Confluence losing pages with parens?

[rhauch]

It seems like Confluence is having problems with pages that have parentheses in the page name. Here's a parent page that has several child pages that have this problem: even the generated "child list" links are broken, and the TOC links are broken as well. These parens are escaped in the URLs (e.g., https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/MODE40/Compact+Node+Type+%28CND%29+files), but if you go to that page you see:

Same error when I manually replace the escaped parents with actual parens (e.g., https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/MODE40/Compact+Node+Type+(CND)+files). Interestingly, if you remove the "%28" and "%29" from the URL and try again, you get a completely different error:

I'd guess that since each response is different, the first is actually generating an error somewhere even though the page actually exists, while the second correctly states that the page does not exist.

Anyway, I know this used to work since we created/edited the pages via Confluence (rather than importing). I'm not sure when it stopped working. Is there a workaround or something we can fix ourselves?

[massfords]

I wonder if it's something in the Apache Web Server config that doesn't like the escaped chars in the URL. Based on the error message, it looks like the original request is never making it to Confluence.

Either way, the docs are hosted on a 4 or 5 year old version of Confluence. It's been my experience that when I create pages in Confluence 5.x that contain special chars, I get links to those pages with their ID's while pages with simple names navigate to the page with the title in the URI.

For example, I would expect a page with various non-URL friendly values to look like: /wiki?pageId=1234567 while a link to a simpler page would look like: /wiki/MyTestSpace/FooBarNotes

[rhauch]

Thanks, Mark. Any suggestions or tips to fix on our side, or will this require a fix on the backend (either data or code)?

[velias]

The problem is probably brought by hotfix for security vulnerability applied on Apache few weeks ago - https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+Security+Advisory+-[phone]

I'll consult with admins who manage Apache how to change the config to make things working again.

We also plan upgrade to latest confluence (which runs already in POC mode directly on docs.jboss.org) and migration of all doc to this latest version.

[velias]

Apache config is patched now, pages are accessible again

[rhauch]

Thanks, velias!