Completely Weird Movable Type Error
Last week I needed to update an entry over on the child abuse site. Actually, I needed to add a couple of paragraph breaks to the original entry, and then add a few paragraphs of text in reply to another post. So, I opened up the entry in the admin console, and made my changes.
However, when I tried to save and publish the entry, I got a 403 error, forbidden to access mt.cgi. Since I was using the mt.cgi console to make the changes, that didn’t exactly make sense to me. Eventually I realized that I could make the changes to the entry, but not add the text, the error was being caused by something in those paragraphs that I was adding. So I did that, and then I added just some plain text. That worked. Slowly I went through each part of the update until I figured out what part was causing the error. As it turned out, it was the word “Update”. When I changed that to “Follow Up:”, the error went away.
Absolutely nothing else was any different from what I was trying to publish but that word, yet the error went away. Go figure. Maybe it’s a sign I need to upgrade to MT 4 sooner rather than later. 😉
I’ve had that happen to me before – a long time ago. I think it may have been one of the antispam plugins thinking it was one of the banned words and not letting me post?
I hadn’t thought about it being tied to antispam, since I was working in an entry, not a comment or trackback, but now that you mention it, the antispam would block access to the cgi script, wouldn’t it?
Just another reason to disable all the plugins and get on with upgrading, huh? If I only had the free time!