"404 Not Found" message when clicking a new topic


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"404 Not Found" message when clicking a new topic

Procedure to fix a 404 (Not Found) error that occurs only when you attempt to access a topic that you recently created. The rest of the board works fine and icons show up properly.

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The following document applies to these symptoms in Discus 4.0:

A topic is created in Topic Manager without error
The topic is listed on the topics page of the user interface
Clicking on the topic name produces a "Not Found" error

and:

Icons on the topics page and administration program work properly (if icons do not work correctly click here)

In this case, the problem is that the HTML directory as specified in the discus.conf file does not match the HTML URL that was chosen for setup. The following procedure is recommended for resolution:

Log in to your administration program, go to Topic Manager, and delete your existing topics. (Presumably this error message occurred when you first set up Discus, so there is not any content in those topics. Note - any information in the topics will be permanently removed by this step!)
Download discus.conf to your local machine using FTP, in ASCII mode.
Open discus.conf in a text editor such as Notepad (NOT a word processor such as Microsoft Word).
Edit the line starting with "html_dir=" so that it reflects the proper path. ^*
Save the discus.conf file.
Re-upload your discus.conf file to your server. Use ASCII mode and set permissions on the file to 0755 (rwxr-xr-x).
Log into Discus and confirm that no topics are shown and no error messages are present. You can now create new topics, and your Topic Manager should now create topics that work properly.

Fixing html_dir

^* This is potentially the most confusing step of the process, and is also the step that DiscusWare can provide absolutely no support for whatsoever. We do not know how your server is configured. If all else fails, we suggest that you remove all Discus boards (and failed installations) and then start the installation again from scratch.

Your goal in this step is to modify the html_dir so that it reflects the directory on the server that corresponds to the html_url. For example, consider the following setup:

admin_dir=/home/users/foomatic/cgi-bin/discus_admin_23402394

    html_dir=/home/users/foomatic/cgi-bin/discus

    html_url=http://servername.foobar.com/discus

    script_dir=/home/users/foomatic/cgi-bin/discus-cgi

    script_url=http://servername.foobar.com/cgi-bin/discus-cgi

Look carefully at html_dir -- it indicates that the "discus" directory is under the cgi-bin. But now look at the html_url -- it indicates that "discus" is not under the cgi-bin. Herein lies the problem, specifically that html_dir and html_url do not match up. The webmaster of this site might make the following correction:

admin_dir=/home/users/foomatic/cgi-bin/discus_admin_23402394

    html_dir=/home/users/foomatic/discus

    html_url=http://servername.foobar.com/discus

    script_dir=/home/users/foomatic/cgi-bin/discus-cgi

    script_url=http://servername.foobar.com/cgi-bin/discus-cgi

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