image below shows what the new layout looks like.

screen capture showing the new site layout for the test account

We've tested the site following the changes, but members should be alert to anything that seems off, and we appreciate reports of problems. We maintain an issues tracker for known problems with the site, and this is a good place to start if you're noticing something isn't working as it should and want to know if it's been reported. We always welcome reports of problems in the comments there, in the #town-hall channel on our Discord server, or by contacting the mods.

* While working on these updates today, we noticed that images that should be displaying inline (i.e., next to each other rather than one per line) were not displaying correctly but were displaying as blocks (i.e., one per line). This is not related to the update, and we will be working on updating our stylesheet this weekend to correct this issue.

Posted on 13 January 2024 (updated 13 January 2024) by SWG Moderators