34

I posted a question yesterday, Output characters to Word document with different formatting for each character. When I tried to edit it I was told that Stack Overflow was in read-only mode. It is still saying that today.

There are two links at the top, one to the status page and one to recent meta posts on the topic. Neither of them says that there is any problem.

There have been multiple reports in the comments and on other meta sites that this problem keeps happening to various users ever since the initial report (and likely there have been more incidents that were not reported at all), hence the close reason that it "can no longer be reproduced" is invalid.

Josh Zhang StaffMod
10.9k9 gold badges35 silver badges46 bronze badges
asked May 14, 2024 at 23:25
11
  • 6
    (I suspect your requests aren’t making it to Stack Overflow servers, and the issue is isolated to you - or possibly other people near you or routing the same way. You could be getting served a cached version of the page from your ISP or a CDN or...) Commented May 15, 2024 at 0:03
  • 5
    Try clearing cookies (and maybe other cached data) in your browser. Can you access it with a different browser? FWIW, I'm also in Sydney. Commented May 15, 2024 at 2:27
  • 7
    This has happened to several people over the last few months (including me). I suspect it has something to do with Stack Exchange's Cloudflare settings. I'm curious about what triggers it. IIRC, it happened to me when I had a busy Physics.SE question page open in my phone browser overnight. But that could just be a coincidence. Commented May 15, 2024 at 7:23
  • 3
    Been happening to me for about 12 hours on math.SE.com. BTW: are the links in the read-only banner to the SE.com status and SE.com meta or are they properly specialized to the stack where they appear? For me, instead of to a math.SE status and meta.math.SE, they're to the SE.com status and meta. Reported here Commented Jun 22, 2024 at 15:06
  • 4
    Report of the same issue happening on RPG. Commented Jun 23, 2024 at 8:22
  • 4
    Another report from Mathoverflow. Commented Jul 5, 2024 at 8:54
  • 1
    And now it happened to myself; added to the linked meta.MO post. Commented Jul 25, 2024 at 6:48
  • 1
    Another possible instance: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401510/… , though this differs from all other reports here in that the issue fixed itself after several hours without the user having done anything. Commented Jul 25, 2024 at 8:47
  • 2
    as of 15:01 25 July 24 Mozilla Firefox snap for Ubuntu 128.0.2 (64-bit) Ask Ubuntu in read only since early morning but photography ok Commented Jul 25, 2024 at 14:02
  • 5
    Looks like they have acknowledged (and fixed) the issue: stackstatus.net/incidents/f1490159-6b45-4b27-8a2b-cbcc1eaa05b1 Commented Jul 25, 2024 at 17:47
  • 1
    The next report: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/401833/… Commented Jul 31, 2024 at 11:54

5 Answers 5

18

In Firefox, what worked for me is clicking the "lock" icon on the left of the address bar, and pressing Clear cookies and site data.

answered Sep 20, 2024 at 8:51
0
18

Clearing cache and cookies (Chrome) fixed it.

NoDataDumpNoContribution
19.1k3 gold badges36 silver badges82 bronze badges
answered May 15, 2024 at 6:30
5
  • I'm curious what would have happened if you had tried to access any URL on the network (other than that one question) that your browser hadn't cached... Commented May 16, 2024 at 22:27
  • 1
    @testing-ma-lady When it happened to me, all of my other sites on the network behaved normally, only Physics.SE was in read-only mode. Commented May 17, 2024 at 6:09
  • When it happened to me, clearing cookies and data initially had no effect; it only worked on the second try about a half day later. Commented Jul 25, 2024 at 6:56
  • Another weird thing is that the issue is somehow tied to the user account as it affected both devices I use to access the site at the same time, nevertheless I had to clear cookies on each device separately to fix it. Commented Jul 25, 2024 at 11:47
  • 3
    Clearing my cache worked for me, but only briefly. I again have no access to MathOverflow. Clearing my cache a second time had no effect. Commented Jul 25, 2024 at 14:35
16

For all you nerds who care, this seems to be caused by the __cflb cookie specifically. Deleting that cookie got me out of read-only mode without signing me out.

answered Jan 20 at 8:31
4
  • 1
    Work like charm. Out of curiosity, How could you find this __cflb cookie affect it? Commented Jan 21 at 2:40
  • 4
    @zangw Deleting each cookie and reloading the page, one at a time. I’m sure there’s an intelligent way to do this, but there are also only like ten cookies, so whatever. Commented Jan 21 at 3:55
  • 3
    As an additional context, looks like __cflb is for Cloudflare Load Balancer session affinity. Commented Feb 24 at 5:20
  • 1
    @MetaAndrewT. Nice find. Seems like a failover bug, probably. Also explains why some reported the bug fixing itself with time; the cookie apparently resets somewhere between a couple seconds and a day. Commented Feb 24 at 5:47
9

FYI - I've added the status-review tag to the post. The team is aware and discovered what's causing this during last night's maintenance (see here and here). No estimated timeline, but it is on the team's radar for investigation into a fix for it.

In the meantime, as @pmolsen mentioned above, clearing cache and cookies is the current suggested workaround.

answered Oct 24, 2024 at 20:37
6

I have resolved this issue by changing some code on our side. The root of the issue has to do with us needing to set sticky sessions to reduce the number of open connections on our servers. I've worked around this requirement by making sessions refresh whenever the site is accessed in read only mode.

answered Feb 26 at 22:19
1
  • Thanks, Josh! :) Commented Mar 1 at 19:41

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.