Webmentions fail with a HTTP 500 error message

[voss]

While trying to do this:

Backfeeding comments and reactions from Mastodon to my Known site using brid.gy

I encountered this error:

brid.gy gives me error icons for webmentions.

Ryan from brid.gy says my webmentions endpoint is failing with the following HTTP 500 error:

Something went wrong.

base64_encode(): Argument #1 ($string) must be of type string, array given

Some other notes:

This seems to have started happening around 4 months ago. The last post where webmentions were working, is this one. It might all be down to my shared hosting provider (Dreamhost), but I wanted to bring it to your attention as well.

I'm not sure where to look for a fix (my Webmention troubleshooting skills are highly underdeveloped), short of upgrading to the 1.6 release.

Any suggestions appreciated (:

Give us some context:

• It'd also be really handy if you could tell us the contents of your version.known file

  • version = '1.5'
  • build = 2023060201

• What database are you using? (e.g. mongo, mysql, postgres)

  • MySQL

• Any warnings or errors in your admin/diagnostics page?

  • It mentions that my version is behind the git release

• If this is a programming bug, can you include examples of any Micropub / API calls / webhook pings you make? Otherwise please don't worry about what this means!

• Bonus points - are you able to illustrate the issue with a unit test? If so, submit it as a pull request!

[voss]

I tried webmention.rocks to see what went wrong, and it does indeed return an error 500, as seen here: https://webmention.rocks/receive/1/5adc8828e60114ed40ac5bc9bc70d4b3 (only live for 48hrs), with the error message:

base64_encode(): Argument #1 ($string) must be of type string, array given

I will raise this with my hosting provider, but I'm also curious if anyone using Known have come across this issue before. I've not been able to find any other issues filed describing this.

[benwerd]

I'm going to run some tests at my end and see if I can reproduce the issue.